To the editor:

Rev. Ken Hitch suggests (“Misquoting Jesus,” Enterprise, Dec. 8) that we leave it at “love your neighbor,” but that only gets you so far. Loving involves wanting what’s good for someone, so if people have diametrically opposed ideas about good — if he thinks it is good to give a gender dysphoric young woman testosterone and a double mastectomy, and I think that’s horrible — we still haven’t answered the question of how to love. We need to know what is good.

The Gospels have a lot more to say about that. For instance, Jesus institutes a process for punishing recalcitrant sinners with social ostracism (Matt 18:15-17), so goodness doesn’t mean unconditionally accepting everyone.

Rev. Hitch endorses the theory that Jesus’ problem with divorce was not divorce per se, but that it was unfair to women as practiced at the time. There are two problems with this. First, Jesus has equally harsh words for women who get divorced and remarried as for men (Mark 10:12). Why blame the victim? Second, he explains his problem with divorce, and that isn’t it. He quotes passages from Genesis, which he understands as representing God’s original intention for marriage (“male and female he created them” … “the two shall become one”). He understands the permission for divorce given later in the Old Testament as a concession to human stubbornness (Matt 19:8), which he revokes in order to restore the original plan.

Does anyone honestly believe someone who thought like that would have been open to being transgender?

Ben Douglass

Saranac Lake