By Rich Lowry
Friday, May 29, 2026
James Talarico has decided that God isn’t nonbinary after
all.
Anyone who has relied on the Texas senatorial candidate
for theological guidance might be experiencing whiplash. Talarico is trying to
clean up a series of idiotic statements, including about God’s supposed
nonconforming gender, that are vulnerabilities ahead of a competitive race
against the scandal-plagued Republican candidate Ken Paxton.
Once upon a time, Talarico, a former Presbyterian
seminarian, wanted to make the Bible into a tool of radical gender ideology.
It was during a 2021 debate in the Texas legislature on
whether biological men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports that
Talarico declared that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in
between. God is nonbinary.”
Talarico now says that he was just being provocative,
although in the clip, he is as measured and earnest as a mainline Protestant
pastor delivering a sermon at a 9 a.m. Sunday service.
In explaining what he was getting at, the Democrat says
that God is above and beyond human categories. Well, sure. God doesn’t have a
male or female body. This doesn’t change the fact, though, that God refers to
Himself in the masculine gender (“So God created mankind in his own image, in
the image of God he created them; male and female he created them”), and the
Bible calls Him such things as Father, King, and Husband.
Talarico also cites the Apostle Paul and a famous verse
in Galatians for the proposition that the Bible rejects traditional notions of
gender: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there
is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
This is a ringing statement of the unity of Christians in
their faith in Jesus Christ, no matter ethnicity, class, or gender; it isn’t an
endorsement of modern gender theory. It is especially preposterous to claim
otherwise when Paul extensively discussed the two biological sexes and their
different roles (“Husbands should love their wives sacrificially, as Christ
loved the church. Wives should respect and submit to their husbands.”).
Talarico similarly wishes to revise his 2021 comment that
there are six biological sexes, something that he insisted had been established
by “modern science.” Now, he says that there are two biological sexes — men and
women, as it turns out — although there are people with chromosomal
abnormalities who should be treated with respect. If this is all he meant at
the time, though, he could have said so.
He’s also backed off a Covid-era post about white people
spreading the virus of racism “wherever we go—through our words, our actions,
and our systems.” He added, “We don’t have to be showing symptoms—like a white
hood or a Confederate flag—to be contagious.” This, he now claims, was merely a
denunciation of racism.
Most white people, of course, manage to oppose racial
bias without making struggle-session-worthy condemnations of their own
whiteness.
Finally, after saying several years ago that one of his
campaigns for the Texas legislature had decided to go vegan in order to promote
animal welfare and fight climate change, he now insists that his current Senate
campaign practically runs on Texas barbecue. It’s out with the tofu and in with
the brisket, and the campaign must be endeavoring to run up its take-out bill
at Austin’s famous Franklin Barbecue as we speak.
All of this raises the question: Which is better? A
candidate who has sincerely held woke views or a candidate who adopted an
outlandish worldview a few years ago because he thought it was fashionable, and
is now jettisoning that worldview because it is no longer convenient?
Neither speaks well of James Talarico. He will be buoyed
in the campaign by Ken Paxton’s desperate flaws, regardless. But in his new
flexibility on such questions as the nature of God and the number of sexes,
Talarico has demonstrated that as a political figure, he’s proudly nonbinary.
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