White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre faced questions about Pope Francis' declaration condemning gender theory on Monday, ultimately affirming President Biden's support for the transgender community.
A reporter pressed Jean-Pierre regarding the Pope's Monday document, which formally reaffirms and expands on the Catholic Church's assertion that attempts to alter an individual's immutable gender are ultimately misguided attempts to play God. Jean-Pierre declined to say what Biden thought of the document specifically, but added that he does support the transgender community.
"We are pleased to see that the document… furthered the Vatican's call to ensure that LGBTQ+ are protected from violence and imprisonment around the world. However, the president will continue to be an advocate for the rights, safety and dignity of the LGBTQ+ community, including transgender people here in the U.S.," Jean-Pierre said in response to a reporter who asked for a response to the document.
"What about the more specific comments about gender theory and transgender individuals?" a reporter pressed.
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"I'm going to be really careful. The president's role to litigate internal Church policy, that's not his role, so I'm gonna be super careful there," Jean-Pierre said. "But I can speak to the president's stance, and he's always been very clear on the importance of protecting or having protections for the transgender community and the broader LGBTQ+ community, and that's been very clear since day one of his administration."
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Francis' Monday declaration, called "Dignitas Infinita," addressed over a dozen individual issues of the modern day through the lens of scripture and church teaching, including abortion, human trafficking, poverty, euthanasia, the death penalty and more.
Latin for "Infinite Dignity," the document was released after more than five years in development by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) and focuses on threats to human dignity in the modern world.
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"Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God," the document states. "This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel."
It's not a new stance for the church — Pope Francis, forced to confront the rapid rise of gender ideology in recent years, has previously called it one of the world's "most dangerous ideological colonizations."
The document continues: "Another prominent aspect of gender theory is that it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world."
The document also reaffirms the Church's teachings on abortion and elaborates on its long-standing ethical criticisms of surrogate pregnancies, for which the pope recently called for a worldwide ban.
Fox News' Timothy H. J. Nerozzi contributed to this report.
