The president's wisdom--and hypocrisy

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. This week, WORLD Radio’s Jim Henry filled in for Eicher. Here is a summary of their conversation.

May is the month for commencement and for commencement speeches. President Barack Obama spoke this year at Rutgers University and took issue with students for something that happened two years ago.

In 2014, Rutgers students protested the selection of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker. The students raised such a ruckus that Rice ended up withdrawing. This year, Obama told the graduates their efforts were misguided.

“I don’t think that’s how democracy works best, when we’re not even willing to listen to each other,” he said. “Don’t feel like you got to shut your ears off because you’re too fragile and somebody might offend your sensibilities.”

John Stonestreet praised Obama’s sentiments and agreed with them.

“That’s exactly what needs to happen,” Stonestreet said. “We’re not preparing college students for the real world if instead of being able to face something that they disagree with—even something that they think is evil, whether they’re right or wrong—they run away from it and hide and call foul instead of actually bucking up and taking it like an adult human.”

But Stonestreet also pointed out some hypocrisy in the president’s comments, particularly in light of the edict just issued by the White House requiring teachers to let students use the restrooms that correspond to their gender identities, not their biological sex.

“There’s other moments in the presidency … where the president basically just said, if you disagree with me, you don’t get a voice at the table. There certainly hasn’t been a huge push by this president to practice what he preaches,” Stonestreet noted. But he encouraged Christians not to despair or feel hopeless because of the state of the culture, particularly the push to allow men and women into each other’s restrooms:

“What do you do now? You do what you can do, and you do it where you can do it, and you do it with all the strength of truth that comes from a Christian worldview applied to the real world in which we live. The truth of America is the truth of the world, and that’s still that Christ has risen from the grave. And that’s the truth after a Supreme Court decision or after a presidential edict or anything else that we deal with.”

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