Courage, not consensus

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday, August 14th

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good Morning John!

JOHN STONESTEET: Good morning

BROWN: We’ve celebrated a few cultural wins in this space over the years…I’m thinking of Jack Phillips the Masterpiece Cakeshop baker who refused to bake a custom cake for a same-sex union because of his biblical worldview of marriage…. That was in 2018.

In 2023 graphic designer Lori Smith won a first amendment free speech case, also centered around a biblical worldview of marriage.

And now we have Vanessa Sivadge. She’s the Christian nurse who was fired from her job at Texas Children’s Hospital after exposing alleged Medicaid fraud.

She noticed the hospital was listing children on their charts according to their preferred gender, not their biological sex. Then prescribing procedures based on that erroneous information and then charging it to Medicaid.

She filed a whistleblower lawsuit. The settlement was finalized last week, resulting in the first free detransitioner clinic in the United States.

Definitely a victory…but John when you think about transforming the culture…are we there yet?

STONESTEET: No, we're not there yet. And of course, it certainly depends on what you mean by transforming the culture. If you mean across the board into a true vision of what it means to be human, we've got a long, long way to go. If you are asking just specifically about the transgender issue, I'm more encouraged, but we still have a long way to go. And I don't want to repeat a mistake or repeat a blind spot that we had just recently with the Dobbs decision that came on the heels of all kinds of polling that made us all think that we were moving in a pro-life direction. And now on a structural level, on a legal level, and then on so many other levels, we're not. So what happened? What did we get wrong? There were people that were saying things like this was a pro-life generation. And maybe it will be, but it's not yet. And so what happened to that prediction? And I think part of it was kind of missing the underlying relativism upon which these questions about life and death were being answered. So, you know, a growing number of young people would be willing to say something like they were personally pro-life, but that didn't mean they were really pro-life. They were just personally pro-life. And they were stating that from a perspective of a deep seated moral relativism where they didn't actually think there was such a thing as right and wrong to begin with. I think when it comes to the transgender issue, when we've seen some brakes put on the runaway train, which is certainly way better than it was. you know, where it was just a couple of years ago. And we can all be thankful for these shifts and we can be thankful for the courage of Vanessa Savage and, and other whistleblowers that we've seen pop up all over the place.

And, you know, courageous voices, moms in particular who stood up for their kids and, and, and some, you know, fashion designers and, and children's authors. I mean, there's so many people we can point to and be grateful for it. um and and you know to put a stop on this but that's not the same thing as saying we have a really clear understanding of what it means to be male and what it means to be female and until we do and until we have a sense that male and female are actually fixed categories of what it means to be human what it means to bear god's image then we're still I think dealing with pretty shaky ground in the same way as any sort of victories that were happening on the pro-life front over the last couple of years. All these specific changes, all these specific shifts and policy changes that have happened are still happening on some ideological ground. And I'm not as convinced that we've got this anthropological crisis settled by any means. And that's the kind of the soil that we're seeing this fruit come out of anyway.

REICHARD: Well John, speaking of anthropology, as the sports fan that you are, I’m sure you’ve heard about the two former NBA players who say they plan to pursue the WNBA draft next year.

FREEDOM: I’m definitely not here to mock, make fun of or disrespect any community or personal choices. I’m simply asking that the current rules be applied to everyone.

That’s former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom explaining why he’ll seek a spot in the WNBA. Royce White announced his plans first, posting on X, “ I realize after 35 years, I’m actually a woman.”

Under the WNBA’s current collective bargaining agreement, only women are eligible to play in the league. But the agreement does not define what a “woman” is.

Of course, Freedom and White say, that is exactly the entire point.

John, did you see this coming?

STONESTEET: And yeah, I did. I mean, I think somebody actually encouraged Enes Kanter Freedom to kind of do this, knowing that he has been a kind of courageous and unafraid voice for things that he believes are deep issues of justice and morality internationally to the top players in the NBA. So when I saw that he had been kind of challenged to, hey, it's time for you to enter the WNBA draft, I wondered if he would actually do it. And of course, he did. I thought it was really quite something then that the response from the WNBA is that the commissioner has announced a task force to try to answer this question. What is a woman in a league for a league that is called the Women's National Basketball Association. I mean, you know, this falls into the you can't make this stuff up category. There's so many of these incidents when it comes to this issue and our confusion about what it means to be human, what it means to be male and female.

And the NBA and basketball is a sport where this difference could not be more stark. I mean, look, you just got to turn on SportsCenter and see the top 10 plays during the NBA season versus the WNBA season. If there is a one-handed dunk in the WNBA, it is making the SportsCenter top 10. There's going to be 10 one-handed dunks a night in the NBA, and no one's going to blink twice. If there's a behind-the-back pass in the WNBA, it makes the top 10. Steph Curry tosses those out like tic-tacs. We're just not dealing with the same thing at all. And you certainly will have players that are going to… this bluff. If nothing else, then they've got the time on their hands and they've got the leisure and they care about these things pretty specifically. The WNBA is in a bind. It is already having an enormously difficult time protecting its already very fragile reputation because of the Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham incidents over the last several months. The clear racialization of the league is obvious.

Here you have the only time in its entire history that the WNBA has been remotely close to something like popular and successful. And it's just being squandered top to bottom. And then this. I don't know if it can survive. I don't know if it's going to. it's going to last. It's certainly not going to last if they don't settle this issue because you will have. Listen, you can take any team right now out of the G League, the NBA Developmental League. You can take them and put them in the WNBA and they will win the championship hands down and it won't be close. And the challenge is in the G League, they don't get paid that much. WNBA players get more than G League players get paid. All this kind of falls into the category of treating something like a speed limit that's actually gravity. You might decide that gravity is negotiable, but when you step off the roof, you still hit the ground. And you may decide that something like this is negotiable, but then when you put it to the test of the real world, then there are consequences. So I think it's unavoidable. Eventually, it's going to have to get worked out, I guess.

REICHARD: One of the nation's largest public universities is trying something new with freshmen next year. The University of Michigan will let some first-semester students take classes without traditional letter grades. Instead of an A, B, C, or D, their transcripts will just say pass or no credit. (That according to a Wall Street Journal article.)

The university says the goal is to ease up on mental pressure, to help them adjust to college, and encourage intrinsic motivation to guide academic journeys that are personally meaningful.

I have no idea what that means.

Similar programs already exist at other colleges–prestigious ones at that–sometimes as a way to deal with students they describe as unprepared.

John, some might call this coddling. But I wonder…is something deeper going on? Is this a particular worldview about what education is really for?

STONESTEET: Well, that's a good question. I don't think there's anything sacred about the ABCD, you know, system and it has its own problems having been someone who administered it. But of course, that's not really what's at question here. This isn't as much a move away from a system because there's a better one in place. This is a move that owes itself really to an ideological shift. Basically it seems and it sounds, at least according to that paragraph you read, that I certainly have no idea what it means either, that this is a kind of an expression of what happens with this kind of internal turn. that so much of the world has taken where truth and meaning and purpose is to be found inside.

Now, of course, that's long been the message of Disney movies and pop culture and other things, self-help and opinion pieces in magazines. But if you really do believe that, if you really do believe that meaning is something that has to be made and truth is something that has to be constructed and identity is something that has to be found internally without any extrinsic reference point, then if that philosophy then is going to impact what we think about education, then this kind of a move makes perfect sense, I guess. That, you know, really all you want to do is ensure that a student has had some kind of, quote unquote, authentic academic journey that is personally meaningful, I guess. It's easy to make fun of. You know, I want to give a shout out here. I was having this conversation with our editorial team at the Colson Center. And one of our colleagues, you know, brought up Harvey Mansfield, who taught for years at Harvard University and was known for speaking out against great inflation all the way decades ago. And he was known as C-plus Manfield or something like that because he was so commonly giving out lower grades. And that's something that apparently is very... you know, psychologically hard on a fragile generation. And so, look, I think we'll see the consequences of this sort of coddling down the road. It is a coddling, but it's a coddling that's based on an ideology, I think. And it's an ideology that we've seen everywhere else. So it makes sense then that it would reshape how we evaluate and how we measure learning.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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