Culture Friday: The rake on the floor

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, February 27th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the BreakPoint podcast. 

Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Well, John, Colorado is considering a bill, SB 26-097, that would make it the second state in the country, along with Nevada, to legalize "the world’s oldest profession."

Now, John, you live in Colorado. You’ve seen weed legalized, doctor-assisted suicide embraced, and now, instead of calling prostitution prostitution, lawmakers want to rename it “adult commercial sexual activity” and then make it legal.

Does it feel as icky as it sounds? I mean, just a descent into the, as the Bible says, the miry bog, the pit of destruction?

STONESTREET: There should be the new, you know, nomenclatures that we substitute for these states. If they’re going to substitute "adult commercial sexual activity" for prostitution, we should do "the pit of destruction" for Colorado.

We’ve been on a roll, you know. And it’s funny, as I travel around, usually people from California are always like, "Well, at least you’re not California." I was like, there are so many ways that I wish I was California. Colorado has been on a direct trajectory. 

The four lawmakers who proposed this legislation in Colorado to legalize prostitution are millennials. It’s like clockwork, honestly, that we’re seeing this more and more and more. And the way that this is argued in justice terms, despite all the evidence to the contrary— the evidence that legalizing prostitution actually increases the trafficking of human beings, that it actually leads to other destructive behaviors, and that it specifically has negative implications for children, for the protection of children—none of that gets in the way.

And what’s happened is these folks tend to go unchecked in the Colorado legislature. And so they can basically throw out things that are absurd, that are insane, that are not good, and call it good, that are not just, and call it just.

And frankly, the story of what happened to Colorado is not that we became more progressive. It was that the Libertarians were actually used by the progressives to create a legislative supermajority in a sense that really cannot be kind of reined in or stopped.

And of course, it’s all based on the ideas of the sexual revolution.

So yeah, listen, we’re not in the ballpark of most other states anymore. And the reason is, we’ve embraced a vision—a vision of life in the world, a vision that was sold in the name of libertarian freedom, but requires the state as a nanny to basically create and protect our ability to have no one ever tell us anything that we do is ever wrong.

EICHER: You know John, I don’t think I misunderstand libertarian philosophy, but I think what may have happened in your state is that people got confused between libertinism and libertarianism.

Because whenever you expand libertinism, you necessarily get bigger government, you just do. You have to have more government because of all the social destruction that follows libertinism. 

STONESTREET: You have to for two reasons.

Number one is you still have a moral citizenry, or some aspect of a moral citizenry, that doesn’t want this kind of thing. And so you have to have a state that actually then tramples on their rights.

This is the same thing that happened with same-sex marriage. It happened before we had same-sex marriage in the case of Jack Phillips. Here’s somebody that just didn’t want to participate, and so you have to have a big state that actually enforces his participation.

But you’re right on the other side of things too. And we’ve absolutely seen that in terms of the legalization of marijuana, that there’s a lot of buyer’s remorse of police officers, of educational professionals, of city leaders, because it’s let so many other things out of the bag, and you have to have a big state back it up.

Because if you think that freedom has no boundaries, if you think that the personal choice to do whatever you want, no matter what community you’re a citizen of should be a guarantee of the state, that is the way to have a more intrusive, invasive, and bigger state.

The Libertarians were used in this whole process. And I moved here right when this was starting, I’ve seen the whole thing happen. And it’s just another thing to add to the legalization of pot, the legalization of Doctor Death, and the legalization of magic mushrooms. I mean, we can go down—the protection of drag shows for kids—we can go down the line.

BROWN: You started your response to this question talking about California. So let’s go there for just a second.

California Governor Gavin Newsom had a flub. Let’s listen to a little of what he had to say while on stage with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

NEWSOM: I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to impress you. I'm just trying to impress upon you, I'm like you. I'm no better than you. You know, I'm a 960 SAT guy. And you know, and I'm not trying to offend anyone, you know, trying to act all there if you got 940. But literally a 960 SAT guy, I cannot, you've never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.

Rapper-songwriter Nicki Minaj’s response is classic. Let me just read a little of what she posted on X:

“His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is and that he can’t read.”

And then she goes on:

“Do you wanna know the craziest part of this footage that will haunt him forever? He’s literally slowing his speech down and talking in a sporadic cadence... As if they're children!!!!

 He’s not just saying it—He didn’t misspeak!!!! He BELIEVES it!!!!

Do you just love it, black ppl?!?!?!"

Now, John, it sounds to me like a mashup of identity politics and critical theory. What do you think?

STONESTREET: Yeah, look, I think that I’m weary and wary of the games that happen on both the left and the right to catch each other in racist speak.

Obviously, there was the whole thing recently with the President and the meme that was posted to the Truth Social account. And at the same time, a meme that historically is just horrible and unjustifiable—and how it got there and all that, there’s all kinds of stories.

And you have the left that immediately wants us to think the worst of that. And then you have the right that immediately wants us to think the worst of this.

The problem here is not just whether he misspoke and it was a statement taken out of context, and in the larger context it looks better. But there is the tyranny of low expectations, as Thomas Sowell put it, that inflicts the left and the way that the left understands poverty, the way that the left understands class struggle. It’s in the water of the left.

And it’s not just in policies where we want to do handouts instead of hand-ups. It goes back in the water of embracing a Darwinian understanding of the human person, because it’s based on a fundamental understanding of the human person that’s disconnected from the image of God. And so it just gets in the water, I think. 

Now, you know, what did Newsom mean? There’s just so many examples of this, of people trying to be cool. I chalk this more up, you know, to the nerd who shows up on the football team and he’s like, "I don’t always get good grades." I’m thinking of that one line from The Sandlot, you know, where he’s like, "I gotta B once," trying to be cool, and it just doesn’t land.

I don’t know what his intentions were, Nicki Minaj has her right to read this. But there is a history of what Thomas Sowell called the tyranny of low expectations, and it’s rooted in a bad anthropology, and it pops up.

I don’t want to justify one on the altar of the other or play gotcha on either side. But it is important to know that history, because it’s a history that has been reflected in these events.

Even more tragically, it’s a history that is reflected in the history of Planned Parenthood, which of course has had a direct impact on black communities in a horrific way. And the numbers there, in my mind, are unjustifiable no matter what worldview you have.

EICHER: Well, you know John, I'd like to keep talking about gotcha moments, because sometimes I think gotcha moments are illustrative.

It is as though on the night of the State of the Union, or the afternoon of it, President Trump sent his people out to the House floor and laid out rakes on the Democratic side and then was planning to say during the speech, "Hey guys, careful, don’t step on these rakes."

And then just to spite him, the Democrats proceeded to step on every available rake.

STONESTREET: That's a pretty good analogy.

EICHER: Well I'm glad you liked it, because I did work on it a little bit. 

But you know, here’s the story that I’m talking about, and I know you remember this: the president introduced Sage Blair and her mother and told the story of how this young girl, at age 14, was treated by the school district as a boy, hiding this disclosure from the parents, not allowing them to regain custody until just an enormous fight was put up.

Now, it does have a happy ending, Sage is now a student at Liberty University, she got a full free ride, she is living as God intended as a girl.

The president, during his speech, concluded, “Surely we can all agree no state should be allowed to do this. We must ban it immediately.”

Or, translated into politics: "Guys, don’t step on this rake. Honor this family."

But then when not one single Democrat stood up in agreement with a very sensible proposition, the president said, “These people are crazy. They are just crazy.”

Did you have the same kind of response?

STONESTREET: This was the most moving part of the State of the Union by far.

There were a lot of gotcha moments where the President did pretty well. It’s a remarkable thing to see truth win. 

But this was a remarkable moment to see such wonderful personal redemption, up-close and personal. Reconciliation between this woman and her mother. Justice on a national stage where the truth is told when she had been lied to. The fact that she’s a student at Liberty University right now—what a wonderful story of what God can do to someone whose life is broken.

That’s what I want to highlight in all this.

I appreciate the President doing this. I appreciate the clarity of here’s where the parties stand on this, in case anyone is still wondering. And I’ll get to that in a second, but I just want to celebrate the fact that God can restore and redeem and renew lives.

I don’t want to get over this, because we were told, we were told just a few years ago that Sage didn’t exist. And anyone who spoke out against this whole transgender ideology was accused of stupid things like erasing trans people.

And what really happened was we were told that, "oh no, there was no one being forced. There was no one being talked into this. This wasn’t happening to minors."

Except that it was, and we knew it was, and we have the insurance data curated to actually prove it. And we have yet another story.

And there are many others. There’s the Chloe Coles of the world and others who also are wonderful stories of redemption. And now these are individuals that have a life returned to them.

And I also want to celebrate their moms in particular. Yes, their dads too, but man, there were a lot of moms that went along with it.

Thankfully, everybody right now is admitting they’re wrong.

Vanderbilt, this past week—the center of the whole issue with Matt Walsh, remember that, and the Tennessee legislature? Vanderbilt’s out. Not only with minors, but also with adults. They’re just not going to do it anymore.

And that’s just the latest. We could talk about HHS. We could talk about Tavistock. We could talk about all kinds of different examples of this.

So the unraveling is going to be interesting, and there’s going to be moments for us to smile and to say, "I told you so." But man, let's not, please let’s not forget these young women, especially those who have found restoration and redemption in Christ. And as Christians, we should point to that and celebrate that and hold those folks up and thank the Lord for His grace.

BROWN: All right: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Excited to see you next week, John, at our staff retreat!

EICHER: Right? Location: top secret.

BROWN: So next Culture Friday is in person. Can’t wait to see ya!

STONESTREET: Looking forward to seeing both of you as well. Thanks.

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