Culture Friday: A challenge to truth

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 10th of May, 2024. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Hey, John, glad you’re back!

JOHN STONESTREET: Thanks. Good morning, both of you.

EICHER: John, I want to rewind about six years when the Boy Scouts of America rebranded the “Boy Scouts” program, as distinct from the “Cub Scouts” program, “Scouts BSA.” And it was clearly all related to the cultural and corporate pressures that had buffeted the organization. I asked you then for your reaction to the end of this chapter. Here’s what you said, back in May of 2018.

STONESTREET: There’s not a more important mediating institution in American history, maybe, than the Boy Scouts. Now, if there were other mediating institutions that were forming boys into young men as opposed to forming boys into perpetual adolescents, then this loss wouldn’t be that big of a loss. But we don’t have that many. I mean, the home is failing young men, by and large in many ways the church fails young men. There’s just — there’s not another mediating institution that exists. And so that’s why I think this is a really big deal. It’s a loss for America.

Well, now the entire organization is rebranding. Boy Scouts of America is now “Scouting America,” the change announced this week to take effect next February. Boys are completely erased. And I’d like for you to pick up on that term you used, “mediating institution”—the presence of which Alexis de Tocqueville described as one the distinguishing features of the U.S. versus the rest of the world. And it looks like that mediating institution is now, just, done.

STONESTREET: Well, I think they've been done for a long time, numbers-wise and influence-wise. And there's so many things that are about this story. I mean, it's just one thing after another. So now we have a situation in which the Girl Scouts allow boys, and the Boy Scouts don't want to call themselves boys. It's just something you couldn't make up, and you couldn't have made up, you know, for example, when I was a kid, and the Boy Scouts still had an enormous following, a lot of people involved in scouting, and so on.

I think a key thing here to point out is this point of mediating institutions. That's a phrase really, that owes itself to a lot of conservative thinkers. I think probably first and foremost, Edmund Burke, but Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about America, he didn't specifically mention the Boy Scouts. What he talked about was the middle. And what he meant there was that a distinctive of America and of course, at the time he's writing in what many people would call its adolescent era, was that in between the state and the citizen, there was a lot of buffer. And America was thick in the middle. What was meant by that is that there were family and that there was local government. And then there were these voluntary associations and independent organizations. And what that did is it really protected the citizen from an overreaching state. And it helped the state from being overreaching, because these institutions helped form the virtue and character of the citizen, so that they were easy to govern and a big state was unnecessary.

And this is a distinctive of the way the American culture was functioning back then, and really has for most of its history. So here we have a situation in the American context, where perhaps the most effective organization in forming men—other than the family itself—decided a while back, that there was no such thing as boys. Or that there was no such thing that should be recognized as boys, much less men. And this is happening at the same time that more and more young people, specifically young men, are growing up either isolated from their fathers, or fatherless altogether. This is a recipe for disaster. This is an incredible, incalculable loss. And it doesn't help that the Boy Scouts now become Scouting America. You don't want an organization to deny reality.

Now, praise God for Trail Life USA. This is a wonderful example of Christians stepping up, and, and that group has grown dramatically. And you know what it's trying to do? Exactly what the Boy Scouts originally did, only with even more, I think of a faith foundation, although the original Boy Scouts were really strong on the faith component. But this is a huge loss. And, you know, this is just the latest chapter of it. And, you know, eventually it'll, it'll disappear. I mean, look, for all practical purposes, it's irrelevant in terms of what it actually offers American culture. I'm sure there's some individual troops doing, you know, with leaders that are doing good things. But for the rest of us that live in a society that is not doing the bare minimum, and equipping and cultivating young men to be young men, this is an incredible opportunity for the church to do this, and certainly a requirement for dads.

BROWN: John, let’s head over to your state and talk about a new law in Colorado that makes it clear. If a child wants to use a preferred name, public and charter school teachers have to abide. It’s the law. And if you don’t comply, it’s called discrimination. Doesn’t this essentially turn teachers into liars?

STONESTREET: Well, that's exactly right. I mean, first, you're telling students that it's okay to lie about who they are, even if they, you know, are honestly deceived, it's still saying something that's not true about themselves. And then you're not only allowing teachers to do it, you're mandating that teachers do it, and you're mandating that teachers do it specifically to the parents.

So there's so many things wrong with this bill in Colorado, which is now, again, a law, it's just hard to know where to begin. But I mean, that's as good a place as any. You're telling students it's okay to not tell the truth about who they are. You're teaching them that their nature, their ascent, their essence, their ontological identity is up for grabs, and that who they are, is not reality, like gravity. It's a social construct, like a speed limit, and that can constantly be changed. And that's not true. That's, that in and of itself is a is a falsity about what it means to be human. But then to mandate that teachers tell these lies, and to tell these lies to parents means then in a new way, the state is inserting itself in the relationship between parents and kids. And that's a damnable thing. That's the thing that will have such long-reaching consequences.

And every time we've seen the state interfere, and listen, when a state, when the state has to step in between parents and children, it needs to be because something has gone dramatically wrong, and there needs to be a rescue. This is not what is happening here, in this case. 

But there's another aspect of this one. And I just want everyone to kind of put this, this math problem here together. The second part of this law is that if a teacher fails to comply, and by the way, it's not only using preferred pronouns of a kid, it's using whatever preferred name, so they could say, you know, the, he could say, I'm a "she" on Monday, a cat on Tuesday, an appliance on Wednesday, and Xur on Thursday, and the teacher has to balance according to that dizzying, you know, journey. And if they don't, and Myrna this is key, it is the same as a teacher referring to a minority as a slur, as a racial slur. Think about that.

Calling this discrimination on the level of racial discrimination means if a kid shows up and says, "I'm a furry," and the teacher says, "No, I'm gonna call you Ted, or whatever your name is," then it's the same according to the law, as if if that young man was an African American, and the teacher referred to him in that that terrible racial slang that has been used historically. Can you imagine that, that equivocation? Not only are you telling teachers to lie to parents, about kids and to kids about themselves, if they don't lie, you're basically calling them a bigot along the lines of the worst category of bigots in history.

BROWN: That is mind blowing! And here’s what makes it especially unbelievable: this year marks the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s fresh on my mind, John, because I got to write a cover story on the subject for an upcoming edition of WORLD Magazine.

Who would have thought six decades later we would be having a discussion about people actually equating the use of the N-word to refusing to call someone by their preferred name?! It doesn’t make any sense!

STONESTREET: Well, you're right, it doesn't make any sense. But maybe part of it is, is that this is just the latest chapter in a whole history in which members of the LGBTQ movement, particularly the activists, have hijacked the legacy of Civil Rights. It happens over and over and over in all kinds of ways. It's never made sense. It's never been the same. It's never been equatable. And yet, it always has been. This past week in WORLD Magazine, the cover story written by Rosaria Butterfield told a little bit of that story.

And, you know, Sean McDowell and I wrote about same-sex marriage back in 2013, and looked specifically at this book After the Ball, which laid out that game plan, which there needed to be a portrayal of anything that was against homosexuality, as a along the lines of the worst bigotry in history. And you had to rewrite history to create heroes out of, you know, made up sexual categories. And that's been the plan. And of course, I was told at the time, and I'm sure Rosaria's received these emails too, that when nobody knows about After the Ball, nobody knows about that. It's not really that important. Well, call it what you want. As a former lesbian activist, she said it was important. And not only that, but whether, whether they got the game plan from that book or somewhere else, it's the same game plan. And then it continues, but it's never been to this degree, Myrna, to your point, it's never been to this degree, where to refuse to refer to someone as something that they are not, that you've actually basically called them these awful names. It's just astonishing. But as soon as I think that the Colorado State legislature, or Civil Rights Commission, or governor, or the Denver Post can't surprise me anymore, man they outdo themselves, I say, as a resident of Colorado.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks so much, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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