Culture Friday: A country worth loving

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday the 3rd of July.

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. It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Welcome back John! Good to see you, it’s been a minute!

JOHN STONESTREET: Thanks, good to see you both!

BROWN: John, on the fourth of July weekend, it seems appropriately fitting that we start with this story about the Daughters of the American Revolution—and an attempt that was made to restrict the Daughters to Daughters only. Our Harrison Watters was there.

HARRISON WATTERS: The annual meeting is a time for pageantry. But a few hundred of the three thousand plus delegates came ready to get a resolution to the floor for a vote.

STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER: I think we should practice right now. Ready? One, two, three.

ALL: Second!

At a closed door meeting, members supporting Restoration —wearing black and white—testified to the harms of men in women’s spaces and programs. Other delegates, wearing pink, defended what they called inclusivity.

During the vote, tellers brought paper ballots to the delegates at their seats. After voting, Texas delegate Laura McDonald went down front to ask a question. While there, she says she was offered a second ballot.

MCDONALD: And I said no, I’ve already voted. And then I got to thinking, wait a second, what happens if somebody does that? They get up out of their seat and vote again? That’s all I said…[18:28] and then the next thing I know, they’re saying that they’ve heard that there were people cheating.

The DAR has not replied to multiple requests for comment. McDonald says the leaders called for a revote, and this time each section of delegates came forward to vote on stage.

MCDONALD: And they cut our ribbon to say that we’d voted, and then you drop it in, and then you file back in…and that took a long time.

About three hours, with no breaks. Delegates who left the room could not reenter. After 8pm, the final results came in. Here’s Barbara Wells.

WELLS: There were 981 yes votes for us, and there were 1474 no votes for them. So, that’s that’s how we lost.

McDonald says the results are revealing.

MCDONALD: Is this the restoration of the DAR? Is this the—I hate to say it, but the exposure of the DAR, and we found out today what their true intentions are.

Some are looking elsewhere. Delegate Hanna Jones:

JONES: There’s other lineage societies. This is not the only game in town.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, another lineage group, last year voted to protect women’s membership, and has invited Southern DAR members to join. But McDonald is encouraging members to hold the line for now. Christine Gordon plans to answer the call.

CHRISTINE GORDON: We have the blood of revolutionaries through our veins, we’re not going to be giving up too quickly.

A special session is planned for October and McDonald hopes it will bring more clarity about how the DAR plans to proceed.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters in Washington.

BROWN: John, this vote was a bit unexpected. What’s the right response when an institution embraces something that simply isn’t true? Is it time to leave—or stay and fight?

STONESTREET: Listen, now’s not the time at all to back down from what is true. I was really appreciative to see the clarity, for example, in Justice Thomas’s concurrence in the decision that was released this week about boys’ and girls’ sports, where the rest of the justices, rightly so, were trying to address issues of Title IX and issues of equal protection.

Thomas did not miss the opportunity to just say boys with gender dysphoria are not girls, and they never will be. At some level, that is the truth, and you have to stand with the truth.

This is just the way we’re going to go about our business.

There are times when an institution—and I’m just not very familiar with the Daughters of the American Revolution as an institution—but there are times when an institution is lost and the best thing to do is build something better and different. Then there are other times that you stay in it and you fight for the things that actually matter.

The point isn’t about America, and it isn’t about the American Revolution. It’s about claiming the word "daughter." You look at that and think that the absolute level of narcissism required to say that every single thing in the world has to be about me and my identity and my movement is just a remarkable thing to see.

EICHER: So, John, here we are, July 3. Tomorrow is the big anniversary, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Myrna and I can remember 1976 pretty well, the Bicentennial. Gerald Ford was in office, and it was just a couple years after Watergate. I had enough of an awareness—I was kind of into news as a kid—but there was a real feeling, even though we had a president resign in disgrace. There was a feeling of patriotism. Red, white, and blue everywhere. Lots of flags.

Now it just doesn’t in some ways feel the same today.

Except this was interesting—the Europeans coming over here remarking on social media how much they love America. They show up in World Cup venues with preconceived notions about the country driven by media coverage. They get here and they say, “What a great country this is.” They seem more patriotic than some of our own people.

STONESTREET: Well, listen, hey, I was six months old in 1976.

EICHER: Yeah, so the memories are vivid!

STONESTREET: I mean, like it was yesterday!

But I’ll tell you what I do remember. When you’re young and you’re over at your grandparents’ house, or you’re exploring your own house for the first time, and you come across these knickknacks, there was still an awful lot of Bicentennial stuff laying around.

That is an interesting thing that I hadn’t thought of until you brought up your own memories of it. Without a comparison, I’ve thought we’re certainly not as patriotic as you would expect at a time like this. This is really a big deal.

I suspect it has to do with a number of things.

Number one, we are dealing in the wake of an extended period of time without sustained and significant civic education. That education has to do with not teaching the next generation the history.

You lose identity when you lose story. When you don’t know what story you belong to, then you don’t really know who you are.

When you boil it down to what it means to be an American, what we know about our story is all the bad things. There is a critical-theory overarching narrative that has, I think, dominated how American history has largely been taught, and that’s really going to rob it.

Frankly, I think there was an impulse where many people wanted to have a level of patriotism, and that’s been undermined by increasing partisanship.

To make so many of these things partisan has been a mistake. Certainly from the left, wanting to make any sort of celebration the mark of a partisan identity. But the administration is guilty of making some of this partisan, making some of this about him.

I think that’s a real missed opportunity this time, in this place, and this year, where we really could have recaptured some of what it means to be an American in a really good way.

To me, it’s a real tragic loss.

I have been struck watching European fans experience Buc-ee’s for the first time.

What are they really impressed by?

They’re impressed by the culture. They’re impressed by the civility. They’re impressed by people wanting them to legitimately have a good time and experience middle America.

They’re impressed by the diversity—not racial diversity on a shallow level—but the diversity of interests, the diversity of music, the diversity that you find in one single Buc-ee’s truck stop.

This thing that America has that the rest of the world doesn’t have tells you something we’ve talked about before here. It speaks to the mistake that’s been made when this has been allowed to become so partisan.

I understand where that came from, and I’m not putting all the blame in one direction or the other.

America has always been the strongest in its middle.

The rich civil society, the family, the local communities—the things that have been the product of people taking ownership of their own lives, their own communities, and their own relationships—that’s what Alexis de Tocqueville noticed when he came and wrote Democracy in America a long time ago.

You see this part of America that is unique and unusual when you have a group of individuals who take a sense of identity and a sense of responsibility seriously the way Americans have.

BROWN: John, out of the tall stack of Supreme Court opinions this week, one of the biggest involved boys competing in girls’ sports. Justice Clarence Thomas—and you mentioned him just moments ago—he wrote separately to make a point that was almost startling in its simplicity: boys are not girls. What did you make of all that?

STONESTREET: First of all, if there’s any narrative left that this court somehow is owned and run and managed by Trump, that myth should be off the table.

I’m so glad that we are at least concerned with original intent. I’m actually grateful for that, even though I wish that the ruling would have landed differently given contemporary circumstances.

The other thing I wanted to say is that the decision about men and boys in women and girls’ sports was welcome.

I appreciated Justice Thomas’s flat-out clarity. "Let’s not forget that at the heart of this is that boys are not girls, no matter what."

I think he’s willing to invite more challenges to this narrative that somehow boys with gender dysphoria are, in fact, girls. His willingness to come out and say that up front is actually a big statement.

Kristen Waggoner was very careful and clear to say on CNN and in other places, in the wake of all these sympathetic pieces about this boy in West Virginia who’s now not allowed to participate, "This is not just about competitive advantage. It’s also about safety."

This young man, who is now the target of so much sympathy from the mainstream press, threatened to sexually assault the girls who were in that locker room.

We were told over and over and over this doesn’t happen.

That’s not something the court was asked to address. That’s not something that had to do with equal protection or Title IX.

But I’m grateful that Kristen made a point to let everyone know, "As you’re feeling sorry for this guy, let me tell you what he did."

It’s important to keep in mind that what is really at stake here is the safety and well-being of women. It’s not just about competitive advantage, as important as that is in and of itself.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thanks!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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