Culture Friday - A new kind of Christian feminism

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, July 1st, 2022. 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 Culture Friday.

Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: So after we talked a week ago, it was just a few hours after that that Dobbs came down, reversing Roe and Casey and returning the issue of abortion to the states.

This subject has been a major theme here on Culture Friday for the many years we’ve done it, John, and you should certainly feel free to mark the occasion as you wish.

But my question for you here right off the bat is whether anything surprised you about the reaction to it and specifically, do you think the leak of the opinion actually had the beneficial effect of letting off some of the cultural steam before the court released the final opinion.

STONESTREET: Well, you know, that's a good question. I guess it's hard to know what we're comparing it to—whether, you know, it was an intentional leak by a progressive clerk in order to let that side kind of prepare. You know, there were the protests, and acts of violence against pregnancy resource centers and other places. And some of those certainly, I think will continue. I don't think this is going anywhere.

There's certainly a level of irrationality and factual inaccuracy in terms of how people are responding to it. No one has banned abortion. No one has settled the matter.

I celebrate the end of Roe v. Wade, because it preemptively stopped the job of state legislatures and the job that they're actually supposed to do preemptively like right off the bat, it took out of their hands, something that belongs in their hands, enshrined something in the Constitution that actually just does not exist.

But it is really amazing to see headline after headline after headline, you know that the Supreme Court has taken away a constitutional right, when the entire opinion was about the fact that there was no constitutional right. I mean, argue it but don't assume it—you know, actually make the case for it. Which, of course, it can't be made. So here we are. It's not amazing. It's not surprising. This whole thing about abortion has proceeded on factual inaccuracies.

I'll tell you what I have seen though: just a blatant willingness of many of these headlines to quote people who feel like they have lost a right in the state of pregnancy. And they're very quick to acknowledge that what they're killing in this whole conversation is a baby. That's been a stunning thing. Headlines, you know, quoting these women, it's like I can't I can't have this baby. So oh, so we are talking about a baby. This isn't a dehumanized sort of practice. So it's taking the lid off of it. And I think that's powerful. It's undermining the false definitions and the lies and the misused words that have been employed for years in this debate, and hopefully now we can actually, you know, have a real debate and, and move forward on it.

BROWN: John, I’m noticing a new kind of argument making the rounds on social media. It goes something like this:

“I’m not pro-murdering babies: I’m pro Becky, I’m pro Theresa” and then what follows are scenarios of women facing difficult pregnancies that supposedly warrant the killing of their babies.

I’m reminded of a recent WORLD Opinions article by Allie Beth Stuckey. She points to a Washington Post sympathetic profile of a 19 year old mother in Texas, unable to abort her twin daughters because of the state’s new protections for the unborn.

I’m just seeing a lot of this in the immediate days after the Dobbs decision and I expect to see more. How do we address this notion that women now somehow count less in America?

STONESTREET: Well, I think there's really two primary things we can point out and again, convincing someone of something just does not mean the same thing as making a valid argument.

But I think there are two very important things we can point out. Number one is, many of the preborn children are women as well. So holding up the value and worth of women means holding up the value and worth of all women. Second, I think a lot of this language from the pro abortion side is profoundly dehumanizing on women.

I thought women were supposed to be able to have it all. I mean, wasn't that really the whole notion. And now we're told women can't have it all, unless they actually deny or violate the natural functioning and the natural purpose of their own body.

It's almost as as Ryan Anderson has put it, as if we now have in a new way, a new misogyny, in which the male body who's able to have sex repeatedly but doesn't have to bear the natural consequences of fertility is the ideal body. And so what we want is to turn women into a bunch of men biologically. And I think that is a profoundly dehumanizing thing, I think being pro woman is being pro woman. And one of the amazing things about women, a very amazing thing about women is their ability to have children. And the crazy thing that we often hear from the pro abortion side is that women have to deny that ability, that that ability is an obstacle to their being fully and truly, you know, women and people of value.

So, I think, and I was having this conversation recently with, with one of, and I think there's a whole network of young Catholic theologians who are female, who took seriously the call from Pope John Paul, to that we needed a new Christian feminism and there's a whole network of them, they're wickedly smart, and they're super talented. And basically, they're making this articulation that we want a feminism that upholds the full capacity of women to be women. And we don't want women to have to deny their God given procreative capacity in order to be fully valued as women and that's what the pro abortion side is telling us that that has to happen.

EICHER: So beyond Dobbs, John, we had the Coach Kennedy case this week, dealing with the football coach’s freedom to have a post-game prayer on the public-school field, the court ruled in favor of the coach. Obviously, this is a major win for religious liberty, but what does this do culturally: How do you answer the criticism of this decision, that Christians are just exercising power and special privilege?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I could say some things but I thought Coach Kennedy himself has been absolutely fantastic in media interviews answering this very question, which is just again, calling out the misnomer that this only applies to Christians. And it doesn't. It applies to everyone.

I think there's some wonderful lines of argumentation and Gorsuch's opinion itself that I think this is something that Christians should read. But your concern is the right one, because this criticism is not just because of the Coach Kennedy decision. What we're hearing now is an echo, of course, is essentially putting together this case with the Dobbs case, with the case having to do with whether money can go to Christian institutions, and seeing it all together.

And here's what you need to know. And that first case in which Justice Roberts wrote an opinion that said, look, we've already decided this and Trinity Lutheran, we already decided this and Espinoza. This is the third case now, in which a state pretends that simply because a institution is religious than a program, a state program that's available to all entities can't be available to religious institutions simply because they're religious - that's just not something you can do, you have to have a compelling interest to withhold the same sort of access to these programs from Christian institutions. He's saying the same thing that the Supreme Court has said now three times. In the Dobbs case, this is a decision specifically about the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade. And its, you know, subsequent decisions. This isn't a Christian position. This was a constitutional argument.

And in the case of Coach Kennedy, this is just something that clarifies where free speech rights and free exercise rights lie. And thankfully, Gorsuch just completely undermines this whole lemon test that's been used for years, which is just hugely problematic, and Gorsuch says this thing has never been helpful. It's never been useful, and it's time for it to be thrown away. These were all decisions decided not on grounds of judicial activism. They were undoing unconstitutional grounds of judicial or political activism. So this is a better day for the exercise clause. It's a better day for the religious freedom of all Americans. This isn't just about special rights being bestowed upon 
Christians.

BROWN: Well, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you so much.

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