Culture Friday: Costs and courage

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, January 23rd. 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!

John Stonestreet will be along in just a moment. But before we go to him … today marks the 53rd annual March for Life in Washington. The largest annual human rights demonstration in the world. It’s going on in our nation's Capital today.

Ahead of that, our Washington producer Harrison Watters caught up with some of the state delegations from around the country … with special attention to those that are fighting local measures that put unborn children at risk.

SLEDGE: Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for being part of the world's largest human rights demonstration. We're so excited to see all of your signs.

BROWN: Yesterday, a group gathered in a hotel conference room nearby … to strategize about defeating abortion legislation in their home states.

MIZE: Virginia is going to be a real challenge for us.

John Mize is CEO of Americans United for Life. AUL fights for passage of pro-life legislation and defeat of pro-abortion measures.

This November, voters in Nevada and Virginia will decide whether to make abortion a constitutional right in those states.

Nevada would allow abortion up to viability. Virginia could join nine other states and the District of Columbia to remove virtually all limits on abortion up to the moment of birth.

MIZE : And the other side's not being incremental in their approach with the government in Virginia right now... the General Assembly, they are all in just about on every different un-life affirming, high tax taxing, you name it, they're overreaching. And that could potentially bite them come November when we have a ballot amendment.

EICHER: Missouri voters this fall will take a second look at a 2024 state constitutional amendment that established a fundamental right to reproductive freedom …

It had the effect of pulling the legal rug from underneath nearly every pro-life law approved in Missouri.

EBEN FOWLER: So we went from essentially a pro-life state, to a not pro-life state because of the 2024 amendment three.

BROWN: That’s Eben Fowler … a pro-lifer from Kansas City … in D.C. with his wife for today’s march. After the pro-abortion amendment passed in Missouri, Planned Parenthood sued the state, arguing that laws setting medical standards for surgical abortions are an unconstitutional burden. That case was in a Kansas City court this week, and Fowler was paying close attention.

FOWLER: My prediction is that this judge will probably keep some of the regulations. She will also probably get rid of some of the regulations. So they’re trying to chip away at it.

EICHER: He’s hopeful that voters will repeal the pro-abortion amendment and replace it. The proposed new measure is a compromise, allowing abortion for rape, incest, or the life of the mother.

FOWLER: If amendment three passes, we will be a 98% pro-life state—the new amendment three—I'll take that, because if we lose, then we will be where we are now, probably with fewer regulations because of this case that's going on.

But even with state issues on their mind, pro-lifers have national objectives today, too. They hope to convince Congress and the White House to stand by the pro-life cause. 

Mize, of Americans United for Life, told WORLD job one is defending the so-called Hyde Amendment that bars federal funding of abortions.

MIZE: And then the second is they've got to accelerate the study on mifepristone to reimplement the safety measures to keep women safe. And so we're holding them to account in that regard, while praising them for the work that they're currently doing.

Alright, well let’s bring in John Stonestreet now. He's president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Alright John, well you heard that report, and I'd like to mention one other thing; this is from yesterday, a report by Lauren Canterberry reporting on some concern among pro-lifers that the White House is pulling back from the issue, fearing that abortion is a political loser and may contribute to Republicans losing control of Congress.

So let me just flip the question around and say, "What if the political people in the administration are right about this? What if pro-life is a net negative at the polls? Is it a smart move just to acknowledge the reality, or do you stick by your guns and say, 'Look, I’m pro lifer, that's what I do, and I can’t worry about your political judgments'?"

STONESTREET: Well, you have to stick by your guns. I mean, in terms of what can be politically accomplished, that’s just the question of what’s possible, and many people have defined politics that way.

But then to actually not be pro-life, to be pro-abortion by making a generic version of mifepristone more widely available and reinforcing FDA shortcuts and by restoring funding to Planned Parenthood, there’s not a strategic level to this.

I mean, listen, the president was always transactional on the issue of life. He had a few moments in his first term, in particular, where he was very out front and vocal and articulate even about why life should be protected. Certainly, J.D. Vance has been more so that way as a vice president.

But I don’t know that anyone’s ever believed, or should have believed, that you know, there was a personal level of commitment from the president. And we certainly had no reason to believe that from someone like RFK, who’s driving many of these decisions; clearly, his priorities lie elsewhere.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that we’ve been told that to be pro-life is kind of a political disability. That, of course, happened all the way through the ’90s, and we didn’t allow it to come off the docket of the conservative platform.

Trump’s presidency ends soon, and we’re going to have another candidate, and that candidate is going to support another platform, and we don’t think, as President Trump has said repeatedly, that the real success here is overturning Roe. We think, and the goal has always been, that abortion is both illegal and unthinkable.

You know, as Ryan Anderson said, I think very well when the Dobbs decision came out, this is not the end of the pro-life movement, or even the beginning of the end; it’s the end of the beginning. And now we go on to step two, and it goes on.

So I think it has to be called out. I don’t think we should think that there’s some sort of strategy or commitment here that the president himself hasn’t owned up to.

I mean, that’s the good thing about President Trump, you know exactly what he believes, you know exactly what he’s going to fight for. He may change his mind, but if he does, he’ll tell you about it, right?

So we know this, and the movement now has to stay committed, it’s got to be committed at the state level. And on the federal level, we have to make sure that the only party that we’ve had any sort of alliance with in the last 30 years on this issue—50 years, really—is still on our side, because that would be a real big loss if not.

EICHER: Well John, let’s shift gears. Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the FBI to arrest three of the ringleaders responsible for the disruption of church services last weekend in the Twin Cities in Minnesota: Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Louisa Allen, and William Kelly. 

Now Kelly, he's a frequent flyer, evidently able to shuttle between Minnesota and Washington, DC. He’s a regular outside Christ Church in DC, he's a disruptor, he yells on the sidewalk but he hasn't been inside the sanctuary. But was one of the most aggressive ones that you saw at the disruption up in St. Paul. He yesterday posted a video of himself earlier in the day taunting the AG, saying, "Come get me Pam Bondi" to which she went back on social media and said, "Okay" and then followed that up with a green check mark, and now he's cuffed and in custody. 

But John, I want to hear you on this church disruption, seemingly this new low that we’ve hit. And I'd like to ask, suppose you’d been present at that worship service? What would you have hoped that you had done, especially in the face of a guy like Kelly, screaming, cursing, calling you a fake Christian because you happen to disagree with him on illegal immigration?

STONESTREET: Well, listen, I don’t think we have to worry about what a clear pagan, non-Christian activist has to say about what Jesus would have done or what Christians should do, any more than we should care when Whoopi Goldberg or the other members of The View do it.

To ask what I hope I would have done is much of what I saw the church members did, which is first and foremost, protect the children, and I think that has to be the number one priority. And then I appreciate the pastor being firm, being clear, but also wanting to avoid any sort of escalating violence as it goes along.

Listen, we are in a new place, and I don’t think we should skip over that too quickly though. This is a real issue. I appreciated an observation Scott Jennings made on CNN the other night to a other group of fellow panelists who were downplaying this as being no big deal by saying, “Look, you might remember, just a few months ago, there was a shooter that came in and targeted children at a Minnesota church, so you can really forgive a group of Minnesota churchgoers for maybe being a little bit on edge."

But what I think that means is that we’re in a moment—the freedom of speech, like the freedom of religion, something we’ve discussed here many times, has limits. And the freedom of speech as being claimed by these protesters actually interfered with the freedom of assembly and the freedom of religion. And the idea here is that the freedom of religion has been often called our first freedom, not only because it’s found in the First Amendment, but because from it, as Chuck Colson would say, all the other freedoms go.

And we’re now at a place where we have to really be serious, because this is a fear-inducing act of emotional terrorism that took place. And the goal of that is to silence people. The goal of that is to inflict fear.

I was in South Korea last week; the government there has jailed a pastor and trumped-up charges, held him without bond, and he faces trial. Now whatever they decide in the end, the whole point is intimidation.

What the state of Colorado did to Jack Phillips, the point was intimidation.

The question is, is this government going to allow this kind of intimidation to stand? Because it has a chilling effect on people’s willingness to exercise the freedom of religion.

Certainly, the high courts have been very clear on protecting freedom of religion and how that connects to speech and how that connects to association. But the process—it has been the punishment for folks like Jack Phillips. From the incident to the resolution has taken a long time.

Here we have an incident that has had a chilling effect on whether people will have the willingness to express it. And you don’t want that silence, you don’t want that chilled in America.

And so I think it is a critical moment. I think it matters now what the state is going to do on behalf of people of faith. They should not interfere, but they should make sure that interference doesn’t happen, especially when done in a planned, systemic way here.

BROWN: That's true. Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, I was a little bit hesitant about whether John, you wanted to go here, even if I wanted to go here, because, you know, I grew up in an era where grandmamas and Sunday school teachers had at least two pictures hanging on the walls. And one was Jesus, and one was Martin Luther King Jr. 

So I’m a little nervous right now, but anyway, this week we observed, as a nation, MLK Day. But more and more, I am reading and hearing pushback from the younger generations. This young lady, Sarah Wilder, for instance, said younger generations are bristling against holidays like MLK Day. And then this conservative commentator, Chad Jackson, making some bold, pointed statements about King, what he stood for, etc.

But I want to go back to Wilder. She says she doesn’t want to leave us with the impression that “noble movements (like the Civil Rights movement) can't be led by complicated or even immoral men.” But she points to something else that goes beyond King’s flaws and his indiscretions. She writes, “MLK Day represents the de facto wokeism which infects both the right and the left, rewriting our history into a basic story of oppression and hate vs. freedom and liberalism.”

She goes on to say “the conservative establishment is willing to overlook a whole host of the most leftist positions because their opponents may call them racist for opposing a universally-beloved character like King.”

Does she make a valid point? And if so, how do you think discussions like this will affect future MLK observances?

STONESTREET: I think there’s a completely valid point in how we talk about our heroes, and Martin Luther King Jr. is a prime example of that.

Here’s someone who was facing injustice, facing oppression, and doing it in a way that stood up for the idea of the image of God, based it on natural law, and made some very compelling arguments that are very important and very true.

And yet was a flawed man, both in his personal conduct—and that’s really saying it lightly—and also in many of his positions.

But I think where the problem lies here is in allowing the de facto wokeism to hijack the MLK legacy. That’s really the problem.

Just because the wokeism has hijacked history into a basic story of oppression and oppressor—I agree with that—but we shouldn’t then allow that to reframe what was actual oppression taking place and what was actual movements of liberation that the Civil Rights Movement accomplished, while at the same time talking about the flaws when it’s appropriate and how it’s appropriate.

In other words, we call balls and strikes, and we do that with our heroes, and we do that with others. I think it would be a real loss to lose the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to the left.

Now, that doesn’t mean he acknowledged biblical truth in every area of his life, and I think in many ways he accepted insufficient and even heretical positions on the person and life of Jesus, and so what do we do with that? Well, we say that out loud. We just talk about it.

You know, the issue isn’t to downplay what it is that the man and the movement actually accomplished; it’s to not allow it to be hijacked.

And let me be really clear, de facto wokeism in our culture, the critical theory mood in our culture—and I think especially the sexual version of critical theory—they don’t have arguments to make on their own, so they hijack legacies. That’s actually the strategy. And I just don’t want to concede that to them.

I don’t want to concede a holiday. I don’t want to concede a legacy. I don’t want to concede a movement. I don’t want to concede a man.

We should not fall for that. We should not accept that.

BROWN: Saying it out loud, is that what they're doing then, these young people, these from the different younger generations? Saying it out loud?

STONESTREET: Well, maybe some of them are. I mean, I think they’re asking questions.

But I do think we have to teach them the intellectual and academic integrity and patience. And I think, by the way, that involves getting the human person right. And critical theory gets it wrong by saying those are the people that are messing up the world and we’re the ones that are right.

And that’s just not the way the Bible describes the human condition, and it can’t be the framework that we use to try to understand the past, the present, or the future.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Welcome back and thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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