Culture Friday - Cracks in America’s melting pot

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s Friday, July 2nd, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Paul Butler.

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

By not acting, the Supreme Court sent quite a message this week in declining to hear a case out of Virginia dealing with gender identity and the use of restrooms. And specifically how public high schools are supposed to work it all out.

It’s an old case—starting in 2014—and a case, by the way, the Supreme Court back in 2017 agreed to hear, then agreed not to.

Lots of background detail here. We start in a high school in Gloucester County, Virginia. Student’s name is Gavin Grimm.

Reporting for WORLD, Carolina Lumetta writes:

“The principal initially allowed Grimm to use the boys’ restroom, but school policy required students to use facilities according to their biological sex. The school gave Grimm the option of a single-stall restroom, and Grimm sued for sex discrimination in 2015.”

BUTLER: By 2016, the Obama administration weighed in by issuing legal guidance through the Department of Education that it was the position of the government that federal law on sex discrimination applies to gender identity.

By the time that Grimm’s lawsuit got into the appellate court, it relied on that Obama guidance. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the school must allow female students who claim a male gender identity to use boys’ restrooms and by implication vice-versa.

EICHER: As we said, the Supreme Court in 2017 had agreed to review the case. But then the Trump administration scrapped the Education Department guidance. So the high court sent the case back down to reconsider.

Meantime, the Supreme Court took a totally different transgender case—an employment case—and in the end wound up effectively adopting the Obama position that federal sex discrimination law should apply to gender-identity cases in the workplace.

So the Fourth Circuit appeals court applied that standard to the Grimm case and again ruled in favor of the transgender student.

BUTLER: So now, to present day. The appeals court case was appealed again to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court declined to accept the case and that means (for now) the transgender bathroom decision is binding precedent in five states: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

EICHER: And unless another federal appeals court rules differently, the Supreme Court currently has no case it can use to clarify whether its transgender employment case—known as the Bostock case—applies in the school-bathroom context.

It’s Culture Friday. John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

John, good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning, gentlemen. And congratulations on pronouncing Gloucester correctly.

EICHER: You know, it's just practice, practice, practice until you get it right.

STONESTREET: Of course, I say that as a Virginia native.

EICHER: Well, I did my time in Virginia, but only two years. But yeah, so another milestone of sorts here and again, from Virginia. But we have the Trump Supreme Court basically handing a victory to the LGBT movement.

STONESTREET: Well, I think that’s accurate. I think that as this whole conversation about LGBTQ rights progresses along the legal lines, what we have is just a little victory: One step forward, two steps back; two steps forward, one step back. Because what we have is a Supreme Court that is just wary and super reticent from making any sort of sweeping declarations that pretends this settles the culture war. Maybe it’s because we’ve heard for many decades now that the Supreme Court settled the issue of abortion in Roe v. Wade, and it clearly did not. If there’s one issue not settled in our culture, it’s the issue of abortion. And of course, that reflects something I think that people should understand, which is that the courts are more a reflection of the culture than a leader of the culture. Not that they don’t matter, and not that they’re not part of culture, but that stuff tends to be downstream, not upstream.

And so we’ve got a lot of confusion, and the court wants that confusion to sit out there for as long as possible. They don’t have to make that decision. I mean, you might say the Obergefell decision was the exception to that since Roe v. Wade. But if you go back to the opinion that Kennedy wrote, he tried to pretend as if the decision itself would not create all of these millions of little skirmishes across various issues of culture. And so we’re going to be jerked back and forth here, we’re going to be going back and forth based on who’s in the White House. So we’re going to get the Dear Colleague letter from President Obama, and we’re going to get a completely different take from President Trump and his administration. And then President Biden is going to jump in and attempt to apply the Bostock decision in ways that the court itself specifically said it shouldn’t be applied. He’s going to try to do that, and then some courts are going to allow it, and then the Supreme Court—the highest court in the land—is going to try to set it out.

So I guess there’s a lot of different ways to talk about this. We’re gonna see little fires everywhere on this issue. And we’re gonna have to actually deal with this. But it also should help us learn the lesson we needed to learn from the pro-life response to Roe v. Wade, which is we don’t wait for the court to do the work that needs to be done in the larger culture. Parents shouldn’t wait for the court to decide what schools should teach their kids; they should teach their kids. Churches should not wait for a court or a legal decision or the next election whiplash to say whether we should speak out on this or be at threat for religious liberty. It’s just so clear that Christians need to come down to what is true and what is good. Figure it out. Now. Otherwise, we’re just going to be going back and forth in a form of Christian worldview whiplash that we seem to be suffering from these days.

EICHER: And you're seeing a lot of activity at the school board level, too. I mean, some of that is driven by these very questions of transgender and how we're going to accommodate what we're going to do with regard to bathrooms, and so on and so forth. “Pronouns” was the subject of one of those meetings.

STONESTREET: Well, look. Let me give a shout out to Virginia because I have been critical of it over the last couple of years given it’s where I grew up, and good heavens, what’s happening there? I think that there’s a few states kind of in a race towards the abyss and Virginia has jumped out in the lead in many ways. And yet what we saw with the case of Tanner Cross is a church and a larger community of parents and a larger community of fellow teachers stepping up to say, “I might not even agree with him, but this is not the kind of Department of Education we want lording over us. We want a place of religious freedom.” I was highly encouraged by that. And now it stands in direct contrast to pastors that I have heard address other congregants who are fighting religious liberty battles by saying things like, “this is your battle, not mine.”

I was so encouraged by the community support for Tanner Cross, because in many ways, it stood in such direct contrast to the lack of community support for Jack Phillips. Now that’s a hit or miss, there’s a bunch of us that stood with Jack Phillips. There’s a bunch of folks, our friends from Focus on the Family and Colorado Christian University and people nationwide that have stood with Jack Phillips, but I’ll tell you why going to a school board meeting and taking the mic maybe got a little out of hand. And a pastor just kind of coming out and saying “we’re rallying around this guy, because he’s one of us.” Good heavens. When’s the last time we saw that for a Christian who found themselves in the cultural crosshairs? So high five to that community. It kind of restored my hope in where this might go.

BUTLER: John, interesting pride-month decision in California to extend its government travel ban to five more states: Florida, Arkansas, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia.

That brings the total to 17 states where the state of California will not allow state resources for official travel. Texas was already on the list and then adding Florida, that means the second- and third-most populated states are off-limits. And of course, the reason is that the California government disagrees with those states on LGBT rights.

I heard one commentator call this a cold war among the states. It’s a little frightening stated that way, but is that an accurate read? Or do you just think of it as meaningless posturing?

STONESTREET: Is it okay to say yes? I mean, I guess. I guess it’s a Cold War, in a sense. But my daughters sometimes have a Cold War where they don’t talk to each other. It’s a real cold war, but it’s not a great consequence to the larger world. And I wonder if that’s the case here.

The little bureaucrats in states like to champion and pat themselves on the back. What we have seen—particularly in these progressive states—is these governors’ moral posturing and lack of follow through on their own promises for their own policies, so I can’t imagine that they’re going to be able to be consistent with their policy for everyone else. They want to go to the Super Bowl, or go to the beach, but California has the beach. I guess at some level, the vacation that at least had happened, the mayor of Denver’s vacation, it just got in the way of principle, and I think we’re gonna see probably some of that here.

What do you do? I wish we could say we can ban progressives from moving out of California to other states and ruining the vote there. They could send all the conservative lives here. Maybe we should strike that last comment from the record.

EICHER: ’Course, I wonder whether, you know, at what point does this cross a line, we, you know, can kind of laugh about it. “Yeah, he's not gonna go to Florida.” But at what point does this become a serious issue? Or does it?

STONESTREET: If you go back to Samuel Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations”, and this may be an extreme application, but Huntington predicted that after the Cold War conflicts globally would not advance along nation states, but between civilizational rifts. And those civilizational rifts weren’t about national identity, they were about worldview. So think about Islam and non-Islam think about different kind of cultural groups within a particular region. And he said that those fault lines as he called them would not just be between regions of the country, sometimes they would run right in the middle of countries. We have certainly seen that with some of the genocidal conflicts. If you think about Rwanda, if you think about other places: This is what Huntington was writing about years ago.

Look, at some point a country cannot advance without shared definitions of right and wrong. It’s one thing to disagree on a common goal; it’s one thing to disagree on the best way to get to a common goal. It’s another thing to disagree diametrically on what the goal should be. And that becomes the sort of things that creates rifts. There are rules to countries, there are rules to civilizations, there are rules to groups of people being able to survive together going forward. And you can’t break those rules forever without consequence. Or as Dallas Willard put it, you can’t step off the roof and then choose not the hit the ground.

This is actually baked into the way the world works. And so I think, Nick, your question is the right one. Eventually this sentiment that I can’t talk to you because I disagree with you and making that sort of line on such an odd issue when there are so many other issues at stake. It’s unsustainable going forward; there comes a point where you can’t reason, you can’t be rational. There has to be another party to the conversation. And at that point, things begin to break down.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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