Culture Friday: Cultural narratives and moral truth

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 18th of October, 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 author and speaker Katie McCoy.

Good morning!

KATIE McCOY: Good morning, Nick and Myrna!

EICHER: Katie, there’s a plagiarism scandal story around a book under Kamala Harris’s name a decade and a half ago, Smart on Crime, the title. Conservative investigative reporter Christopher Rufo discovered passages in the book that were straight up copied from public sources, including Wikipedia. Which is a little like a copy of a copy.

Not to worry though: The New York Times reviewed the offending passages, called up a plagiarism expert, and concluded they involved only factual descriptions and statistics and not the original ideas of other authors. Therefore, the ruling on the field is reversed,  this is not serious plagiarism, according to the New York Times.

According to The Wall Street Journal, though, this dismissal is further evidence of why the public doesn’t trust the news media. An opinion piece in the Journal cited a Gallup survey that found less than a third of Americans trust the media to report accurately.

Now, you come from the academic world, Katie. You’ve got a Ph.D., you used to teach at the college level, I think we can call you a plagiarism expert. What do you say? No big deal?

McCOY: Well, it should be a big deal. Now, I’ll set aside for the moment that in all likelihood, the vice president had a ghostwriter for that book—most people of great fame and notoriety do. But that’s really not the story here.

I think the story is that the nature of the offense is being seen through the lens of the political leanings of the offender. For instance, when former Harvard President Claudine Gay was found to have plagiarized her work, you saw The New York Times rush to her defense—at one point with this opinion piece saying, “We need a new word for plagiarism.” Apparently, plagiarism is just too harsh! It's such a negative word.

But, properly speaking, plagiarism is intellectual theft. It is stealing, the taking of somebody else’s work, and claiming it as your own. It’s serious enough to get a college student expelled, in some cases, from a university—certainly failing a class. It’s something that every professor has to take seriously. So, I don’t think we should brush it under the rug. But what we also shouldn’t brush under the rug is the way that the legacy media are responding to it. You can only imagine how, if this were an ideological or political conservative, some of these same media outlets would be responding to proof of plagiarism. That, I find, is the more-concerning thing.

And really, Nick, in our moment today, it only adds to this growing institutional distrust that so many Americans have, whether it’s of our government or of media.

BROWN: Katie, a former star on the show “The Bachelorette,” his name Josh Seiter, dropped a bombshell. Several months ago he announced he was a transgender woman. But as it turns out, it was all just a big social experiment. He appeared on an online conservative TV show to reveal what he’d done—which is pretend to be transgender. Here’s Seiter explaining his purpose.

SEITER ON ALEX STEIN: I said, ‘Let’s look at the medical literature and what it says.’ It says that trans people don’t have to transition, don’t have to have gender dysphoria, don’t have to get surgery and don’t have to get hormones. If they feel they are a different gender than their bio sex, then they are trans and they are valid. And I said, understandably, ‘this is ridiculous, then I can present exactly how I am, and I can be trans and valid if I say that’s my gender identity.’ And so I said, ‘Let me prove how ridiculous this is, using Reductio ad absurdum by being trans for five, six months.’ And hopefully people will understand then how ridiculous this is.

So is he doing a service or is he just a mocker?

McCOY: Myrna, I don’t know how to answer that question because I think there are two aspects to it. On the one hand, we don’t want to ever discount the fact that there are countless adolescents, especially teenage girls, for whom gender dysphoria is a very real coping mechanism. It is often a signal of distress, typically in some other area of life. So, I don’t want to discount that gender dysphoria is itself a real thing.

Now, most of what we’re seeing, especially among teen girls today, is not properly gender dysphoria. It is social contagion and a coping mechanism. But when we get to talking about men self-identifying as women, more often than not, it is linked to a pornographic fetish. We have talked about this before. It is a very uncomfortable and unpopular thing, but it is something that is very real. You can trace the prevalence of transgender pornography, the uptick we are hearing of it on places like Pornhub—and how, all of a sudden, men are self-identifying as women, not only to gain access to women’s social spaces, but because they are aroused by the idea of themselves as female.

That is what Josh Seiter was pointing out. He’s absolutely correct in that the vast majority of these men who are self-identifying as women do not have gender dysphoria.

You don't have to take my word for it. Look at secular sociologists and psychologists like Ray Blanchard, who is no conservative. He has brought up that most men who are transgender or trans-identifying are what is called autogynephilic. That word, autogynephilia, comes from Greek words that essentially mean “love of oneself as a woman.”

On the one hand, I had a little bit of pain as I saw this through the lens of perhaps a very confused teenage girl who needs spiritual and emotional care. But on the other hand, Seiter did do a service to people who are just ready to wholesale believe someone's self-identification.

I actually went back to his Instagram page to see where he “came out” as trans. You would not believe all of the accolades: “You're so brave; you’re inspiring to me!” And now, all of a sudden, there’s all kinds of hate mail that he’s getting. I think he has death threats. Why? Because this does not align with the prescribed cultural narrative that we are all told to believe, despite common sense.

BROWN: Katie, I ran across a story of a couple in Philadelphia, very heartwarming story. They discovered their twins were conjoined and chose life for them, hoping for a successful separation surgery after they were born. And it was a wonderful success!

Now, this is about a week-old story, but I bring it up because the surgery was at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. And as it turns out, that very same hospital is alone at the top of a list of the 12 worst offending institutions that mutilate children with medical procedures aimed at sex-change. Heads the list!

That’s quite a dichotomy. How do you explain that?

McCOY: Very simply, Myrna, if you do not have a definition of good and evil that is anchored in some type of transcendent truth, you are destined for incoherence. In both of these cases, they both happened at the same children’s hospital, and in both cases, the action was done in pursuit of what was considered good. It was considered good and life-saving to separate these conjoined twins—praise God, what a miracle!

But then it is also considered good to sterilize or mutilate children. So, we have two conflicting definitions of what is good.

Whether we’re talking about medical advancement, I also think we can apply this to things like artificial intelligence and other scientific advancements. You can use something in the genius that God created humanity to be. All of human ingenuity can be used for good, or it can be used for evil. All of the things we are seeing with medical advancements—we cannot out-advance human nature. Human nature is still inwardly corrupt, and human nature is a horrible guide for what is good.

This story and the dichotomy of these two things being true in the same children’s hospital just demonstrate how incoherent it is to have a definition of morality that is not anchored in something objective, something transcendent, and something eternal.

EICHER: Katie, you’re a St. Louisan, if I remember right. So you may be surprised to learn that voters in Missouri, if polls are accurate, are likely to okay a constitutional amendment that among other things would legalize abortion. But it’s the “among other things” part that is a real concern. We’ve been talking about transgender issues, and I just wrote a column for WORLD Magazine that makes a case that the way the language is written, it’s going to undermine parental rights and create a new super right that will include the right to transgender procedures for children. We’ll talk more about this in days ahead. But for you, Katie, isn’t it surprising that what we thought of as a very pro-life state may not be?

McCOY: That's fascinating and deeply disturbing.

So, first of all, yes, I am a South County St. Louis girl. I went to high school in St. Louis and still love that city. I was very saddened to see that this legislation is coming up for a vote.

Since Roe was overturned, we’ve seen a common theme, and it is this: we cannot take for granted that laws equal change. Now, they do bring change in laws, but it shows that state by state, we have to win the hearts and minds of people towards protecting the unborn. Even a state like Missouri can be vulnerable to legislation that is this extreme.

One of the things I find over and over again is that pro-life people, like you and me, are kind of scratching their heads, going, “Well, why is it that Roe was overturned and we keep losing?”

It’s because at the core, we cannot take for granted that people know what abortion is, what it entails, and we have a new generation that we have to educate on these things. We have to do the arduous work of not only looking to laws and ballots and political cycles but actually engaging our neighbor to talk to them about what abortion is and why it’s wrong.

EICHER: But doesn’t it prove the point that the law is a moral teacher? A half century of Roe versus Wade was not only deadly, but it taught the culture that abortion, even if you think it’s evil, it’s a necessary evil.

McCOY: Precisely. And with that, all of the rhetoric, such as “the government doesn’t have a right over a woman’s body,” becomes entrenched in people’s minds—so much so that it’s like we stop thinking.

We see this in our presidential election today as well. You’ll hear pro-abortion advocates who don’t really say the word “abortion” very often. They talk about freedom. They talk about choice. In other words, freedom and choice are conflated with upholding Roe or reinstating Roe or making it a constitutional right.

So, you’re exactly right. We’ve had two generations living in this legalized abortion society, and in many ways, it has been baked into our social consciousness that this is a good, and it is something worth defending. It’s part of why we need laws that are just and righteous.

BROWN: Author and speaker Katie McCoy. Thanks, Katie. We’ll see you again soon!

McCOY: Thanks for having me!

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