Culture Friday: Family as the foundation

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 20th of September, 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 John Stonestreet. John is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast

Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: G’mornin’

EICHER: John, another assassination attempt … and I’m struck by how much of a non-event it very quickly became … and how there’s been almost no letup on the temperature of the political rhetoric. You know, the first attempt on former President Trump did yield a bit of self-reflection on the part of the political class. But this one really didn’t register.

Peter Doocy of Fox News did try to shame the White House about calling Trump a threat … and not only did he get nowhere … he was accused of being dangerous in bringing it up.

Listen.

PETER DOOCY: How many more assassination attempts on Donald Trump until the president and the vice president and you pick a different word to describe Trump other than “threat”?

JEAN-PIERRE: Peter, if anything from this administration— I actually completely disagree with premise of your question, the question that you’re asking. It is also incredibly dangerous in the way that you’re asking it. …

But what’s your takeaway from all this?

STONESTREET: Yeah. Well, you know, look, I said this, I thought it was fascinating, despite how serious it was that when there was the first attempt on President Trump's life, that was the longest stretch we had been in since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, since one of our political candidates or sitting presidents had been assassinated or had been shot or shot at, and so, you know, have we turned a page now?

Because now we're up to, you know, two in the last, you know, just couple months. I think that is a really important conversation, that there are, you know, cultural norms that hold things back. And when those cultural norms are gone, then it's hard to hold those things back, you know.

Secondly of all, the rhetoric of, you know, stochastic terrorism, and you know, which is always aimed at the voices on the right. Here we are another one, you know, from the left. And then the coverage from the media just continues to add to this thing that is undermining our ability to have a political life together, and that, of course, is just the constant erosion of trust—just cannot trust, you know, the reporting on this. You just cannot trust people giving analysis and commentary. I mean, look, but both sides have been in a kind of consistent pattern of saying they're the ones that are guilty and not and not us.

You know, it just even in the same week, you know, Trump's silly comments about eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. And then, you know, you turn around and blame the bomb threats and so on that took place in Springfield, turns out they were foreign actors, every single one of them. So, you know, to me, this is, you know, pointing to something that has to do with the erosion of trust, and I'm not sure how you have a community life together without that.

There used to be a whole lot of non-political space where we could at least hang out, where we could at least find a good bit of common life together. And we're just kind of running out of out of space. It's hard to imagine that any society really has a future together without some sort of non political ground, and in that ground there is a good bit of capital. And what I mean by that is trust. That's the capital of a society, is trust. We just don't have a lot of it right now.

BROWN: Well, I’ve got a confession. Back in the day not only did I watch, but I laughed-at the sitcom from the 1990s Murphy Brown.

This past weekend Candice Bergen—she was the title character journalist Murphy Brown—she was a presenter at the Primetime Emmy Awards this week, and of course, she brought up the very public spat between her and former Vice President Dan Quayle back in 1992. Let’s listen to it from back then.

QUAYLE: It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another lifestyle choice.

Fast forward to this week, this is what Bergen had to say in recycling the ridicule.

BERGIN: My character was attacked by Vice President Dan Quayle when Murphy became pregnant and decided to raise the baby as a single mother. Oh, how far we’ve come! Today a Republican candidate for vice president would never attack a woman for having kids. So as they say, my work here is done. Meow.

So, John, do you even remember this controversy? You were just a kid, I’m guessing!

STONESTREET: I was a junior in high school in 1992, but I do remember Murphy Brown, and I do remember what really was one of the most ridiculous moments in American political history, which is saying quite a lot, in which you had a real life vice presidential candidate in a public spat with someone who actually didn't exist in real life, this character, Murphy Brown. And Dan Quayle got absolutely hammered for suggesting that we really ought not encourage, you know, children born outside of the context of marriage. And you know, he's called prudish and puritanical and attacking women's rights. But as soon as I saw this clip of Candice Bergen the other night, and of course, she was using the platform, you know, as the Emmys tends to do, for a political statement from the left, just completely ignoring—and I remember this piece when it came out 20 years after that incident in 1992 basically saying, “You know what, Dan Quayle is the one who got it right.”

And this history is a really, really important history. G. K. Chesterton talked about what he called the triangle of truisms when it came to family and society. And he described it as mother, father and child. And he said, you know, the triangle of truisms cannot be destroyed. It can only destroy civilizations who disregard it. In other words, when we're talking about family, we're talking about gravity, we're not talking about a speed limit. And so this push, though, that happened in the latter part of the 20th century, to fully divorce sex, marriage and babies in such a holistic way. Now, of course, we know the 60s was really about separating sex from marriage. The pill enabled that by separating sex from babies. But here you had, in this scenario, the separation of marriage and babies, and it started with this wanting to have babies without marriage. And of course, now we have marriage without babies. And even back then, that was maybe even more unusual than babies without marriage.

There was this sense that marriage, when able, should be procreative, and you can actually see that in the history of liturgies and marriage ceremonies in the church. And of course, now we're so far beyond that this conversation seems quaint. Where now we want to have not only sex without babies, but we're having babies without sex. So, the divorce of sex, marriage and babies, has been thorough and complete now, but this was an important chapter in it. And yet, you know, 20 years later, you get the fact check. And it's so much like these political stories, you know, where it ain't happening, it ain't happening, it ain't happening. And then, you know, on the bottom page of the fourth section of the newspaper, it's like corrections, oh yeah, it really did happen.

This was a case of that where the Brookings Institute basically said, you know what, kids need a mom and a dad. And so the idea of intentionally robbing a child of a mother or father was the first stage. And one wonders—although I would definitely say it differently than J. D. Vance has been saying it—one wonders if in 20 years, we're going to get a hey, turns out that J. D. Vance was right about the ruling class.

BROWN: So, are you saying J.D. Vance was right, just like Dan Quayle was right?

STONESTREET: Well, not in the way he said that. But you know, the overall idea that fertility is this enemy of a woman being her true self is a poisonous fruit of this separation of sex, marriage and babies. And you know, it's fascinating to watch, particularly some of these Catholic female theologians and public intellectuals who have emerged in response to John Paul II's call for a new Christian feminism. And what they've all articulated, I'm thinking of Erika Bachiochi at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Mary Eberstadt—I mean the names go on and on. What they have articulated is is that one of the things that feminism has done is that it has taught women that the fertility is an obstacle to their true selves, so they actually have to fight against their fertility.

Alongside of this has come this idea that children are pets. I know we talk about it if pets are children, but actually, on the ground, one of the impacts has not been to elevate pets to children, it's been to demote children to pets, that they're this kind of lifestyle accessory that I want to go along with my purse and the little puffy dog, you know, that goes in the purse these days. Man that sounded like a “get off my lawn” line. But I'm really serious. It's really a problem how we think and talk about children as accessories.

And that's exactly the mentality that J. D. Vance is talking about, that there is something that happens when, as a culture, think of children as pets or as lifestyle accessory options. In that part, yeah, I think it's right. And you know what? There's already people writing that article saying J. D. Vance is right. No one's willing to say he should have used the kind of attitude in the way that he did it. I won't say that, but you know, the number of professional women going. “I was sold something and it wasn't true, didn't give me what I wanted.” So we have people already writing the article saying that J. D. Vance was right.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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