Culture Friday - Growing up together

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, February 18th, 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. Well, it’s Culture Friday. Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast and he joins us now. Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: We normally don’t report on school board elections, John, but this was interesting. The New York Times had a story on a school board recall election in San Francisco.

Voters there tossed out three uber-progressive school board members and they had the blessing of the city’s liberal mayor. The Times reports, quoting here: “[The recall] reflected a trend: Many Americans, even in liberal places, seem frustrated by what they consider a leftward lurch from parts of the Democratic Party and its allies.

“This frustration spans several issues, including education, crime, and Covid-19.”

Turns out this is a revolt of San Francisco parents, who seem to be saying enough with renaming schools away from flawed historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, enough with the masks, enough with the virtue signaling. Just do your job.

I think I know what the political import is here, but do you see a cultural shift happening?

STONESTREET: I don't know if I would call it a cultural shift. I just don't think most Americans are aware, the far left progressive side of the party. And the activists themselves are I mean, I think most people live in a different world. There's a particular level of what Ross Douthat in his book called decadence. I mean, he wasn't the first one to come up with that. But there's kind of a place you get as a society where you're so fat and happy that you can start to accommodate fantasies, and beliefs and wanting to and the impression that you can actually remake the world, not just according to what you want, but away from created realities and everything else in it. And I just think it's gone too far. I was talking with a group of educational leaders this week, and, and we all agreed that the Loudoun County School Board has been the best marketing force for Christian education or educational alternatives. We've seen a buyer's remorse here. Now, of course, the governor of California hasn't helped specifically with the mask mandates. I mean, I think that's one of the big trigger points when when you saw the celebrities come out and party for the last two weeks, you know, in the NFC Championship game and then in the Super Bowl, without masks and you know, the mayor of LA saying, “I held my breath”. And then you're masking up kids. Yeah, you look you can be gracious and say at the early days of the pandemic, even throughout the first year, we were waiting on data we didn't know, better safe than sorry, you can't say that anymore. You can't say that anymore. with school kids. The data is absolutely against not only whether or not masks actually are effective, but specifically the threat to school aged children. And the counter negatives of depression, suicidal ideation, isolation that come from lockdowns and mandates. This has been brutal, not to mention learning objectives. This has been brutal on school kids and parents have had enough.

EICHER: I love research studies and here’s a fascinating one. Quoting from a colleague here at WORLD, Ericka Andersen writing for WORLD Opinions. She cites “… a new report from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University, and BYU’s School of Family Life, researchers found … that those who marry in their early 20s are happier and more fulfilled than their later-married counterparts.”

“Sadly,” Ericka Andersen writes, “two-thirds of young adults believe that getting married later in life improves the chances that a marriage will be successful. It’s a faulty assumption,” she says.

What she means by that is that many now see marriage as a “capstone” to their success instead of a “cornerstone” for their future success together.

Now, assuming the research is right, and the National Marriage Project has a great track record, why do you suppose that might be? And what benefits do you think might flow from this “cornerstone” versus “capstone” idea of marriage?

STONESTREET: I think that distinction - the Capstone versus Cornerstone - is a really helpful way of pointing out The way different people see marriage these days, or the difference between how it seemed today versus how it was seen 20, 30, 40 years ago, there's so many things tied in with that. There's, for example, the connection with procreation. If you treat marriage as a capstone and then choose to get married later and later and later in life, as we've seen over the last couple decades, then your procreative potential just is diminished in many ways. That betrays that you see that procreation, marriage, and sexuality are not a package deal. I think there's another helpful distinction that tells us where this distinction came from. In other words, why is it that we're now seeing marriage as a capstone as opposed to a cornerstone, we're seeing it as a kind of something to check off the bucket list, as opposed to something that is the mark of adulthood and kind of growing into the kind of person you're going to be? See, what goes along with this data is people who get married in their 30s might have matured, but they probably have cohabitated, over the course of that time. And the factor here is not so much age, it's don't live together first, don't treat another relationship like marriage, that's not marriage. And if you don't live together first, then go ahead, jump into the water. And I know we have this idea, I'm not ready to get married. And when I hear a 20 Somethings say that my answer is, of course, you're not ready to get married, no one's ready to get married. You know, what makes you ready to get married? Getting married, you know, in other words, obviously, there are, you know, if someone's a meth addict, they're not ready to get married. But all things considered equal, jump in and do it together. Because to become one. And I mean, gosh, the more we tweak marriage, the more we expand it, the more we try to adjust it here and there, the more we realize that there's a structure to this thing. You don't even have to point to, you know, the first couple chapters of Genesis, to see that you can point to hard, fast sociological data. And of course, that begs the question why, and that's when you get back to Genesis is that there's actually a way this thing is made. I think that Brad Wilcox and national marriage project continues to point us to that I'm grateful for their work. But we've got to deal with reality, we've got to deal with what it actually is. The myths around marriage, and parenting, the myths that continue to get propagated. It's just really stunning. And then you can go back to various chapters of the sexual revolution, you know, kind of the kids will be fine. And it just turns out to be not true.

BROWN: Shout out to my colleague at WORLD, Leah Savas, and her recent report on pro-life legislation in Florida. Pro-life activists there are working to target what’s effectively become a legal right to abortion in that state. It’s a complicated story, lots of moving pieces, but they’re working on this now, even though all eyes are on the U.S. Supreme Court. But John, you’ve long said pro-lifers will have to battle abortion state by state if the Supreme Court reverses Roe versus Wade. Is this an early indication of that?

STONESTREET: Absolutely. And so is California sanctuary city for abortion, you know, you know, legislative push, which I don't know the status of that off the top of my head, but yeah, I mean, we're just gonna see this state by state by state by state. We've already seen and even prior to this, obviously, any sort of restrictions to Roe v. Wade, that have been pushed in new and creative ways and you know, obviously, this one, the Dobbs case is the one that we think actually will gut Roe in a really substantial way. But I think I mean, I think the most likely outcome of this is not any sort of wholesale protection of unborn life as citizens because, you know, Roe was decided on a terrible definition of viability, and now we're in a new definition of viability. And then viability as a criteria has changed, because now we can look inside the womb and know things about developing fetal development that we've never known before. I wish all that were going to come into play here, but I don't think it is. I think, what's its gonna be is basically, this is a states rights issue. And because of that, there's not some sort of universal magical Penumbra that gives us you know, a right to an abortion. This is going to be a state by state issue.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.