Culture Friday: Ideology meets reality

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 20th of June.

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

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I'm Mary Reichard. It's Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He's president of the Colson Center and host of the Break Point Podcast. Good morning to you, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

REICHARD: Well, let's start with that big decision out of the Supreme Court on Wednesday in U.S. versus Skrmetti Tennessee's SB-1. Full title of that is a mouthful… Medical Procedures Performed On Minors Related to Sexual Identity. The law restricted so-called sex transition treatments for minor children, and the High Court upheld that restriction by a vote of six to three liberal justices in dissent. The majority held Tennessee's law passes rational basis scrutiny, as opposed to some heightened level of judicial review.

Rational basis is pretty easy to meet. You just have to state some plausible reason for the law, and you're good to go. Now this ruling does not apply to states that do allow for medical interventions for kids with gender dysphoria. I should add that part, but here's an interesting quote from the opinion, acknowledging that the mere reference to sex in the law does not trigger that higher level of review. And here's the quote, “Such an approach would be especially inappropriate in the medical context, where some treatments and procedures are uniquely bound up in sex.” What do you make of that, John?

STONESTREET: Well, there's a lot to make of this. First of all, it's an incredibly important case having to do with whether or not states can add restrictions to protect minors from this kind of runaway train, or what seemed like just a couple years ago, to be a runaway train of trans ideology. And as you said, and this is important, this is just a law upholding Tennessee's right to place such restrictions in law, it doesn't actually make the procedures illegal.

But there's a lot to take in, not just because of the gravity of the case, but there was a lot of concurring opinions, and there was a lot of dissents. A lot of the justices wanted to write on this and deal with it in different ways, as we've come to expect, for example, from Justice Thomas. Now Chief Justice Roberts, wrote the majority opinion, and that's what passed 6-3.

But Justice Thomas was clear. He wants to use this and invite a whole lot of scrutiny. For example, he wants to bring Bostock back into scrutiny. He thinks it was wrongly decided. He says that in his concurring opinion these treatments that are being promoted by trans activists, puberty blockers and so on are legitimate medications in certain situations that are being used in the case of mental distress, and that's not a legitimate thing, and the FDA hasn't approved that.

So he mentions all that, and says that this isn't about sex discrimination, it's about medical discrimination, which you have to keep in place in order to maintain the integrity of the medical practice. And it's also about age discrimination that we don't want to subject minors to things that they can't actually consent to. And this falls under that category.

Now that was the main concern of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that really this doesn't fall under requirements of heightened scrutiny or anything like that. But Roberts went further. He went further and talked about how WPATH was an illegitimate organization. He didn't quite say it like that, but he all but said it that way. He went in and referred to the so-called “experts.” In other words, people that have propped themselves up prematurely as experts on this issue to promote this sort of medication. And he said, just because they claim to be experts doesn't mean they are. Now, again, I may be making a little edgier than he did, but it was pretty edgy.

He talked about the medical risks of using these medications for things that they're not legitimately suited for. So for example, early onset puberty or things like that. That's where these medications come in, but to use them when those medical conditions don't exist and what you're dealing with is mental distress is completely illegitimate, and he points that out. And by the way, it seemed to me that he was pointing out that the Bostock decision … and again, I took this in quickly, so I may be, I may be overstating this one. But the Bostock decision, which had to do with employment discrimination for transgender individuals. And you might remember Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in that one. He basically said it was wrongly decided and needed to be reconsidered because it created a big mess. And on this program, when we talked about that decision, we said it was a big mess and it was going to create a lot more problems downstream that was going to have to be adjudicated. That seems to me to be what Justice Thomas now is repeating and calling for.

So I think this is first of all a wonderful decision. It acknowledges how different the situation is now just two years or so. After all, this was brought to the court in terms of public opinion, in terms of what's happening in Europe, by the way, Justice Thomas mentions that in his concurring opinion. This is a loaded thing. It's a long read, but it's worth the read. Especially, I would say justice Thomas's concurring opinion, although you got to read the majority opinion to know really where he's going at.

Again, they're dealing here … Justice Roberts wanted to deal with a legal technicality that this doesn't meet the criteria for heightened scrutiny under sex discrimination. This is about age discrimination and employment discrimination, so Tennessee has a right to uphold this law. But Thomas took it further, and he acknowledges that there's been a whole mess created here, and he blames it on the so-called experts of the transgender movement, which self proclaimed and crowned themselves medical experts when they did not have it. And it's clear now that they did not have that medical expertise. Again, Thomas is writing some gargantuan concurring opinions, and this is one of them.

BROWN: Making a hard turn here, John. The Pew Research Center released its latest report on religious change around the globe. Here's the headline, “Christianity remains the world's largest religion, but it's declining globally.” Now, what's interesting to me is Iran, the striking exception. As I understand it, the underground church in Iran is one of the fastest growing in the world. That's due to the courageous efforts of believers distributing Bibles, sharing the gospel, but it's at a high cost. According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a non-partisan, nonprofit, over the last year, violent arrests, interrogations and long prison sentences have increased six fold for the evangelical Christian community in Iran. In light of that, John, how should we Christians here in the West be thinking about what's happening between Israel and Iran right now?

STONESTREET: Well, there's a lot obviously to this story, including just geopolitical realities. There's something just amazing about such a small country like Israel able to so successfully defend itself on multiple fronts. And there's been a line that's been crossed, and certainly, unlike some other Western administrations, Israel tends to not take the crossing of those red lines lightly, and it has an incredible amount of intelligence and military capacity. This news that you're talking about in terms of the persecution directed at the church in Iran is just part of the headlines now for a decade or more, where every year is worse for Christian persecution than the year before, We heard just this week of 100 or so Christians that were slaughtered in Nigeria, again by a Fulani herdsman, who have tended to be the chief perpetrators of crimes and evils against Christians there. It's spreading through more of Nigeria. What do these things have in common? Islam.

If you look at the list of the greatest violators of human rights and the greatest violators of religious freedom and religious minority groups, it is Islam or atheism. In other words, you actually have a communist dictatorship or you have Islam. Now, what does that have in common? Views about God, and that's why we continue to say worldview matters. And when you look at these problems and these tragedies and these evils through the lens of purely geopolitical lenses, or, you know, economic lenses, you know, as as the Marxists do, or, you know, as secularists do, they look for, you know, some kind of land disputes. I mean, certainly those things factor into it.

But at the end of the day, you know Islam, when it is committed to the fundamental tenets of Islam and it takes the form of state power, they will not have any other gods. And not only that, but they specifically identify Jews and Christians as being the greatest violators and the greatest blasphemers and heretics, and that comes with the death penalty. And so it's just not surprising, unfortunately, that when Muslims live out their worldview and when it has the power of the state behind it, then you get this sort of thing.

The other topic here, of course, has to do with how God uses religious persecution to grow his church. And historically, that's been the case. Not always, I mean, we need to be really clear there's a kind of a narrative that doesn't quite take into consideration all the data. Persecution always grows the church. There's been times in history where persecution, particularly in specific times and places, has shrunk the church, but it purifies it according to Scripture. And so we know ultimately that God is sovereign over these things, and yet we still pray in this fallen world, and in this fallen context, when you have this kind of example of how how bad the fall actually is on the human condition and the sort of tragedy they can actually bring, then we pray with them: “Come quickly, Lord Jesus and make these wrongs right.”

REICHARD: John Stonestreet, president of the Coulson center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks so much, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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