Culture Friday: Norman Lear televised the change he wanted to see

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 8th of December, 2023.

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

NICK EICHDR, HOST: And I'm Nick Eicher. It's Culture Friday. Joining us now is author and speaker Katie McCoy. Katie, good morning!

KATIE MCCOY: Hey, good morning.

EICHER: Well, the man who introduced political commentary into primetime sitcoms has died Norman Lear at 101 years old. He's probably best known for the hit show All in the Family that featured the conservative that only a liberal could create: the fictional character, Archie Bunker. I doubt you could exaggerate Norman Lear's influence on the TV industry. But if you think you can, well consider this: next Wednesday night, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and the CW, all planned air and in memoriam message honoring Lear at 8pm Eastern at the start of television's prime time. All those over the air networks at the same time.

Of course, television today is much edgier than anything that Norman Lear ever produced. But it was a different time in which he did it. Maybe the biggest difference from that time to today is how widely Lear reached American culture. Because there were just so few choices available. In the 70s, when All in the Family ruled the airwaves, it was just airwaves, more or less a captive audience. Imagine the shock though, after a decade of highly popular liberal television, Ronald Reagan was elected president and the so-called religious right was on the rise. So Lear responded to that by taking his millions in earnings, and starting a political action committee of his own called People for the American Way which does exist to this day. But politics, it can be very temporary, but it's culture that endures. He may not have made a huge mark on politics, per se, but he did change the culture and Katie, you are way too young to have experienced this yourself. But you know, Norman Lear was really a historic figure.

MCCOY: He was a Titan and a legend in American television entertainment and your point Nick brings up an important principle that we see at work even today, that entertainment and, more broadly, the arts is one of the vehicles of significant cultural change. And significant cultural change leads to different attitudes in the public about certain ideas or beliefs or practices. And one of the big examples of that in Norman Lear's career was the show Maude. In Maude season one, this is 1972, the main character Maude has an abortion and it is a two episode, I believe, part of the season, pretty bold, not only to do that for primetime television, but season one, and the show kept getting renewed. But what's most significant about that is that was in '72, Roe passed in '73. And you see, combine that with other initiatives in culture to change public perception of a particular idea. Now if someone is watching Maude, perhaps they had a view of abortion that was abstract, that it was somehow distant and removed, but here they come to love this character and they identify with this character and all of a sudden they're understanding the logic behind why a character might want to get an abortion. It's one of the many ways that television, entertainment, the arts, shapes culture, shapes conversations, and it's also one of the many reasons that we cannot retreat from it as Christians.

BROWN: Well, let’s move to an extremely difficult, extremely serious subject … having to do with what we’re learning about what happened in the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel … just the extent of the barbarity.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had this to say:

NETANYAHU: I say to the women's rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you've heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation, where are you, I expect all civilized leaders, governments, nations, to speak up against these atrocities.

So, where are they?

MCCOY: So earlier this week there was a meeting, it was a UN special session, in which representatives of Israel brought in different people to speak, among them, Sheryl Sandberg. And they also brought in officials from Israel to talk about what they witnessed, and the types of violence and sexual crimes that they saw. It is absolutely horrific. It's almost too graphic to even say in a venue like this. But these are just unspeakable horrors that Israeli women endured - sexual violence, mutilation. And this was women and girls of all ages. And one of the people who was speaking very passionately against this was Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York, and she called it evil. And I was so glad to hear her put it in those terms, that there's just no other word for it. It is simply evil, and it is the type of evil that can only be explained by a demonic hatred.

But here's the thing that is even more alarming as we are learning more and more about this is just how silent different organizations have been in decrying the sexual violence against women and girls in Israel. Organizations that ostensibly exist to combat violence against women and girls or violations of human rights - and I'm talking organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, I think they finally caved to pressure and released a statement earlier this week. Emily's List, the Women's March, these are groups that claim to champion what is in the best interest of women. But whenever it comes to Israeli women, even though there can be no doubt of what occurred, these organizations can't doubt it, but they just disregard it.

EICHER: Well, I'm seeing this more and more Katie. So it doesn't surprise me so much. It used to surprise me. It doesn't now, but what do you think accounts for this?

MCCOY: You know, this is something that we're seeing in real time, so we're seeing the fruit of different ideas play out. There was a conservative commentator who said that America is looking more and more like 1930s Germany. Now in 1930s Germany, the Nazis hated Jews because they were considered not white enough. Among the American left, there is a hatred of Jews because they are considered too white. And in both of those systems is a moral framework determined exclusively by hierarchies of power. There are people scratching their heads, saying, why is it that anti-semitism has gone from the far right fascist populist movement of the Nazis, and now we're seeing it in the far left, these halls of elite academia? And they have something in common: when you take away absolute moral principles, when you take away absolute transcendent truth to guide whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, the only thing that you are left with is power. It's how the Nazis did it when they co-opted Nietzsche in the Ubermensch, and it is how the far left is doing it using the legal theory of intersectionality as a social theory, writ large. Everything that we're seeing is about concepts like hierarchies of oppression, and who is the victim and who is the oppressor. And the reason there is this uprising, really eruption of anti-semitism is because Jews are considered white, and Palestinians are non-white, and in the hierarchy of oppression, that makes Jews automatically the oppressor.

EICHER: You mentioned Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, she's a liberal Democrat. And she did risk the ire of the progressive left by speaking out on this. And I guess sometimes it just takes one.

MCCOY: It did. In fact, it wasn't just Senator Gillibrand. It was also Hillary Clinton, who gave a very impassioned address as well. And so these are women from the ideological left. But on the other side of the political aisle, there have been plenty of people on the right decrying anti-semitism. A day after that UN special session, you had the congressional testimony and hearing of three different Ivy League presidents, interestingly, all of them women, and none of them could say conclusively whether a call for genocide would constitute a violation of the Student Code of Conduct. And once again, we just saw these ideas on display in the name of freedom, in the name of individual liberty, even in the name of free speech. So what we are seeing is the outflow, the results of being a people who are free, but not moral.

BROWN: Katie before we let you go, I’d like to get your take on a recent agreement between the Portland, Oregon, school district and its teacher union.

What this bargaining agreement does is it allows Portland teachers to take gender identity and race into account before disciplining students. So, when a student engages in continuous disruptive behavior, school officials have to develop a support plan for the student that has to take into consideration the impact of issues related to the student’s trauma, race, gender identity/presentation, sexual orientation and something called restorative justice as appropriate for the student.

How could this possibly be helpful to students?

MCCOY: With the exception of trauma, and I don't want to discount whether they're talking about a student who has endured some type of personal harm, all of those other aspects are demographic aspects of a person's identity. And so when I hear this, I think a couple of things. First, it's kind of robbing the student of personal agency, because instead of seeing this student as an individual with perhaps behavioral needs, things happening at home that are affecting school performance, you are assessing the student according to his or her demographic combination. And it really is just perpetuating this idea of victimhood, that people are victims of not only their circumstances, but their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, whatever category you want to fill in the blank, and that therefore, they're not responsible for their behavior. Well, those ideas just get perpetuated into adulthood and the shirking of responsibility or someone not considering themselves responsible for their behavior because of their background or their demographic, etc.

But you know, there was something really missing from that list, Myrna, and it's really important. One of the major factors of disruptive behavior for children in school is fatherlessness. Eighty-five percent of disruptive children in school come from fatherless homes. And so if this school board truly wanted to advocate for children, they would be taking into account things like the family structure, whether this child is in a stable two parent home. And society at large would be talking about these issues as well, rather than reducing people to combinations of victim status, talk about the need for children to grow up in stable two parent homes with a father and a mother. Every child is worthy of that, every child deserves that, and every child is benefited from that - not only in school, but in future life success.

BROWN: Author and speaker Katie McCoy. Her most-recent book is To Be A Woman. Thanks, Katie!

MCCOY: Always good to be with you.

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