Culture Friday: Policy shift begins

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: our weekly conversation with John Stonestreet on Culture Friday … morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

NICK EICHER, HOST: John, I’d like to begin with a consequential executive order by the president this week. This one’s aimed at protecting people under the age of 19 from chemical or surgical transgender procedures. The order frames up the procedures as “chemical and surgical mutilation.” It does several things with the federal agencies. I’ll rattle off a few:

It directs federal agencies to withdraw from guidelines by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health … this is W-PATH. It also mandates a review of medical literature on treatment for gender dysphoria. HHS is tasked with defunding institutions that carry out these procedures, adjusting Medicare and Medicaid policies, and withdrawing previous HHS guidance on so-called gender-affirming care.

In addition to HHS, the Pentagon has a role. DOD is ordered to exclude these procedures from the military healthcare program TRICARE. The Justice Department is given a to-do list as well.

This is thorough, detailed. So … considering the idea of law as moral teacher and as protecting people from harm … do you see this as getting it done … or do you think it’s more of a conversation shaper? (I ask you either/or questions on purpose, because I know you like them.)

STONESTREET: Yeah, the answer is yes. It was a stunning order, my favorite so far, I guess you could say it. But there's a number of things that need to be said.

The first is: At some level, there needs to be recognition of a number of people who started warning people about this at such incredible personal cost. Top of that list has to be Abigail Shrier, mainly because it wasn't her faith that motivated her to do this. She was following the evidence. She was willing to say it out loud and risk her career.

There were others. There were people who just took stands on things like pronouns in college classrooms.

There were people like Ryan Anderson, who put his sizable intellect to paper before anyone else did. He saw how big of an issue that this was going to be.

And you have to note it because they were doing this at a time when it wasn't clear who was going to be “on the right or the wrong side of history”—when that phrase still held sway.

That might be the second thing that I want to talk about.

It's just that myth, that emotionally manipulative talking point about being on the right or wrong side of history, that needs to go into the dustbin of history immediately. Particularly for Christians.

Christians shouldn't pay one bit of attention for a split second about what somebody—particularly from a godless secular perspective—says is on the right or the wrong side of history. Or that the science is settled, or anything like that.

The idea that we got to a point—including many Christians, and including many Christian parents and way too many Christian pastors—where we were literally thinking, “Well, maybe we got this one wrong. Maybe there's something here. Maybe this is like race.” Or all the other ways this was manipulated into the system.

It's over.

There's a lot of people that need to be thanked and there's a lot of people that should be ashamed.

EICHER: I’m going to nominate the media for the latter category, John, but what do you think?

STONESTREET: Yeah, the executive order and the headlines on this executive order carry the whole story.

NBC News, “Trump bans gender-affirming care.” I just want to let NBC News know: It’s not 2022 anymore.

People don't use those phrases anymore—around the world. Let’s say you want to keep up with what's happening in Europe, these enlightened countries we want to be like, they bailed on this a lot sooner than we did.

And the title of the executive order—essentially of protecting children against harm and mutilation—I mean, think about the difference in what this one thing is being called. On one side of the aisle, it's called “care.” The other side of the aisle, it's called “mutilation.”

That brings up life and death by executive order.

There's a whole lot more that needs to be done between now and the next administration. We talked about this a few weeks ago about the executive orders. Specifically, I’m thinking of the one that said that the government was going to recognize people as being only male and female. The challenging part of that is: Can you imagine every four years going back and forth about whether what we're talking about is “mutilation” or “health-care”?

This is the sort of dizziness that reveals how vast and wide a worldview gap can be. How consequential it can be when it is applied to things like government policy and federal law and executive mandates.

That leads to the next thing, which is not only is there work for Congress to do absolutely in backing this up, but there's also work for everyday people to do. We’ve got to figure this out—the state wasn't responsible for this—this absolute explosion among middle school, and adolescent, preadolescent females. They didn't get there overnight.

There has been a cultural devolution that has led to the greatest identity crisis of a particular demographic that we have seen in our lifetimes. I can't figure out for the life of me anything that comes close. And the consequences reached such an extent as to divide the world that dramatically—between calling the same exact thing on one hand “mutilation,” and the same exact thing on the other hand, “care.”

So we have to do the upstream work to do, particularly families and churches to help young people deal with whatever is creating this identity crisis.

BROWN: Young people are not only dealing with an identity crisis, John, apparently they don’t know their history, either. On Monday of this week was the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. But I read a story pointing out that an alarming number of young people in this country think the Holocaust is a myth. How does the culture perpetuate a false and dangerous narrative like this?

STONESTREET: Listen, secularism is, broadly speaking, particularly corrupting when it comes to cultural memory—because history then becomes a tale told only by the winners.

There's nothing true that we can access. You also have to understand, too, that secularism quickly turned into progressivism, which is an ignorance or a dismissal of the past anyway. So that is a really alarming reality that you pointed out, the increasing number of young people that deny that the Holocaust happened. It’s one of the most historically verifiable events ever. Think of the things that we don't question from the past before photography, before mass communication. Yet young people doubt it.

But this is the same group of young people that don't know history at all.

My guess is there's at least some sort of related factor to another story that broke this week, which is the nation's report card on education. Yes, it's always worse than we thought it was. One of the most alarming outcomes was that the vast majority of young people can't understand a word on a page.

As one professor told me this week, “My students were surprised that I expected them to understand what they read.” Now, you add that to the complete revamping of the educational system—away from facts, away from meaning—and then apply that to history. Then everything is how you feel, and of course, how Americans feel by and large duped. We’re skeptical. We're cynical.

I don't know if you saw this, but guess what? The CIA finally admitted that the lab leak theory of the COVID virus is the most likely one. But everybody was called a conspiracy theorist for ever bringing this up. How do you know what up and down is if all you have to go on in this culture is just being a consumer of mass media in all of its various forms?

That's young people. So look, if they're this confused about something as historically verifiable and as historically meaningful, they got it honest.

They got it honest from a broken, hollow, educational system and a vision of both knowledge and of truth, including historical truth, that just permeates everything.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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