Culture Friday: Republicans back off on pro-life

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s the 14th day of April 2023.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I'm Nick Eicher. It's Culture Friday!

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: John, I want to start with pro-life. Since Dobbs and the reversal of Roe versus Wade last summer, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. So far, the unborn are fully protected by law in 13 states. Eight other states have protections that are blocked for one reason or another. There are three states allowing gestational age exceptions, but fairly robust protections, for a total of 24 states.

But everywhere else, it’s pretty much pre-Dobbs status quo or worse. And in one of the pro-life states, that may very well flip, talking about Wisconsin, where pro-abortion activists succeeded in electing a state Supreme Court justice who all but promised to legalize abortion in that state.

So here’s what I’d like to talk about. It feels like Republicans would just as soon duck the abortion issue right now, because they sense the wind is blowing in a pro-abortion direction.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page—which is typically fairly pro-life—was highly critical of the attempt this week to block mifepristone mail-order abortions. Donald Trump refuses to commit to a 15-week nationwide ban, which is the Susan B. Anthony List litmus test for presidential candidates. And Trump, by the way, blamed a firm pro-life position for underperformance in the midterms.

Beyond that, generally, I’m just seeing a lot of chatter from political types on social media that Republicans really need to sidestep pro-life, at least right now.

So, I want to get your sense on this: Is pro-life politically toxic, and even if it is, should pro-lifers take a pragmatic back seat and not harm their Republican friends? How do you see this?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I think when it comes to defending life, it doesn't matter if it's politically toxic or not. You say what's true, and you don't say what's not true, and you continue to do that, because actual lives are at stake. The political pragmatism is a different question, because you have to be able to make incremental steps. And that's, of course, what we have seen on both sides, except in places where it was definitive. I really, though, question this narrative that somehow pro-life was the problem in the midterms. I mean, look, there is as a legitimate an analysis of the midterms that says, you know, the former president was the problem in the midterms, because the candidates that he endorsed, and the candidates that shared his inability to articulate their positions in any rational way, were ones that did not do well. And there were very pro-life candidates that did very well. I think the whole narrative can be read quite differently. And I think there also needs to be, you know, just a better articulation of what it is that the pro-life position holds, and why and you have a media that's going to paint any restrictions on abortion rights, to not only be wrong, but to be actually fascist and dangerous. So it's interesting that in the years prior to the Dobbs decision, or dealing with Roe, there was a culture war over abortion, but as Ryan Anderson, I think, has pointed out helpfully wasn't the same as the culture world for LGBTQ rights, where you're either a good person or a bad person, depending on where you stand. You might be foolish, if you have, you know, views about the unborn or that sort of stuff. But that's not the same thing as being evil. But we're increasingly hearing this critical theory mood, where groups of people are being assigned moral status. And we know who the good guys are and the bad guys are ahead of time, not based on their arguments, but based on which side of an issue they're on. And that's already being applied to the abortion issue. Last thing I'll say is, you know, it's dangerous to be prophetic in this business, particularly, when we're talking about political futures. But if this sort of critical theory mood continues to corrupt the conversation, especially about so-called abortion rights and protecting the unborn, you're going to have an awful lot of pressure put on the Supreme Court as an institution. One can, for example, for see, not only as more and more radical pro-abortion laws are enacted, that actually target pro-lifers as being bad guys and states like is happening in Colorado, but then as you know, kind of the gender movement just hijacks another movement, which is what they're doing now with the abortion regulations that are happening state by state. There are going to be lawsuits filed and those lawsuits are gonna have to be decided by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court is conservative and this is no longer like, oh, we disagree because we're progressive. It's conservative justices are bad people because they are conservative, and that means the institution is in question. And that pressure that those headlines are just going to increase the number and intensify, this is going to be an issue going forward, I think. I think Supreme Court justices lives are going to be in danger, I think there's going to be increased violence threatened. That's the future I foresee is that the pressure on the Supreme Court and Supreme Court justices is going to be incredible.

EICHER: John, you also mentioned LGBT rights, and once again T-rights are in the news. Every single week it seems there’s something on that. The Biden administration this week put out a proposed rule dealing with transgender students and sports. And it’s all, ironically, around Title IX, which is supposed to protect women’s sports, threatening to pull federal funding from schools if they issue blanket bans quote-unquote “targeting” transgender athletes. So they’re on a collision course. You’re headed toward another clash on this issue around women’s sports.

STONESTREET: You are, and you know, the Biden administration here basically managed to anger all sides of this debate, because they did not do a blanket, you know, enforcement of Title IX, to force all schools in all states to comply. And so that wasn't enough. And what they did, essentially, was to, you know, create some kind of loopholes for, you know, the level of competition and whether a team has a cut or non cut team. And, you know, things like that. And all of this reminds me, by the way, strategically, of what happened with civil unions back prior to the same-sex marriage debate, right, where civil unions were advanced, as a way of meeting a middle ground. And then once that middle ground was achieved, the middle ground was used as proof of discrimination against same-sex relationships, like, you know, in other words, if we're good enough to be called civil unions, there's no reason why we shouldn't be called married as well. And can we just be clear that there's not a whole lot of women that are biological girls that are trying to compete in boys sports, it's certainly not a whole bunch of biological women that are trying to make the NBA, you need to understand this. I mean, this is observably, we're only talking about men competing against women. And so what these regulations essentially say is basically schools need to do everything they can to allow that unless there's some level of competition or something like that, that that makes it you know, so it's completely muddy, it's completely befuddled. It's a draws no clear lines here. And it's going to basically allow some people and not others, which is again, that same sort of middle ground that just gives new ground by which to cry discrimination. So I think this is what the Administration believe that it could do. I think they're setting up some sort of case to be tried at a later time at a Supreme Court, probably not this one. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But this is an incremental step to advance this. And we'll have new cries of discrimination based on these kind of really muddy lines that have been drawn by the administration and enforced through Title IX.

EICHER: We don’t have a ton of time here. We talked about two issues where you’ve got a chasm between the people of the country. You’ve got half the states that are pro-life states and half the states that are pro-abortion states. Half the states completely bought in on LGBT questions, half the states resisting. We don’t have much in common anymore, do we?

STONESTREET: We don't have anything in common and, you know, we're talking about the understanding of reality itself, we're talking about, you know, weird associations, like, you know, reproductive rights, including sterilizing someone, I mean, you know, the language is all up in the air, it doesn't make any sense. But it has to do with a vision of the human person that is embraced by one and a vision of the human person that's at least, if not thoughtfully embraced, it underlies the kind of the way we think about things like babies and the way we think about things like men and women, in places that want to preserve, you know, these things that the world has always agreed on, left, right, pagan, Christian, you know, throughout all of history until, you know, just right now. I also think too, and you know, maybe this is a conversation for a different program, probably but somebody needs to do a history of the transgender movement and show how they've never had their own movement. They've never been able to make their own arguments, and pushing narratives that are completely false, like the suicide myth and, and the trans violence myth and the trans genocide myth, and all these things are just observably not true. And, and yet here you have the most effective, at least in terms of the American culture, in changing things socially. That tells you a lot about the people that are being changed, maybe even more than the movement itself. It tells you a lot about the churches that remain silent and the pastors that refuse to talk as if, you know, we can't, you know, speak out on this thing. It just says a lot more, I guess, in my mind about us than it does even about those who are pushing the movement forward.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, It's always great to talk with you, John. We will see you next time.

STONESTREET: All right, sounds good. Thanks so much!

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