Culture Friday: Societal pressure

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 6th of September, 2024.

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.

It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Alright. Well, let's talk about Donald Trump and pro-lifers, John. Let's do that first.

Several developments since we talked last, beginning with this: Trump infuriated pro-lifers by saying on social media that a second Trump administration would be, his words now, “Great for women and their reproductive rights.” Great for women and their reproductive rights.

Now, we know the euphemism – pro-lifers know what it means. Pro-abortion partisans, they know it too. They cooked it up. But additionally, Trump equivocated, we could say, over a coming ballot initiative in Florida on abortion, then he offered up an in vitro fertilization-free-for-all plan. It's going to open a door to ethics, obviously, but also questions of who will be eligible.

That's all apart from the economic questions, but suffice it to say, Trump appears to be in danger of losing evangelical voters, pro-life voters, over all of this. Is he, do you think, and should he be?

STONESTREET: I think absolutely, he's in danger of losing the pro-life vote, or at least pro-life voters. I think that backpedaling again on his nebulous answer about Florida's Amendment 4 and how he's personally going to vote, coming back and saying he's going to vote against it, that probably saved the day for some, but clearly he's getting some advice that the votes that he's going to gain from, particularly suburban housewives, is going to outdo the votes that he's losing on the pro-life side. And I think, you know, the rest of the pro-life community is really in a pickle in terms of trying to figure this out.

Look, a Trump administration, even if he follows through with all these promises, and I don't think he can, I will be surprised if he actually tries to move forward, for example, with the free IVF. But you know the alternative right now, the full on pro-abortion agenda of Harris and Waltz is the most radical and extreme thing we've ever seen. And so it really does come down to a calculation: is this the time to do a protest vote or not? And I'm not sure when you're really in a kind of a swing state like Pennsylvania, and you're a pro-lifer, and you're looking at this if that's the direction you're going to go.

But I do think that the Trump campaign is dramatically underestimating how committed people are who are pro-life. I think they have misunderstood that somehow this is really about the end of Roe. Now look, America is way better. I don't care what anybody says post-Dobbs, than it was pre-Dobbs. It's a world in which an evil law like Roe v. Wade exists is a worse one.

So Dobbs hasn't been a loser for the pro-life movement. What it's done is exposed where people really are, and the overwhelming cultural mood right now, particularly when it comes to sexuality and sexual freedom, that is basically relativism. It's just a full blown we want relativism. We want the ability to have sexual autonomy for ourselves and for the people in our lives, and that's really what needs to be addressed. A law can't do that. And the pro-lifers that I know are really clear on this.

I was encouraged by the backlash against Trump's position on IVF and Trump's position on an early position on Amendment 4, and that at least caused the backpedaling that we have seen. Because here's the last thing that I'll say, right now is a gamble that's being taken by the GOP. And the gamble is the reason for the GOP losses, the fact that we were too pro-life or too pro-Trump, and a case can be made right now both ways.

So, if your ultimate end, your ultimate goal is to win elections, and they haven't won national elections, or there have been a lot of losses, and the question is, is it because of the abortion issue, or is it because of Trump? And this election is going to be a referendum on that. So, you know, this isn't over by any stretch of the imagination, and it won't be over because of this election.

BROWN: John, interesting story out of Michigan. School officials there are resorting to paying high schoolers, dangling a financial incentive to get them to read on appropriate grade level. This looks a desperation move, the threat of a bad grade doesn’t motivate, and the reward of a good grade isn’t doing it either. Just money.

Do you think this is a good idea or bad idea? Can you think of any unintended consequences?

STONESTREET: Look, this is the definition of trying to stop the bleeding when the problem and the source of the bleeding is so much bigger and so much more fundamental than this. We just reached a point where we're realizing that the way we're doing education in America is failing. It can't be done around the parents. It can't be done at any sort of high level of excellence across the board unless the family is stabilized. And it certainly can't be done when the whole education project and those that are delivering it have been hijacked in their worldview by non-educational goals and an agenda that basically is about DEI in some form or fashion.

So, it might move the needle small, but it kind of reminds me of the, you know, the policies that we've seen across Europe to try to encourage procreation, try to encourage couples to have babies. And as an article said this past week, it's not working. Thinking that this can be accomplished with money assumes that it's a financial problem, but if it's not a financial problem, a financial solution is not actually going to ultimately solve it.

BROWN: John, excellent article in Breakpoint the other day on why the “birds and the bees” talk is just not enough these days.

Clearly, parents have to talk more. They have to talk more frequently. They have to have the talk in broader terms.

Now I am about to get in your business, John, so now’s the time to stop me, but here we go.

My question is how will your talk with your young son, Hunter, be different from the conversations you had with your girls?

STONESTREET: You know, it's not a bad question. It's an okay question. I, you know, I remember with our girls, there was these two moments in particular where I ended up having conversations with them about some of these issues way earlier than I ever expected.

The first was when the real life adaptation of Beauty and the Beast came out from Disney. And you might remember this was kind of a trend where they were taking these classic cartoons and turning them into real life adaptations. And the first one was Cinderella, which was unbelievable. So well done. Beautiful. Great message. And then, of course, Emma Watson was going to be Belle in Beauty and the Beast. They got super excited about it.

And then, of course, they announced a month out that there was going to be a gay moment. And it was such a cheap shot, really, from Disney, and was frustrated about it, but that was time to have a conversation, because they were very much looking forward to that film, and at that point, the scene was so kind of muted that we could have skipped it, and they would have never noticed. But we decided that that was a problem. In other words, to not notice that is really the thing that we were trying to point out. We didn't want things to become normalized in their hearts and in their minds.

And so the other occasion was the Obergefell decision, which, of course, they weren't paying attention to the Supreme Court at age 11 and nine and seven, I think is how old they were, but we knew that that legalization was then going to further normalize things that in their minds and hearts can't be normal. With Hunter, it's far more aggressive. The primary conversations with the girls were about sexual morality.

The primary conversation with Hunter, even already is about identity. What does it mean to be a boy? What does it mean to be a girl? And my daughters sometimes make fun of me because I, you know, some of the stereotypes that I kind of reinforce in his heart and in his mind about, you know, work and play and things like that. And the reason is, is because I said, Look, I told the girls this. I said, you know, even when you were growing up, there was a bunch of cultural norms that we could rely on to reinforce at least that there were boys and there were girls and they weren't the same thing. But in Hunter's life, he's going to be told it every different way from every different voice, that there's not a difference, and he's going to know, and if he's going to know, it's going to be because of us.

So, even after a particular basketball practice when he was five, we had a conversation, because one of his teammates at age five said out loud, well, boys can be girls and girls can be boys. This happened during lay-up lines, which, by the way, lay-up lines for five year olds is absolute chaos, but it actually happened during lay-up lines, and we're like, look, we're going to be really, really clear about this over and over and over, and also have expectations. The expectations are different because you're a boy, my daughters are girls, and we're going to actually act like those things are real categories.

So, that's been our experience, because it used to be like, you know, you got to have the talk, and you got to have it before they're 12, and it's got to be about the mechanics, so that they don't, you know, themselves get into trouble in high school. No, no, no. This is an ongoing conversation that the rest of the culture is having with our kids, non stop from the beginning to the end in almost every expression.

So, our conversation has to be non-stop. One of my mentors has said it is one talk, but it's one talk that never ends. You just continually have this conversation and continually come back to it. You don't let anything slide, and that's the approach that we've taken. We don't let anything slide.

EICHER: Lay-up lines, though, John I, you know, I'm a hockey guy sitting there thinking I can't come up with anything. It's like a it's like a missed lay-up. Well, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson center, and he's host of the breakpoint podcast. It's always great to get together, John, thanks so much. We'll see you next time.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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