Culture Friday: Understanding Women’s History Month

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 1st of March, 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.

Time now for Culture Friday, and joining us is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good morning to you, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Well, John, you may not realize it, but it's Women's History Month, 1st of March. So let me be the first to say Happy Women's History Month to you.

STONESTREET: Well, thanks. I’m a fan of women.

EICHER: To those who celebrate. Yes, yes.

BROWN: But you know, I went around the internet and found all kinds of curious misunderstandings. Here we go: A call to honor trans women during women's history month; another site giving us the first ever black trans woman elected to public office, the first Native American trans woman, etc, etc. There's so much of this that I wonder whether it's worth the effort, because we can't agree on the answer to the question, what is a woman? But for real, are we heroic just to insist on honoring the stories and contributions of XX chromosome persons?

STONESTREET: Well, I think we shouldn’t throw away Women’s History Month just because we live in a cultural moment that strangely doesn’t seem to know what a woman is. And of course, what we have seen then, is the great irony, the tragic irony that in the name of honoring and elevating women, but doing it in such a way to basically subjectivize womanhood to just nothing more than experience. Well, then women’s spaces have been lost, women’s privacy’s have been lost, women’s opportunities have been lost.

And it’s one of the best lines by the way, from Eric Metaxas in the opening of his book, Seven Women, in which he walks through their stories and says, look, a lot of times we talk about women being great, because they act like men. But the idea here is is whether we’re not able to recognize it or not, whether we’re so kind of ideologically blinded or not, whether we’re just denying what is true or not, God created his image, male and female. And so when women are built into reality, we might deny it over and over and over, but when you see it, you know it. And that was what he said, in a sense, at the opening of his book Seven Women. And I’ll give you one more reason it’s worthy is because Christianity was the leading voice in acknowledging the rights, the dignity, the goodness in and of who women are.

You know, this is very different than, you know, various thinkers throughout history who basically said women are, you know, not fully developed men, or women are, you know, lesser than in kind of the human value scale. Of course, Christianity, women are the first to see the risen Jesus. We were just reading in our family the other day about the woman who had the years-long issue with her health and the flow of blood and, and the honor and dignity that Jesus shows her. This is really unparalleled in ancient cultures. And what’s great about it is it’s not this kind of pseudo pro-woman feminism that purports to be pro-woman, but then turns around and actually lays the tracks for ideas that are going to undermine the dignity of women. Jesus is the one who was at creation. Jesus is the one who was there when Adam was put to sleep. Jesus is the one who was there with the Father. And God, you know, pronounced what he made not just good, but very good.

So yeah, we should keep doing—I don’t know if we need to do it this month, we should probably do it more than that, right. But yeah, we shouldn’t give it up just because the world has lost track of what a woman is.

That’s right. I love good thing, “When a man has found a wife, he has found a good thing.” That’s what the Bible says. Right? That’s right. I agree.

BROWN: Well, I’m sure you heard the story of Laken Riley. She’s the 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was murdered, allegedly, by an illegal immigrant. I tell you, the story is such a heartbreak and such an outrage if everything checks out.

But the New York Times did report the alleged perpetrator had in fact been caught and released, presumably for later asylum processing. Evidently, he’d gotten into trouble with the law in New York and in Georgia, where he ended up, but nothing happened until he—and I have to keep saying this—allegedly committed murder.

Now, John, this young lady’s story is going to be Exhibit A on border policy for sure. But is there a way to talk about the tragedy apart from border politics? Are there other issues Christians ought to be concerned about here, or is it right to make this about the border?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, it’s hard, because we don’t want to instrumentalize any life. We don’t want to actually take and basically care about the incredible loss that this family now is experiencing just because it serves a political and ideological goal. And I think that is the danger for those on the right that are using this. At the same time, I mean, look, we talked about this several weeks ago about immigration policy, about the crisis at the southern border, and about how, in the name of tolerance and diversity and acceptance and even to hyper-import kind of Christian language, Biblical language that’s oftentimes thrown into this about welcoming the sojourner and all this sort of stuff, when we take some of these verses, in my opinion, largely out of context as a way of justifying kind of policy initiatives that have basically proven to be ineffective, that in and of itself becomes cruel.

In other words, I remember this great line from the late great philosopher Ron Nash, when he was dealing specifically with charity from a Christian worldview. And he says, you know, “We have to help the poor, not only with our hearts, but with our heads.” And whenever we do policy that impacts real lives, it has to be done with our hearts, and it also has to be done with our heads. And when you have policies that don’t actually acknowledge the fallenness of the human condition, the vulnerabilities of a system that then can be taken advantage of by people with bad intention, and that people do have bad intention, even if they belong to one of these so-called marginalized groups.

See, that’s what’s happened is this critical theory mood has made us essentially put people into categories, and then assume that people are inherently good or inherently evil based on those categories, rather than what we actually know about the human condition. And then when you see that happen on scale, like we see with the crisis at the southern border, and then these sorts of consequences are going to come of that. So I think it’s legitimate to talk about the fact that this is one that shouldn't have happened. It shouldn’t have happened if we had common sense policies. It doesn't mean that even if we did, there wouldn't have been something like this slip through the cracks and a horrible tragedy, evil happens, and you can’t do the kind of the one-to-one transactional view. But at the same time, it is absolutely valid to say that this is a policy born of a wrong understanding of the human condition. And you see the consequences in the real world. Because even if you deny what’s true, we still do have a real world out there, and this is a story of that.

EICHER: Well, John, I was a listener last week, and (*sneeze* God bless you), I resonated with your comments on in vitro fertilization, IVF, right after that monumental decision in the Alabama Supreme Court. And as you know, developments have come in fast and furious. And I’d like to have a follow up with you. But let me first remind the listener today what you said last week talking about the conflict, this ruling called attention to where IVF is concerned, you said, “If you’re saying that this is a child, and therefore these individuals who destroyed it are guilty, you got to do something with the ones who put them in the freezer in the first place.”

And this is exactly what’s making politicians run for the tall grass, run for the hills, whatever you like, and pro-abortion politicians, they are in hot pursuit, because the consistent pro-life view on this, on IVF, is not where you're going to find the political majorities. Even the broad majorities for at least some restrictions on abortion availability, the same folks are not necessarily with you on IVF.

Case in point, by Friday afternoon, you had former President Trump on social media saying we’ve got to carve out IVF. We’ve got to keep that legal. The Republican Party putting out talking points for its candidates warning them, make sure you say we’re in favor of a fix for IVF. And then the Democrats, they’re coming back and saying, “Just a minute, you want to protect life at conception, you want to overturn Roe v. Wade. This is the logical conclusion. If you want to protect IVF you got to bring back Roe.”

Now all of this is to say there’s a lot of educational work, a lot of persuasion still to do here for the pro life movement, because it’s way out of step with public opinion. And we’re hearing that.

STONESTREET: No, and of course that shouldn't surprise us whenever we find ourselves against public opinion in a culture like ours that has detached from God, detached from morality, detached from kind of the only source for human dignity, in which sex and marriage and childbirth are really treated as activities of adult happiness, as opposed to anything kind of inherently connected to the way God designed and purposed us as individuals. Now look, there are ways to create embryos to in vitro fertilization that do not lead to “excess embryos.” But let's just stop for a second and say, we now use the phrase “excess embryos.” Can you imagine using the phrase excess toddlers, within a family, so we have to do something about them? The fact of the matter is what the judge has said is that these embryos have to count as people. This has created a conflict in the law, and it has revealed the conflict that is at the heart of conservative politics when it comes to abortion. But you know, look, Nick, you know, we’re all wondering — anybody that is paying close attention, including with President Trump running for office and others — we’re all wondering, what does it mean, really, that they are pro-life? The policies from President Trump during his first tenure as president, were pro-life. The results were pro life, the protection of preborn lives. That’s good news. He waffled on this almost immediately when it came to the IVF. So the question is, is there a grounds for consistency here? And the fundamental question is not clear for those who have seen this as more of an issue of political expedience than one of principle. As I said, last week, I’m thankful that this conflict is now in the law, and it will have to be dealt with to some degree, right? It’s better than when we pretend like there's not a conflict. This was a decision that’s better than no decision. But it’s going to create some legal issues in Alabama, and hopefully beyond that. We’re going to have to go through it. This cat's out of the bag. To say like, “Well, we we can’t put a stop to it.” I mean, if freezing embryos is like employing prison camps, can you imagine after World War Two, we would just say “Oh, you know, the Japanese internment camps, I know, they may be a bad idea, but let’s go on with them?” No, we’d never say that, right? We're lacking that sort of ethical clarity about that fundamental question. What is it that we are destroying? What is it, the lives that we’re killing?

EICHER: All right, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, thanks. I hope you have a great weekend.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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