The World and Everything in It: May 6, 2025

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Congress targets antisemitism. But can lawmakers draw the line without crossing one.

RAND PAUL: The Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that you can say terrible things. That's unique about our country.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today … when the feds arrest judges, does that cross a line? We talk to constitutional expert Ilya Shapiro.

And later one doctor’s story of what happens when his conscience clashes with the powers that be.

ARMISTEAD: My nurse came to me and she said, Dr. Armistead, I just need to tell you, they're watching you like a hawk.

And football, fatherhood, and the gospel of winning.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, May 6th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: It’s time for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump to meet with Canada PM » President Trump is hosting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney today at the White House. Trump told reporters on Monday …

TRUMP:  I guess he wants to make a deal. Everybody does. They all wanna make a deal because we have something that they all want. 

That something … the president referred to there is open access to the US market.

The meeting is expected to center on trade and tariffs.

This will be their first meeting since the election victory last week of Carney’s Liberal Party of Canada. For his part, the prime minister told reporters:

CARNEY:  It's important to get engaged, uh, immediately, uh, which was al has always been my intention, has always been his intention. I go there with, uh, with the expectation of constructive, uh, difficult.

The two leaders spoke by phone last week after Canada’s election. In the call, the prime minister seemed to set aside the more fiery rhetoric of the campaign season. Trump said of Carney that he “could not have been nicer.”

Trump order on gain of function research » Monday was a busy day for the president. He signed several executive orders … including one aimed at so-called gain of function research. That’s a term many people heard for the first time after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The president remarked as he held the executive order …

TRUMP:  It is a big deal. It could have been that we wouldn't have had the problem we had …

SCHARF: A lot of people say that, sir. 

TRUMP: … if we had this done earlier. Thank you.

Gain-of-function research is when scientists change a virus to make it stronger or more infectious … so they can study how to fight it.

But many experts argue that the risk of a lab-engineered super-virus escaping is too high to justify potential benefits.

White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf:

SCHARF:  Many people believe that gain of function research was one of the key causes of the Covid pandemic.

Monday’s order, among other things … bans federal funding for gain-of-function research in countries with weak oversight—like China.

It also pauses that kind of high-risk research here in the U.S. until new safety rules are developed.

Trump movie tariffs » President Trump on Monday also said he’s looking at slapping a 100% tariff on all foreign-made movies … in an effort to bring more film production back to the U.S.

TRUMP:  Other countries, a lot of them have stolen our movie industry. If they're not willing to make a movie inside the United States, we should have a tariff on movies that come in.

American studios have been filming a growing number of movies overseas to take advantage of lower costs and tax incentives.

And the top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jefferies says … that’s a good thing.

JEFFERIES:  Using the tax code in that way, uh, is actually a positive way to incentivize as much production as possible in the United States of America.

Trump said he planned to meet with studio executives to get their feedback.. The White House says no final decisions have been made regarding movie tariffs.

Self-deportation payout » The Department of Homeland Security is offering to pay illegal immigrants to leave of their free will.

DHS is offering those migrants financial travel assistance, and as soon as they get back to their home countries … a payout of a thousand dollars.

Officials say that leaving voluntarily also leaves the door open for migrants to return legally in the future. But border Czar Tom Homan says by contrast …

HOMAN:  If we have to form to deport you, that puts, that puts mandatory bars against you. Yeah. Even if you, in in other opportunities, you can come back on a student visa, visitor visa and come back the right way.

The Trump administration says this will save taxpayer dollars … explaining that it costs roughly $17,000 to forcibly deport someone … including arrest, detention, and removal.

Israeli strikes Houthis » Israel struck back yesterday in retaliation for a weekend missile attack on an Israeli airport … by the Yemen-based Houthi rebels.

SOUND: [Yemen flames]

Crews heard there battling massive flames pouring from a cement factory in the port city of Hodeida. That after Israeli forces carried out at least six airstrikes in the city.

Those retaliatory strikes came just hours after a leader with the Iran-backed Houthi terror group … vowed more attacks on Israeli airports.

Israeli airstrike against Houthis / Israel-Gaza latest » Israel is also gearing up for a new major offensive in Gaza.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer:

MENCER: This week, Israel is issuing tens of thousands of call-up orders to reservists in order to strengthen and expand our operations in Gaza. Not to occupy, but to expand the military operation.

NETANYAHU: [Speaking Hebrew] 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the operation will be aimed at crushing Hamas … and rescuing the remaining Israeli hostages.

Israel plans to leave a security force in the Gaza Strip indefinitely.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: judges in trouble for interfering with immigration enforcement. Plus, when doctors face hard choices when following their consciences.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 6th of May.

Thank you for listening to The World and Everything in It. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up…Congress clashes over how to define anti-Semitism.

SANDERS: I have an amendment Mr Chairman.

CASSIDY: Senator Sanders we got to get out of here. Senator Sanders your amendment 

MARKEY: Mr Chairman you were commenting upon my amendment …

A Senate business meeting turned into a shouting match last week over a bill called the Antisemitism Awareness Act.

Members of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee spent two hours debating how to curb antisemitic harassment … and how to balance that with free speech.

MARKEY: Mr Chairman, anti-semitism is wrong. Authoritarianism is not the answer. That's what we're debating right now.

REICHARD: Here now is Washington Bureau reporter Carolina Lumetta.

SOUND: [GWU CAMPUS PROTEST]

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Last year college campuses across the country were overrun by pro-Palestinian protests…including George Washington University here in DC. At some Ivy Leagues, activists blocked Jewish students from walking through campus and tagged university property with slogans some consider antisemitic.

Lawmakers in Washington want to prevent that from happening again.

CASSIDY: Let me be clear, There is no nuance in bigotry.

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy is chairman of the committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

CASSIDY: Chasing Jewish students into a room, pounding on the door and threatening them with violence is wrong. That is not free speech.

The Act aims to give civil rights offices in the Education and Justice departments more leeway for prosecuting antisemitism. In the process, it would codify a particular definition, identifying it as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” The definition comes from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, often called IHRA. Back in 2016, the United States and 30 other nations adopted the non-legally binding definition.

Ellie Cohanim served as a deputy envoy to combat antisemitism during the first Trump administration. Now, she is a member of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which is hosted by the Heritage Foundation.

ELLIE COHANIM: The IHRA definition, clearly it has the definition, but underneath it, has examples of when, for example, speech moves from speech to anti-Semitism. When does that cross the line?

The 11 examples listed include not only physical violence but also rhetoric.

ELLIE COHANIM: What the IHRA definition does, clarify is that if, if however, you deny the Jewish people the right to a Jewish Jewish sovereign state, right. That's antisemitism. If you start to compare the IDF with the SS, if you start to compare the state of Israel with the Nazis, that's antisemitism.

Those examples were a sticking point for the Senate markup of the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Every Democrat on the committee, along with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, warned that passage would violate First Amendment rights to free speech.

PAUL: The problem is if you look at the IHRA examples of speech they're going to be limiting on college campuses, everything on that list is politically protected by the First Amendment.

Paul went on to argue that even though he agrees that Jewish students were mistreated during pro-Palestinian protests last year, the Constitution is there to protect even despicable speech.

But the bill’s sponsor, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, says it only applies to action that follows antisemitic speech.

SCOTT: It's if you do something that is a conduct that follows that speech it gives you the link back to whether or not it's anti-semitic or not.

Still, Senator Paul broke ranks and helped the Democrats to pass four additional amendments watering down when the law can be enforced on campus.

PAUL: The Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that you can say terrible things. That's unique about our country.

This is not the first time the act has run into opposition. Although it passed the House last year, several conservative Christians voted against it. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia worried that the act was so broad it could find the New Testament antisemitic. WORLD Opinions Editor Albert Mohler agrees:

MOHLER: It is because of the very subjective nature of the definition that I still have grave concerns about the law.

In a WORLD Opinions article published last year, Mohler used the example of a Christian teaching that Jewish people were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. He says that nuance is required here, which the Antisemitism Awareness Act might not provide.

MOHLER: There are those who say that to blame the Jewish people or the Jews as a category for the crucifixion of Jesus is an act of anti-Semitism. Now, that language, I think, has been misused in an anti-Semitic way. But on the other hand, it is also the language of the Gospel of John. And so we have to contend for biblical language not being inherently anti-Semitic.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told me that the bill ensures that religious expression is not part of the effort to define antisemitism. And the committee adopted an amendment from Senator Cassidy clarifying that. But Mohler says he still has concerns.

MOHLER: I do appreciate Senator Cassidy's proposed amendment, and I know it's presented in good faith, but if you have to put in your legislation that this doesn't violate the Constitution, that's already a problem.

An asterisk at the end of the IHRA definition reads “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” But lawmakers pointed out that the federal government has detained students who wrote critically of Israel but did not participate in protests. Here’s Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia.

KAINE: …Of the 11 examples, four are about anti-semitism about Jews, seven are really about Israel … We should allow people to state tough, tough points of view even if we don't agree with them.

Opposition from Kaine and his colleagues stalled a vote on the bill. Senator Paul left the meeting early…and frustrated. He told me he would have supported the bill if it did not include those 11 examples.

PAUL: If it was just a clean bill that says we're going to uh, you know, police antisemitism, I think that will probably get by. But once we start adding all the other things in there, it, I think, loads up the definition and creates problems.

In the end, the committee ran out of its allotted time to pass the bill and send it to the Senate floor. Chairman Cassidy told me he’ll have to consult with leadership to figure out what to do next.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta in Washington, D.C.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: judges in handcuffs.

Federal agents recently arrested Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan. She faces charges that she helped an illegal immigrant evade arrest… by leading him out of her courtroom through a private door.

The man was in court on domestic abuse charges … although he had been deported during the Obama administration.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: A week earlier, they arrested former New Mexico judge Joel Cano for allegedly harboring an illegal alien and destroying evidence.

These cases are in early stages, but federal policy is clear. Here’s Border Czar Tom Homan at a press briefing that same week:

HOMAN: I’ve said this a thousand times, when you cross that line to impediment, or knowingly harboring, concealing an illegal alien from ICE, you will be prosecuted. Judge or not.

Joining us now is constitutional expert Ilya Shapiro. He is the director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute.

REICHARD: Ilya, good morning. My first question is basic: are judges above the law?

SHAPIRO: Well, judges are not above the law. If a judge, federal or state, murders someone, they can be arrested and prosecuted. There's no immunity from committing any other kind of crimes. The more interesting wrinkle is the federalism wrinkle. So here it's federal officials, federal prosecutors, arresting a state judge. There's a doctrine called “anti-commandeering,” which says that the federal government cannot force states or their officials to enforce federal law. But that's not what's going on here. Here, the allegations are that the Wisconsin judge actively prevented the enforcement of federal law. There were ICE agents ready to arrest someone, and she helped him escape. Again, that has yet to be adjudicated, but those are the allegations in the charge sheet. If that is true, that does seem like interference with federal law enforcement and does not implicate this anti-commandeering principle.

REICHARD: To be clear, it is not unusual for federal agents to arrest people in state courthouses, correct?

SHAPIRO: Yeah, they're constantly looking for people who—criminals who violate both federal and state laws. Often, these are worked out ahead of time between local police and federal law enforcement. Sometimes they're not. And especially when a state disagrees with, say, the immigration enforcement priorities of the federal government, there can be non-cooperation. But again, the federal government can't force a state to enforce its laws, immigration, criminal or otherwise, but it can't impede those federal officers.

REICHARD: Ilya, I’m just curious. When you first hear these kinds of stories, what analysis does your mind go through?

SHAPIRO: Well, I want to know what, what she's actually accused of doing. "State judge arrested for defying immigration officials." If you go by just a headline like that, that's a misleading headline, because at that point you think, oh, what state law is in conflict with federal law? Or what? What are the, what does judge order that the feds are you know, is this a federalism issue? What's going on? But then you read and it's, again, it has nothing to do with any ruling that she's made. And I thought, oh, that's what you want to know. What are the facts?

REICHARD: I saw some headlines that said arresting judges undermines access to justice. And yet in the Wisconsin court, there sat alleged victims of domestic abuse who didn’t get their day in court. And then David Brooks over on PBS said that Judge Dugan’s alleged actions “might be something illegal,” but it also struck him as “something heroic.” Any comment?

SHAPIRO: I've also seen comparisons to hiding Anne Frank. One comparison was made on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I mean, look, you can say that we're pursuing the wrong immigration policies, but if someone is in the country illegally, they can be removed. And so it's, it's not like she was doing something to, you know, protect him from the Gestapo, from getting sent to a concentration camp or something. She has a disagreement over the immigration laws, and that's something to take up with her, you know, Congressman, Senator, things like that. I don't see how it's heroic to undermine the rule of law.

REICHARD: There’s a new executive order from President Trump to compile a list of sanctuary cities. A lot of people may wonder why doesn’t the supremacy clause dictate that federal law wins here? I mean, federal law usually takes precedence over state law.

SHAPIRO: This has come up in the marijuana context. And at this point, I think more than half the states have legalized marijuana for recreational purposes. But not so long ago, there are only a handful. And the question was, I think Colorado was one of the first. And the question was, well, what is the Justice Department going to do? And understandably, they prioritized violent gangs and human trafficking and weapons and things like that over just, you know, simple possession of marijuana, even if it was still federally illegal. And the question was, well, what are the Colorado police supposed to be doing? And the answer is, they don't have to help federal officials in prosecuting marijuana violations, but they cannot get in the middle of it. They can't interfere. 

REICHARD: Alright, so is it accurate to say the sky isn’t falling, despite some of the headlines?

SHAPIRO: I mean, there's, there's been so much legal action, including in the immigration space. And most of the talk of so called constitutional crisis involves the man who was deported to El Salvador, and there's some question about whether he should have been, whether it was a mistake, can it be brought back? You know, that's not a constitutional crisis. That's kind of high stakes poker. And you know the role of federal judges versus with respect to the Foreign Affairs power of the executive branch? This is even more of a nothing burger. You know, the future court will determine whether, indeed, this person, who happens to be a judge obstructed a federal investigation or pursuit of this person who had an immigration arrest warrant out against him, and that's it.

REICHARD: Ilya Shapiro is a constitutional scholar at the Manhattan Institute. Thanks so much, Ilya.

SHAPIRO: Thanks so much. I also write a substack newsletter called Shapiro’s Gavel.

REICHARD: Very good. Thanks again.

WOODY: Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha! Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha!

NICK EICHER, HOST: Yeah, Woody the Woodpecker is cracking up again!

And in Rockport, Massachusetts, life is imitating art.

Apparently there’s a real-life rogue cracking up the side-views on people’s cars.

FAVALORA: We’re dealing with a woodpecker that likes to break mirrors.

Turns out it’s mating season up there … and this Romeo is targeting what he sees as a rival for the lady woodpeckers.

Local man Benjamin Favalora.

FAVALORA: We’ve had close to 25 mirrors in the last 3-4 weeks broken.

When I heard this one … I immediately recalled a Seinfeld episode.

KRAMER: You got a problem with Woody Woodpecker?

GEORGE: Yeah. What is he, some sort of an instigator?

Mm-mm. No problem at all for Barbara Smith. She’s charmed by the renegade Romeo … or at least understands his point of view.

SMITH: And you look at yourself in the mirror and sometimes you do have to peck at that mirror. [laughs] You don’t like what you see!

Nah, this guy’s quite impressed with what he sees. It’s just that he has no time for that kind of self-reflection.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 6th.

Glad you’ve turned to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: medicine, conscience, and one doctor’s stand.

Conscience protections for doctors have existed for decades. But they only work when enforced.

REICHARD: Under the Biden administration, that didn’t happen. Scott Armistead found out the hard way. WORLD’s Addie Offereins spoke with Dr. Armistead and Anna Johansen Brown brings you his story:

SOUND: [URDU GREETINGS]

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: It’s a mild spring day in Richmond, Virginia. Perfect for a game of pickleball. Scott Armistead and a group of four refugee men from Afghanistan meet regularly to play … and talk.

SOUND: [URDU CONVERSATION]

Armistead speaks Urdu fluently. He picked it up on the mission field.

SCOTT ARMISTEAD: When I was in undergrad, I felt called to become a medical missionary, missionary doctor. We ended up going to Pakistan, and were there for 16 years, from 1999 to 2015.

During that time, he gained a lot of experience helping Muslim patients. When he returned to the United States, Armistead took a job teaching second year medical students at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. The school’s family medicine clinic serves low-income patients. Many of them are immigrants and refugees.

Armistead was doing what he loved: teaching medical students and befriending muslim refugees. But he soon realized the U.S. medical field had changed while he was away.

ARMISTEAD: The ideological shift was moving from understanding the patient as an integrated whole to sort of dividing the patient so that the center of the person moved more to the mind and the feelings and the affections than it did to the body.

The way society understood the role of the American physician had also changed.

ARMISTEAD: The language of professionalism had sort of disappeared and the language of ‘provider’ had taken center stage. A professional is someone who has something to profess, something that they actually believe to be good and true. And a provider could be somebody who's just providing a service, almost like a vending machine or somebody giving you a latte at the coffee shop.

That perspective had already crept into Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. Armistead found the new academic medical environment eerily similar to living under blasphemy laws in Pakistan.

ARMISTEAD: Certain conversations are not had, certain things are not questioned. But it was particularly odd because there was all of this talk about diversity and inclusion.

The changes started subtly. In 2019, clinic administrators introduced a new intake form that asked patients to describe their sexual practices in detail and included specific questions about transgender forms of intimacy—all before the patient's first visit.

Armistead knew that would not go over well with the many conservative, Muslim refugees who visited the clinic.

ARMISTEAD: To put it on a general intake form represented a certain understanding. That was just very inappropriate for very conservative cultures.

Shortly after, a group of students affiliated with the Christian Medical and Dental Associations approached Armistead with concerns about a new school policy.

ARMISTEAD: They were telling me that they were being told they needed to introduce themselves with their preferred pronouns and ask the preferred pronouns of the patient.

Armistead approached administrators with another coworker and together they argued the policy change wasn’t culturally competent. That it disrespected the students’ convictions. Administrators told them individual teachers like Armistead could discuss the change with their students.

But one year later, the school declared the clinic transgender friendly.

ARMISTEAD: So what that meant was that we would start seeing patients and giving cross sex hormones and being referring to different departments for reconstructive surgeries, vaginoplasties and that kind of thing. I suggested to the medical director that we talk about it among ourselves, because of the ethical ramifications of doing that and knowing that not everybody was on the same page, not just me, but others. But I was told that there would be no discussion and that it was a priority of the department.

Eventually, the school also began docking the grades of students who failed to ask patients for their preferred pronouns.

It all came to a head for Armistead one day when he was introducing a new group of students to the clinic. As usual, Armistead encouraged the students to reflect on what using someone’s preferred pronouns reveals about our understanding of the body and medicine.

ARMISTEAD: That got me in trouble with a student, at least one student who went to HR and complained about that. A couple months later, I got called to a meeting with the head of the department, and with HR and with my immediate supervisor, and I got accused of harassment and discrimination.

Administrators banned Armistead from working with students for six months, though he could still see patients on his own. But Armistead got the feeling the school was looking for an excuse to get rid of him.

ARMISTEAD: My nurse came to me and she said, Dr. Armistead, I just need to tell you, they're watching you like a hawk. At the end of those six months, there was another meeting called, and I was accused of clinical near misses and sort of irreconcilable relationships among staff, and then I was let go.

Clinical near misses are medical errors that had the potential to cause harm but didn’t.

Armistead is hopeful that under the second Trump administration hospitals and medical schools may be more wary of violating the conscience rights of medical professionals. But he’s worried that without state level change, conscience protections will continue to be at the mercy of whoever occupies the White House and that doctors will continue to leave the field.

ARMISTEAD: It's a stressful time to be in medicine in the United States. Repeated violation of conscience is destructive and contributes to physician burnout.

That’s why Armistead is advocating for a Virginia bill called the Medical Ethics Defense Act. It would give medical workers more legal recourse when their rights are violated.

ARMISTEAD: It didn't make it through the subcommittee just recently. But we realized that these fights often take a long time, so I think the plan is to reintroduce it in the future. And I'm encouraged that in other states this has been passed, and my hope is that in Virginia it will be in the future as well.

He’s determined to keep fighting for other Christian doctors and the next generation who will soon take their place in the workforce.

SOUND: [STUDENT CONVERSATION]

Regular meetings with Christian medical students is a key part of that effort.

On Fridays, Armistead and a group of Christian students meet for a book club to discuss medical ethics. After a recent meeting, they continued that conversation in the car. They were on their way to help an Afghan family move furniture into their new home.

ARMISTEAD: If our system is forming physicians who are not encouraged to follow their convictions and to think deeply about their ethics and to think deeply about issues of virtue, then we are doing a disservice to the public good.

For WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown, with reporting from Addie Offereins.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 6th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Pro-football great Deion Sanders made headlines during the N-F-L draft back in April—but not for what he did as a player or coach. This time, it was his son Shedeur Sanders in the spotlight—and the spotlight moment didn’t quite go as planned.

WORLD Opinions contributor Ted Kluck says there’s a deeper lesson here … especially for over-competitive dads watching from the sidelines.

TED KLUCK: Perhaps the term: “Little League Dad” is a new one for you. Full-disclosure, I was one, and I’m not proud of it. We stand along practice or game-field fences in our sweatsuits and critique what other coaches are doing. We often coach our kids. We often let our own undealt-with hyper-competitiveness lead to sin. And we often let it ruin our kids’ experiences with their various sports. I regret being this way. But there are a lot of us Little League Dads…the highest profile example at present may be NFL great Deion Sanders.

In case you’re not a football fan, let me fill you in. Deion Sanders is arguably the greatest lockdown/cover cornerback in NFL history. He was also a dual-threat offensive player—both as a wide receiver and one of the greatest punt returners of all time. He’s currently the head coach at the University of Colorado—where he coached his quarterback son. He has coached his son Shedeur Sander since his pee-wee football days…making him one of the most prolific and famous Little League Dads of all time.

Let’s start with the good: Deion Sanders clearly loves his son and has been very involved in his son’s life. These are both good things. Sanders has also been very open about his faith in God. However, that openness comes with some…challenges. I’m not questioning his sincerity, but he doesn’t talk about his faith in the same ways that I would talk about my faith. That’s not necessarily bad, but what’s distracting for me—and others—is that he talks about that faith while literally draped in his millions of dollars and clothing emblazoned with his personal brand…that makes things … complicated.

As a recovering little league dad myself, I think there are some things I can also point out that are clearly not good. The Cleveland Browns have not only drafted Shedeur Sanders, they’ve also drafted the circus that will come to town with him. By circus I mean media availability every day around Shedeur’s locker. Media questions to his dad every day when Deion speaks to the media. And an outsized degree of focus/attention on a player who will probably start his career as a backup quarterback. To be fair, this was the selfsame circus that followed the most famous evangelical of my lifetime…Tim Tebow. The question is, is the player worth the circus?

The younger Sanders is a pretty good quarterback, with a pretty good arm, and his speed is average. He was one of the best players on a pretty good Colorado squad where he became famous for two things: throwing touchdown passes to Travis Hunter—the best player in college football—and for waving his gold watch in front of some opposing fans. Behavior a father should have curtailed, not encouraged. Unfortunately, it is a move that became akin to Tebowing. People now sort of hold up their forearms and wave them around as though they’re showing off their own hypothetical gold watches.

Perhaps Deion Sanders has just done what all of us who have Little League Dad tendencies would have done had we all been Hall of Famers with unlimited financial resources. We would have probably used our money and influence to completely mold and shape our sons’ experiences, in ways that wouldn’t have been healthy or edifying for father or son.

Before last month’s draft, the NFL Network aired a commercial dozens of times featuring an overconfident Shedeur Sanders boasting that—in his words—“Draft night will be legendary.” It’s a sad bit of on-the-nose irony. It was legendary, but not in the way he hoped. Shedeur was expected to be picked up in the first round. Turned out he watched from the sidelines as 143 others were picked before him. Perhaps it’s just what Shedeur and Deion Sanders needed…

God is sovereign. God is good. And God works in the lives of His children. And if He’s using these circumstances for the sanctification of His children, these are unqualified goods. Even if they’re hard for Little League Dads.

I’m Ted Kluck.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow … Washington Wednesday. We’ll report on a bipartisan effort to protect people online fighting to remove videos and images that exploit. And, one woman’s story of caring for her husband through long-term illness. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says: “We know that ‘We all possess knowledge.’ But knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God.” —1 Corinthians 8:1-3

Go now in grace and peace.

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