The World and Everything in It: September 13, 2022

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Parents are fighting back against explicit material in school libraries. But sometimes the lines aren’t so clear.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today the legacy of the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Plus Caleb Bailey is back with more pro-life answers to pro-choice arguments.

And what you can learn from a stroll on the beach.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, September 13th. 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: Now news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Biden moon shot » President Biden, speaking from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston Monday recalled the words of President Kennedy.

SOUND: On this day in 1962, he spoke about America’s possibilities.

Just as President Kennedy asked Americans to rally behind the race to the moon, Biden renewed his calls for Americans to unite around a new mission …

BIDEN: To end cancer as we know it, and even cure cancers once and for all! (applause)

Biden spoke of a new federally backed study that seeks evidence for using blood tests to screen against multiple cancers. That could be a major tool for early detection.

The president’s cancer moonshot aims to cut deaths from cancer by at least 50 percent in the next 25 years.

Brain cancer claimed the life of Biden’s son Beau in 2015.

Ukraine advance » Blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags fluttered over newly liberated towns on Monday. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown has more.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: The Ukrainian military freed more than 20 settlements in 24 hours.

It’s part of a major counteroffensive that has seen Kyiv’s forces advance all the way to the Russian border in parts of Ukraine’s northeast.

And over the past week, they have liberated territories that took Russia months to capture.

There were reports of chaos as Russian troops retreated, leaving heavy equipment and weapons behind.

Video taken by the Ukrainian military showed soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag over battle-damaged buildings. In one scene, a fighter wiped his boots on a Russian flag on the ground.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

WHO Ukraine health » The head of the World Health Organization on Monday pointed to the unseen suffering in Ukraine amid the war.

Director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus told an audience at a WHO summit in Israel…

GHEBREYESUS: The Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine is having a devastating impact on the physical and mental health of Ukraine’s people with consequences that will reverberate for many years to come.

He said that includes an increase in COVID-19 cases and that hospitals could reach capacity next month.

He also predicted oxygen shortages in Ukraine “because major supply sources are in [Russian] occupied parts of the country.”

Queen to lie in state » AUDIO: [Trumpet]

Sounds from St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland on Monday as thousands paid respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Her flag-draped coffin arrives in London today where it will rest overnight at Buckingham Palace.

A formal procession will then carry it to London’s 11th-century Westminster Hall where she will lie in state beginning tomorrow.

King addresses parliament for first time » Meantime, at the Palace of Westminster, King Charles III addressed Parliament for the first time as king.

CHARLES: My lords and members of the House of Commons, we gather today in remembrance of the remarkable span of the queen’s dedicated service to her nations and peoples.

He again vowed to follow what he called the “inspiring example” of the late queen.

Charles praised lawmakers for upholding longstanding democratic traditions and declared that—his words—"Parliament is the living and breathing instrument of our democracy.”

Bezos rocket fails » AUDIO: T-minus 10, 9 ... 

A rocket owned by the Jeff Bezos-founded space company Blue Origin blasted off from West Texas on Monday.

The rocket soared into clear blue skies, but roughly a minute later something went wrong.

Bright yellow flames shot out from around the single engine at the bottom. The capsule’s emergency launch abort system immediately kicked in. A commentator for the launch is heard here, moments after the crew capsule ejected from the rocket.

AUDIO: It appears we have experienced an anomaly in today’s flight. This was unplanned and we don’t have any details yet.

The rocket crashed back to Earth, but the capsule carrying experiments parachuted to safety.

No one was aboard the Blue Origin flight, which used the same kind of rocket as the one that sends paying customers to the edge of space.

The rockets are now grounded pending an investigation.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: parents fighting against problematic reading material in school libraries.

Plus, answers to pro-life attacks and accusations.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 13th of September, 2022.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: the debate over what’s appropriate in local libraries.

The American Library Association says that in 2021 parents and patrons requested the removal of more than fifteen-hundred books from libraries, universities, and K-12 schools. That number is up from less than 600 just before Covid school lockdowns became widespread.

REICHARD: With more learning at home, many parents became more aware of their children’s education and school resources and they spoke up. But some caution these efforts could backfire. WORLD’s Lauren Dunn reports.

BEST: I have three children. They're going into – they just started ninth grade, kindergarten and first grade. And they go to the same district that I graduated from. I first went to a school board meeting in May of 2021, and it was due to the COVID mandates in New York state where we live.

LAUREN DUNN, REPORTER: After a failed bid for a school board seat this spring in Erie County, N.Y., Jackie Best started a Moms for Liberty chapter. Over the summer, she got a message from a mother of a child in the same class as Best’s rising freshman. The mom asked if she had looked into any of the books on the reading list for a summer assignment.

BEST: She had started to look into them and noticed that quite a few of them had explicit content. And so she started to send me pictures, she went to Barnes and Noble and just started picking up the books and leafing through them. And we discovered multiple books with explicit content.

Best was shocked at the graphic sexual passages in several of the books. She mentioned books like “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” which has landed on the American Library Association’s top 10 list of most commonly banned books several times. It includes homosexuality, offensive language, and sexually explicit content, to name a few. Best emailed her son’s teacher, and then the principal and superintendent. The school offered to let her son complete the assignment with any book of his choice, but didn’t see a need to change the list.

Best and her friend are not alone. Parents across the country have questioned school leaders about the books available to their children.

Tiffany Justice is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty.

JUSTICE: This really came from our chapters who had become aware that there were certain books that were in public school libraries that they were very concerned about. I'll be honest with you, I was shocked when I saw some of the books that were on these public school libraries, extreme explicit sexual material and sexual violence in these books that elementary, middle and high school students had access to.

Some parents brought their book-related concerns to school board meetings. Justice says that many of those parents were labeled “book banners” for speaking up.

JUSTICE: They wanted to read excerpts from the books that the school districts were totally ignoring were in these libraries, [and] their mics were shut off. They were told that the content was too obscene, that it couldn't be read aloud at a public meeting. And the hypocrisy of that was just too much for parents to bear: the idea that we couldn't post it on social media, we couldn't speak about it at a school board meeting openly, but that somehow adults were okay with those books being on library shelves that our children could stumble across was unacceptable.

Justice says that Moms for Liberty encourages members with book concerns to compare the books to their states’ obscenity laws. She says sometimes, the content is severe enough that the books should be removed completely.

JUSTICE: Internet access in public schools is curtailed. Children do not have access to every internet website that exists on the World Wide Web. And somehow that doesn't seem to be considered banning.

But this isn’t the first time books have been reconsidered. And conservative parents aren’t the first to call for books to be tossed. Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” faced censure even in the 1880s, just a year after its publication. During and after the racial tensions of 2020, more schools challenged Huck Finn along with “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee.

Will Creeley is the legal director at FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

CREELEY: There are issues on both sides that the other side would be all too happy to remove those kinds of questions entirely from the access of minors, and you gotta be careful, because it is a, you know, to use the classic lawyer example, it is indeed a slippery slope. What is good for the goose will eventually be good for the gander, too.

Just last month, and only days before school started, a school district in Keller, Texas, pulled all challenged books off library shelves while they undergo a review. Among the removed books? The Bible.

When it comes to curriculum, Creeley says case law has asserted for decades that local school boards have considerable power over curriculum. Within bounds, school board members can decide what books are included. But curriculum choices aren’t the same as library options.

CREELEY: The Supreme Court says that school libraries are a different deal, because there the search for information initiated by the student is voluntary. It's not mandatory, it's not top down. The teacher doesn't say you're going to read these and report back. At this point, it's the student entering into the library and finding what he or she might like to read on their own.

Creeley says that if a school board has a policy or procedure for determining whether or not a book is allowed in the school library, then it is likely constitutional for them to remove books by following that procedure. But if school board members are simply removing books in a partisan way, that’s where problems pop up.

Back in New York, procedure is exactly what Jackie Best is trying to follow. She says her children’s school district has not agreed to change anything about recommended books in student reading lists, or even add parental advisory stickers or opt-in forms.

BEST: But this is one thing that seems to really, you know, strike a chord with many parents. Even if you don't agree with a lot of the other things that we fight for, this seems to be something that most parents feel that there should be more of a parental conversation going on.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lauren Dunn.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Up next on The World and Everything in It: a new monarch in Britain.

For 70 years, the people of the United Kingdom saw wars and pandemics, the formation of the European Union and Britain’s exit from it, as well as 15 different prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss.

NICK EICHER, HOST: The one constant through it all, Queen Elizabeth II. Her passing marks the end of a consequential era.

Of course, the nation now has a new monarch with a lot to live up to.

Here to help us understand the king’s role in modern England and beyond is Robert Hazell. He is a professor of Government and the Constitution at University College London.

REICHARD: Professor, good morning!

ROBERT HAZELL, GUEST: Good morning. 

REICHARD: For those of us in the U.S. not terribly familiar with the role of the sovereign, help us understand what it means to be king in modern England. What is his constitutional role and what are his limitations?

HAZELL: The king is our head of state, but it’s a purely ceremonial role, so the king has no effective political power. And in that respect, he's just like the other monarchs around Western Europe. We're not the only monarchy in Europe. There are seven others in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Spain. So it's a perfectly common arrangement in European countries to be a hereditary monarchy, but also to be a thriving modern democracy. There's no incompatibility between those two things because the monarch, nowadays, has no political power.

REICHARD: Beyond just what the constitution spells out, what else is in the king’s job description?

HAZELL: The king has all the normal responsibilities of a head of state, and it is actually a busy workload. So the king formally makes all senior public appointments of all our senior judges, of senior politicians, he appoints all the Secretaries of State in the cabinet and the other ministers, and he appoints the prime minister. And he summons and dissolves Parliament and every year at the State Opening of Parliament, he opens the new parliamentary session. He gives royal assent to laws passed by Parliament. So he does all those things in exactly the same way as the other constitutional monarchs in other European democracies.

REICHARD: Is the king permitted to weigh in on policy or is he expected to stay above the fray when it comes to politics?

HAZELL: The King remains above the political fray. He has a weekly audience with the Prime Minister and if he has any concerns about government policy questions, that is the occasion when those can be expressed. But that weekly audience is completely confidential. It never leaks because there are only the two of them in the room, and they respect confidentiality, and no record is kept. So we will never know what the king says each week to the Prime Minister. But that is the one main opportunity that the king might have to influence government policy.

REICHARD: Professor, what do you believe will change and what might King Charles do differently from his mother? And if you could please address this idea of being defender of the faith, please.

HAZELL: He’s clearly going to be different from his mother in that he’s an old man. I can say that. He and I are the same age, both born in 1948. So he's 73. When she came to the throne, she was a glamorous young woman aged 25 and the nation immediately fell in love with her. People don't fall in love with unattractive old men, I can say that being of the same age. He has said that, in the past, that he wants to be remembered as defender of faith. And by that he was signaling he has a genuine interest, not just in the faith that he belongs to, which is the Anglican branch of Christianity, the Church of England. He's interested in other branches of Christianity. He's met the Pope and previous popes. He has a deep interest in Islam and other world religions. So I would expect at his coronation next year that those other faiths will be represented with small walk-on parts. Although the coronation will remain as its core, an Anglican ceremony presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury. And at the core of the liturgy, there will be a Eucharist in which Charles will take a sacrament and sacred oaths. So he is religious, like his mother, but he has a wider interest in other faiths than I think Queen Elizabeth did have.

REICHARD: Help us understand something that may be confusing to some. King Charles is not just the king of the United Kingdom, he’s also the king of Canada and numerous other countries, right?

HAZELL: Yes. King Charles is king of 14 other countries around the world. He's king of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, and half a dozen other small islands in the Pacific and Caribbean, and also of countries in the Pacific, like Papua New Guinea. And those countries are known as the realms and in time, some of them may wish to become republics, as, for example, last year, Barbados did. So the Queen was Queen of Barbados until the end of last year when they changed their laws and became a republic. And the British monarchy has always said if any of these countries in future wish to give up having the British monarch as head of state and to become a republic, we would not dream of standing in their way. So we may see developments of that kind. But in some of those countries, think of Australia or Jamaica, the Constitution is extremely hard to amend. I mean, no doubt, for example, that in Jamaica, where successive prime ministers of both main political parties have said they want to become a republic, it's difficult for them to do so because it requires a two thirds vote in both Houses of Parliament, followed by a referendum. That's a high threshold and it's something, so far, they haven't achieved. So we may hear a lot about countries wishing to become republics. We'll wait to see how many of them succeed. But if they do find it difficult, it's because of their own local, political, or constitutional difficulties. There's no reluctance on the part of the British monarchy to let them go if that's what they want to do.

REICHARD: Robert Hazell is a professor of Government and the Constitution at University College London. Professor, so nice to talk with you. Thank you.

HAZELL: You’re very welcome.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Dogs and delivery drivers are said famously not to get along. You know that.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Yeah, my dog loses it anytime a driver comes near my house!

EICHER: Yep, mine does the same.

But that really ought not be. Here’s exhibit A.

An Amazon driver in Florida was delivering a package when she saw smoke coming from the delivery address. The homeowners were away, so she called 911. First responders showed up and discovered three puppies inside and, of course, rescued them.

But this kind of thing is more common than maybe you think.

Here are two other stories from just this past year. In Georgia, a delivery person saved seven people and several pets as well when she noticed smoke. And in Washington State, a UPS driver saved a drowning girl’s life by giving CPR.

So maybe a little more respect for delivery drivers and a little less barking and growling?

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 13th. Thank you for turning 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: pro-life answers.

This summer after the Dobbs decision of the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade, WORLD Correspondent Caleb Bailey hit the streets of his town to listen to what people were saying. Then he got in touch with Randy Alcorn, who wrote the book “Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” for his response.

REICHARD: Yes, and he created a series on the contemporary arguments which, as you’ll hear, tend to prove the point that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Today: the question of when life begins.

CHRISTINE QUINN: When a woman gets pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her.

CALEB BAILEY, REPORTER: Christine Quinn is a former speaker of the New York City Council. She’s speaking here during a CNN interview in 2019.

QUINN: It’s part of her body and this is about a woman having full agency and control of her body and making decisions about her body and what is part of her body with medical professionals. Those are the facts…

The question of “when life begins” is one of the most common points of contention in the abortion debate.

I went out to the streets of Asheville, North Carolina, to ask everyday people that question.

Interviewee: Once they can live outside the womb probably.

Interviewee: What I would consider it is irrelevant and I don’t think the government should be in the business of it either though.

Interviewee: I think it’s just too gray. There’s too many gray matters you can’t pinpoint one thing because it’s such a personal topic for each woman.

Here’s how Merriam Webster defines life: a state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, and reaction to stimuli. When do those things appear in the womb? When does life actually start?

Dr. Tara Sander Lee has a PhD in Biochemistry from the Medical College of Wisconsin and received post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School.

She currently serves as senior fellow and director of Life Sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a pro-life research organization.

TARA SANDER LEE: The sperm and the egg each have half the number of chromosomes needed to be a human organism when they fuse, that restores the complete number needed to create a human being an organism, a living human being.

So what about those three characteristics of life? The first one, growth, is apparent from the very moment of conception. And it occurs rapidly in utero. In fact, a baby develops 4000 body structures in just the first eight weeks of pregnancy. Adults have 4500 structures.

SANDER LEE: 18 days after fertilization, the embryos heart has appeared by the third week, we already see that three primary sections of the brain are identifiable that's like the forebrain, the midbrain and the hindbrain And we see that their circulation is already developing that by three weeks the early blood cell precursors are appearing.

The second requirement for life is a response to stimuli.

SANDER LEE: You can even see visually, if a baby receives an anesthetic injection, during fetal surgery, you can actually there is a video from a publication that shows you can actually see the baby's face all calm before the fetal injection, and the minute that the baby receives that fuel injection, they start their faces grimacing.

And that brings us to metabolism.

SANDER LEE: If you look at the word metabolism, it actually means that you know, it's defined as the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life. Those structures are in place, those cells are in place to give rise to the tissues very early on, that are going to then further give rise to those organs that are going to help with digestion.

Of course, life is more than these three things, but it’s clear that an embryo in the womb has all these markers. So, abortions don’t just terminate a pregnancy, they terminate a life.

And there are other signs that a baby is alive from conception.

Pro-Life Author Randy Alcorn talks about a woman who stayed with his family for a time. She had gone through multiple abortions. He witnessed the psychological effect abortion has on mothers.

ALCORN: They remember that date, every single year, they don't try to remember it. They just know. Then they do the math. My child would be a first grader this year, my child would be an eighth grader, my child would be in high school, my child be graduating from high school, this spring, my child by now would likely have been married and had children and I would be the grandmother of those children.

These psychological impacts of abortion give evidence to the fact that the unborn baby is not a lifeless blob of tissue. The unborn baby is not a hostile parasite. Meaning it is not part of the woman’s body. He or she is separate and distinct. The unborn baby is a person. With a brain, a heart, a body, and most importantly, a soul.

Filmmaker Tracy Robinson spent most of her life supporting a woman’s choice to have an abortion. But a series of pro-life presentations and fetal images shifted her perspective.

TRACY ROBINSON: not only does life begin at the moment of conception, when the sperm meets the egg, but the fact that our DNA begins at that moment, every unique characteristic and trait, every unique thing about us was formed in that moment, and it just sends chills up your spine, the fact that were the size smaller than a dot, but everything was programmed into that little thing.

Six years later, her documentary The Matter of Life hit movie screens across the globe. In that documentary she interviewed Dr. Anthony Levatino, an OB GYN who had performed multiple abortions. Until he realized that each of those operations took away a life.

ROBINSON: He came to the realization that it doesn't matter if you're this big or this big, or maybe even this big and he's just holding up his fingers. It was always you there's only one you.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Caleb Bailey in Asheville, North Carolina.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 13th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. WORLD commentator Steve West recently took a walk on the beach with his wife and found some unexpected reminders.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: On an evening walk down North Carolina’s Wrightsville Beach, my daughter once reminded me that the shells that crunch under our feet are the remains of dead animals: snails, coral, and the like. The sand itself is what’s left of quartz rocks worn down by wave and wind. Today, children play with the contents of this burial mound under a blue-white sky, with brightly colored buckets and shovels while parents talk or read.

We are often unaware of where we are, of what we live atop, or even who we are-that our lives are built on those who have gone before us, names lost to the depths and ebb and flow of time.

But God sees.

Amid death and decay, there are beautiful certainties that the prophet Jeremiah reminds me of: life like a watered garden, mourning turned into joy, gladness traded for sorrow. And then there’s this promise in Jeremiah 31, verse 8: “And it shall come to pass that as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring harm, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, declares the Lord.”

Pruning. Creative destruction. God plucks out waywardness, dependence on anything but him; rebuilding and replanting us in new patterns, in tilled rows of earth and sky.

In July, my wife and I visited the beach in North Carolina again. As we walked together, the sun setting low ahead of us, my wife spoke up. “I love watching the waves, the tides. It reminds me of the constant love of God for me.” I think about the violence of the waves, the constant wearing away of the shells and grains of sand, the smoothing of the line where land meets sea.

God’s love is no sentimental love, no pandering love, but one that strips away the old to make me new. It’s a relentless love that sometimes takes me through darkness so that I will cling to Him all the more that breaks down even as it builds up.

Oswald Chambers says, “Dark times are allowed and come to us through the sovereignty of God. Are we prepared to let God do what He wants with us? Are we prepared to be separated from the outward, evident blessings of God?” And then he adds, “Until we have been through that experience, our faith is sustained by feelings and by blessings. But once we get there, no matter where God may place us or inner emptiness we experience, we can praise God that all is well.”

Farther down the beach, two women walked toward my wife and me, heads cast down, examining shells. As we neared my wife dropped a translucent green piece of sea glass behind her, a gift for the observant. We passed. Turning back, we saw one woman stop, exclaim, as she spied and scooped up the sea glass.

We walked on, smiling. That’s how it is: even in death, glory; even in worn-down remains, beauty. And surprise at the treasure God brings.

I’m Steve West.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Washington Wednesday and the Iran nuclear talks.

Also, World Tour.

And, we’ll meet a seminary dropout serving God in the ordinary.

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: The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12 ESV)

Go now in grace and peace.

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