What is an alumna?

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, May 8th. 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 Culture Friday, John Stonestreet is here. He’s President of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. 

John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well John, a long-running cultural debate is now on a collision course with federal law.

The Trump administration this week opened a civil rights investigation into Smith College, that's the women’s college in western Massachusetts. But here is the twist: Smith is not being investigated for excluding women. It's nothing like that. It's being investigated for admitting men—some men, but not other men. 

The issue you've probably guessed by now, is transgender admissions. Smith admitting male students who identify as women and the administration saying that once a women’s college expands the word “woman” to include men, then the legal category becomes a nullity. It just collapses.

So imagine being general counsel for Smith College, John, and you’re facing this inquiry: If a women’s college admits some men, then on what basis does it exclude the rest of men?

How do you deal with that, counselor?

STONESTREET: If I were general counsel for Smith, what I would say is, if you’re at the point of actually putting yourself in a multilayered administrative mess and then complaining because you’ve got to figure it out...I mean, this is all pretty predictable, because reality is still what reality is.

And so if you can rightly claim that it is discrimination not to allow some men, then you have no basis upon which to say then it’s not discrimination when you choose some and not others based on some other random category.

So look, you could see this too in Senate hearing after Senate hearing when folks ask, “Can you define what a woman is?” And the questioner just pretends like it’s a nonsensical question that doesn’t need to be answered or it’s above their pay grade, or you know, all kinds of other ways that they're responding to it. 

Like, this is not a mess that the people who are asking the question made up. This is a fabricated conversation made by those who are confused by these things, and then they complain about having the conversation.

So I guess my advice as an attorney is: you made this bed, you’ve got to sleep in it.

EICHER: Well, you know, one part of the story, John, as The New York Times bravely framed it, was this careful assignment of who wears the black hats who wears the white hat. This sentence was really a beauty: “The inquiry broadens the Trump administration’s bid to limit rights for the nation’s transgender students by targeting school admissions for the first time.”

Now there's a journalistic sentence doing a lot of work, is it not?

STONESTREET: A ton of work. A ton of historical work, a ton of historical revisionist work. So what were all the other previous administrations prior to three or five years ago doing by kinda having these fixed categories?

This is a conversation that was forced on the American people against our will, and now that the conversation has been forced on us, legitimate questions are being asked, and those who forced the conversation don’t want to have it!

That’s kind of the strange math behind all this.

EICHER: You know, John, a few moments ago you mentioned congressional hearings, and I want to bring in another one.

This one involves Congressman Brandon Gill of Texas questioning a witness brought in to defend the pro-abortion position. Congressman Gill did not ask about slogans or legal abstractions; he asked about methods. 

And the exchange really forced a question that abortion rhetoric usually works very hard to avoid (speaking of avoiding conversations): What exactly is happening inside the abortion business? 

Now, a warning: this is a little difficult to listen to, but it should be:

GILL: You’re an advocate for abortion, for abortion policy. What's your favorite type of abortion?

WITNESS: I am an advocate for patients having access to the full realm of reproductive health care.

GILL: But do you have a preferred method of abortion that you, that you like?

WITNESS: I do not.

GILL: I’m going to read through a couple different methods, and I want to get your take on on how much you like these. …How about this one? It’s called the saline injection. It’s when a 20% salt solution is injected through the mother’s abdomen into the baby’s amniotic fluid. The baby’s skin is burned off. The baby ingests the solution and dies of salt poisoning, dehydration, and hemorrhaging of the brain. 

Do you prefer that method?

WITNESS: I would prefer to talk about the subject of the hearing.

GILL: This is the subject of the hearing. This is about protests outside of abortion clinics; I'm asking you about abortion.

WITNESS: I stand by my prior testimony.

GILL: Yeah, I wouldn't want to talk about this either if I were you.

Well John, people complain about performative politicians and grandstanding in congressional hearings, and often with good reason. But this seemed different to me. 

If you're going to use the hearing room to make a point, make this point. Do it this way, right?

STONESTREET: Do it this way, because the conversation was really about a witness basically talking about how morally reprehensible it was for anyone to prevent access to an abortion clinic or to be within even a certain range of it and expressing disagreement as a way of emotionally pressuring—that was something morally beyond the pale. 

And the ability of the abortion issue to obscure the real moral questions has always been a remarkable thing. It would be super interesting in the history of etymology and social conditioning if it weren’t talking about something like dismembering a pre-born child.

Because think about that—that the moral outrage from the witness was about prohibiting access to this clinic while saying that she had no moral comment at all about what was happening in the clinic.

And just the history in this issue, the ability of advocates to basically obscure the horrific nature of surgical abortions is just really an incredible part of this story the whole time. 

And hidden evil flourishes. Evil has to be exposed. And that’s always uncomfortable. It seems like a bad day when it happens, but it’s always a better day when hidden evil is exposed than the day before when it was allowed to remain hidden.

BROWN: Well John, when I was a little girl I played with dolls. My little 17-month-old granddaughter, she plays with dolls. It’s the cutest thing…it’s child’s play. But I am just not sure what to call what I’ve been reading about recently.

Grown women, collecting very life-like baby dolls, which by the way are quite expensive…thousands of dollars….but not only collecting them, participating in some very elaborate role-playing. I'm talking putting the dolls to bed, giving them baths, strapping them into car seats and running errands with them. All of which is recorded and posted to social media.

Is this yet another example of a culture that devalues babies and children? Or, I don't know, should we just chalk it up to an expensive hobby?

STONESTREET: I wish I could do a psychological analysis and be able to answer that question. Because maybe for some it is just an expensive hobby, but what makes an expensive hobby like this even thinkable or plausible or interesting to people, right? 

I mean, obviously dolls have been present across generations and times and places, and you do not have kind of elaborate scenarios like this in which grown women, who in other times and places would themselves be mothering real children, pretend and role play like this.

The only exception I know is a particular community in Japan—it was dying, it was a town that was dying—and there you had a number of older women that had populated their town with dolls like this. Now, you walk into a near ghost town and see a whole bunch of dolls, that's the stuff of a horror movie, that's super creepy. 

But for them it was about missing the noise, it was missing the voice and the cries and the laughs of children. It was missing the presence of it and trying to bring it in, but the reality that was behind it all was a demographic winter that had overtaken that community. 

There are too many other trend-lines here that are connected to our anti-natalist society—our impulses to really only have children if you want them—that puts this in a larger context for me. 

BROWN: Well John, I know you are a sports fan. I want to talk about WORLD Opinions contributor, Ray Hacke's piece on WNBA romances and reporters reporting on them.

So here's the scenario: two WNBA players on the same team go public with their lesbian relationship. At a press conference, a reporter asks one of the players, had she sought advice from other couples in the league?

The PR person immediately shot that question down, sparking a hot-button topic in the sports world. As one outlet put it…

“You drafted a literal power couple to be your backcourt. You cannot market the chemistry for ticket sales and then act shocked when people ask about the drama.”

What do you think?

STONESTREET: Oh well yeah, I mean listen, it’s a marketing technique—except when it’s not.

And the desire here is to use it for marketing purposes, so as long as it's good it's good, and then other than that it's not. This is a unique situation. So this is a problem within the larger WNBA’s as Ray also pointed out, the WNBA also has other problems, namely financial ones.

I guess at some level you look at all of these things and you're like, these aren't bugs of the system, these are features. Like, this is what comes with the package that we've been sold within this. 

And it's a real shame, because the WNBA is undergoing a new day, a new day of talent, a new day of excellence in terms of ability to play the game, and they want to actually shoot that in the foot too by not actually highlighting the players that are bringing the attention to the league.

It's just a lot of strange things going on, I think, which kind of points to an inherently broken system to begin with. 

EICHER: Alright, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

John, thanks, we'll see you next week!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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