← Breakpoint
Breakpoint
The Horrors of October 7; Attempts to Restrict Homeschooling; The Seattle Times Doxes Katy Faust and The White House Pushes IVF Again
01:01:17
Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:02]
A
You're listening to breakpoint this Week where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian Worldview. Today we're going to talk about a new report detailing the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th. We're also going to talk about homeschooling. Whose right is it to educate our kids? We are so glad you're with us this week. Please stick around. Welcome to breakpoint this week from the Colson center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet, president of the Coulson Center. John, we are about two and a half years out from the October 7th attack in Israel. And this week there have been a lot of headlines into more kind of documented research and in some cases likely propaganda into what happened that day. But I want to talk with you specifically about something from a new report from something called the Civil Commission, which is a non governmental entity out of Israel that's been documenting witness statements and other kind of criminal investigative evidence about what happened on October 7 and in the days following. And this is a really shocking report. I think a lot of us were already shocked by what happened that day. There was so much documentation, even by the Hamas terrorists themselves. There were videos circulating online almost immediately after this happened. But this report really details in particular a lot of the sexual violence that, that took place against women and children and men in the aftermath of October 7, including against prisoners who were taken back into Gaza by Hamas after that. It's shocking even to just read kind of reports about the report, if that makes sense. You know, I'm continually surprised and saddened to hear about all of these, you know, the stories of victims and survivors of October 7th. Are you as shocked as I am that people will continue to deny that this happened or try to even justify it?
- [02:04]
B
I mean, that, that I think is the big difference here. And that's what makes this kind of worthy. I mean, this is not something that I would send anyone to go read. It's over the top except for the fact that there is a norm of either denying, downplaying or equivocating of the actions of Hamas that day. And as you said, one of the features of that day is, is we have this documentation in such incredible detail because of witness or survivor reports, because of, you know, random security footage, but in no small part because it was filmed by the perpetrators themselves, posted on social media and celebrated. And we also have some pretty blunt, honest confessions by some of the perpetrators who were or have since been caught. This is what sets it apart. For example, from the commitment that was part of the globalized world or the civilized world after the Holocaust. Now, this is not to the same scale of the Holocaust, but it is to a scale. A few things that we've seen certainly since then and back then there was a real commitment. Never forget, never forget, never forget. We can't go without saying too that this week, and it's hard to imagine that it wasn't at least somewhat specifically timed to try to preempt this report release, although I don't know that people are speculating about that. There's a history from Nick Kristoff of the New York Times of trying to downplay what the terrorists are capable of out of Hamas and what Israel and to downplay certainly the victimhood status of Israel. But this was preempted by a very shocking blog post about the behavior of the IDP and claims that they were guilty of rape. But with that too were a set of under substantiated claims sources that were anonymous sources and not nearly as widespread, certainly not by the perpetrators themselves and included some outlandish claims. I mean, you remember being in Ohio, because I think it was your state, the claims of, you know, immigrants eating dogs during the, you know, the 2024 election season. And immediately we were just told, oh, if you even took that seriously, you're a racist. And, and that's outlandish. And no one would should believe that at all. This is a New York Times claiming that dogs had been trained to commit sexual violence. It's an astonishing claim. It's one that is incredibly hard to make sense of as a real thing. I mean, it should be on its face considered absurd. And then all of a sudden that is completely believable by the newspaper of record. There's just an amazing thing here. And we were talking about this in our editorial committee. When you see this sort of barbarity and certainly pride about the barbarity that comes from those who committed it on October 7, you really can't escape that. There is a demonic level to this. There certainly is a level of barbarity that is not common in the world. And sin is common in the world. The fall is common in the world. But there are sins and there are sins that God hates. There's fallenness and there's a level of fallenness that Romans 1 describes when you literally lose the ability to know reality. And this kind of falls to that level of deception and demonic influence. And of course, it's part and parcel of radical Islam. Lest we forget. And I think we have forgotten, you know, what radical Islam says about particularly Jews, Christians, other infidels, how it has behaved historically in terms of stamping out any dissent. And that worldview really matters, that true believers are capable of incredible things, both in terms of heroism and in terms of evil. And that is. So it matters an awful lot. Not just that you believe, as all the kind of woke tolerant folks told us for the last 20 years, it matters what you believe. And that has an incredible impact on kind of what you do.
- [06:30]
A
I also just think it's worth noting, as painful and gruesome as it is, that there is something unique and uniquely evil about sexual violence. And that a lot of the mainstream narrative still around what happened on October 7th and Israel as a nation, coming from, you know, the segment of the population that does not like Israel, a lot of the narrative around it has been, well, this was, you know, maybe we don't excuse everything, but this was a response to an aggressor or an oppressor or this was an attempt to overthrow a colonizer or whatever that nonsense is. The element of prolonged and documented and videoed and circulated sexual violence, to me, speaks against. Even if you were tempted to embrace the smallest part of that narrative, that would put a little bit of a hole in that theory, because there is something extremely unique, and it's meant to be individually and corporately degrading, humiliating, assertive in a really violent way. To use sexual violence as a tool of war in a case like this. And this report, if we didn't already have enough evidence, just proves that that was an absolutely planned and executed tactic of this effort on October 7th by Hamas. And I guess from my perspective, it just reiterates the fact that sexuality is something so vulnerable and different. It's unlike any other part of the human experience. There's really no analog to it, and there is beauty that comes from that, but it can also be used uniquely as a weapon, and that's really sad.
- [08:29]
B
Well, there's an important point to be made here, too, about connecting with other belief systems. My mentor Bill Brown often said, you may not live what you profess, but you will live what you actually believe. Now, the beliefs of Islam about the infidels that made this a part of the planned attack, and I think that's the other part that came out, is you said that this was actually not something that just happened in the height of the moment, didn't just happen out of the passion. This was a. A planned part of this assault, and it's connected directly to what is taught in radical Islam about what the other is. And women, not just very, very much so. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm just talking in general terms, but it's, it specifically reflects what is thought of about women and Islam. But we also had reports this week of pastors being caught in sexual abuse situations. And although their faith in no way supports that, it absolutely condemns their behavior. It tells you where their belief system had gotten to a point of saying, well, I'm doing ministry and therefore I have a right to dehumanize this person. And there's always a connection between that sexual violence and the dehumanization. In fact, the reports about what the IDF is guilty of now, again, I think many of them are outlandish. I think the timing of it was definitely concocted in order to undermine this, this, this report, which shocked, again, so many. Which tells you how shocking it is, because how many times have we been shocked by these? You know, this is just further confirmation. But it's very possible in the heat of war to dehumanize the other. I think there is a feeling of that, particularly among those that find themselves in the military. To some level, the temptation is to dehumanize the enemy. And so if they're guilty of that, they're guilty of that false thinking. That undermines that as well. But the thing about radical Islam, it's like it's written down. This isn't an innovation. It's not a departure theologically from the essence of what the religion teaches. This is why I'm not ever going to say all cultures are equal, all religions are equal. It's a silly, silly thing to say because there are such stark differences. And when you get to something like radical Islam, both in terms of the teaching of Muhammad and the behavior of Muhammad, which is supposed to be a model for the perfect life lived, and then the interpretations of the hadith and others, I mean, of Islamic teaching, this is. This, again, is not a departure. You know, what do they say? It's a feature, not a bug of the system. And that's what this, I think, is a reminder of. And also that the rest of us, committed as we are in the west to various forms of critical theory, have already decided who the good guys and bad guys are. And we just can't seem to undo that, which is why we have this consistent, I think, downplaying, denying, or equivocating of behavior.
- [11:50]
A
Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, I live in Ohio, and this is a huge, scandalous moment for my state right now. There's this unfolding investigation into alleged, you know, really, really widespread fraud in our Medicaid system. And a lot of it is being attributed in this investigation to the large Somali community that we have here. And you know, I have a friend who worked at a, used to work at a YMCA in a particular community around Columbus that has a lot of Somali families. And she was telling me the other day that she used to regularly, once a week or so would have to call the police because when it was closing time, if it was just her and another female employee at the ymca, they would tell people that they had to leave and the men would just not leave because they do not consider women to be in any sort of credible positions of authority. So they would have to call police and request a male police officer to come and close the ymca. This is obviously an anecdote, but there are intense and significant cultural differences that should inform the way we run our communities. I think in a lot of ways the critical theory, mood that you're mentioning has led us to be naive about those or to pretend that those cultural differences don't occur or aren't relevant to the, you know, the normal day to day workings of a community. But they do play out in things like kind of willfully ignoring alleged fraud if that is the case, or you know, things as simple as, you know, your local neighborhood YMCA that can't really function because women are working there.
- [13:27]
B
Yeah. And in every case, let's just be really clear. I mean, we're not talking about ethnicity, we're talking about culture. And I, you know, was reminded this week of a unique contribution that I think Chuck Colson made to our understanding of culture. At the root of the word culture is certainly the word we get when we talk about cultivate, you know, and if that, you know, makes you think of farming, it should, because that's what we're talking about, cultivating the world. Culture is what humans make of the world. It's not the world. It's what we do with the world. It's the worlds we make of the world. But Chuck would also point out too that at the heart of culture is cult. And by that, this, not that, you know, kind of, you know, the creepy share name dress in burlap and you know, share all your possessions. But, but, but just worship belief, deeply held belief, what you're committed to. And we don't often realize the beliefs that we actually have. We don't really think about our cultures that way because they're just there, it's what's normal to us. We're like the fish that don't know they're wet. But at the heart of all the cultural differences that we've pointed out here, illustrated by the October, this new October 7th report illustrated, you know, obviously you see fraud in many communities perpetrated by many ethnicities. It goes to that question, though. Are we talking about a feature or a bug? Are we talking about something then that is accepted as normal, or are we talking. Talking about something that is rejected? You know, culture changes when the norms change or when culture changes, the norms change. And at the root of that is cult. And, you know, another part of our culture was these kind of coexist bumper stickers that just when you actually talk about true believers becomes less and less and less believable. So, you know, there's other kind of headlines this week of how tolerant the sides are of each other. Another story out of Nigeria, horrific accounts again, the incompatibility of radical Islam and anyone else, Christianity. Yeah, I mean, it is, you know, this time again, it was a targeted of Christianity and then also the limited perspective of Westerners that continues to try to chalk this up to a land dispute or something like that between the Fulani herdsmen and Christians, as if that's what's happening here. Now, at the heart of it is a religious commitment, a religious belief on a much less tragic scale. But also notable, you have lawmakers in blue states that are starting to go after homeschooling again. Right. These are people that can't be tolerated in this behavior. Now, I'm not equating the evil of these two things at all. All I'm saying is, is there is within a framework of belief that this thing, this belief, and at times, especially with radical Islam, this group of people cannot exist. We cannot coexist. So the idea that beliefs can coexist, the idea that, you know, even within some belief systems that certain groups can coexist with other groups, it just doesn't understand the landscape of religion and certainly competing religions.
- [16:51]
A
Yeah. Well, let's talk about that bill that you're talking about. I think you're talking about the one in Delaware real quickly here. Or, sorry, is it Delaware?
- [16:59]
B
I was talking about Connecticut, but who knows? I don't know. However many places it's going. I don't want to blame Delaware for something Connecticut did whenever I.
- [17:05]
A
It was Connecticut and whenever I imagine that part of the country. I'm so sorry to say this, but they just all met, meld together in my brain. They're so small. I don't know which is. Which. Okay, Connecticut. There is a bill there that's awaiting the governor's signature. I don't know the political status of it, if it's likely to be signed or not, but it looks like this was originally put forth to really be a heavy restriction on homeschooling by Democratic lawmakers in that state. It's lost some of its teeth as it's gone through the state legislature from groups like the hslda, the Homeschool Legal Defense association, are concerned. The main component of this bill says that a parent cannot homeschool their child if they or anyone in their household has ever been convicted or accused of or is under investigation for some kind of abuse or neglect. And on first glance, that sounds reasonable, but HSLDA has pointed out that that especially the component saying you could be accused of, that's such a wide net with such vague language that that could be, you know, just about anybody. It could be a person off the street saying something that's not credible and not investigable about somebody down the street, and suddenly that person is blacklisted from homeschooling. So there's some real concerns there.
- [18:22]
B
Well, I think it's on a number of levels. I mean, we live in a kind of a. A time that's radically different than just a decade ago. I mean, a decade ago, we were talking about, like, school choice as a pipe dream. Like, you know, wouldn't it be great one day if our tax dollars could be redirected? And, you know, what we have seen is in a lot of states, that sort of choice has been expanded. That tends to be in red states, not blue states. Although in Colorado, we have a ton of options that we have access to that. In other words, there was a lot of elbow room that was created. There's not a lot of oversight required from the state. The funding doesn't go with us, so we're still underwriting other people's education, those of us that are involved in alternatives. But, you know, there's just a lot of elbow room. I have said for the last year, at least in Colorado, that cannot stand, you know, in terms of a state that believes in its bones that there is a group of people that are wrong and that are evil and that fundamentally children belong to the state and not the parents. You know, there's an ideology behind this, and if you believe that, then this sort of elbow room and freedom cannot stand behind this bill in Connecticut is what's behind a lot of it. And that is a presumption, again, of who's guilty Right. Whose job is it to protect kids in this vision? It is the state's job, not the parents job. Right. Now consider this. There is a presumption of guilt. It reminded me of several years ago in the state of California when there was an attempt to pull back a lot of state funding bills for private colleges there that did not fully get on with the LGBTQ agenda as it was at the time. Now, this was even, I think, before transgenderism really took over. I think this had more to do with like, banning same sex dating or, you know, having, you know, male only or female only dorms and things like that. And there ended up being, I think, a remarkable effort by several leaders of Christian colleges out there to undermine that push to kind of control or to assert control over these institutions. And it's a really cool story, but there was something. Even when the guy who proposed the bill, when he pulled it back, he said, but we're still going to have to do something about the terrible things that are happening at these schools. And you just see this presumption of guilt. So this is what happens. Of course, we have one story of somebody who's off the grid, you know, ideologically captive, either to the right or to the left. And so therefore their kids in school. And therefore it's the problem of homeschooling. Oh, you know what the solution is? State schools. Well, where is all the talk about the fundamental failure of state schools in so many of these areas, of these schools to keep students safe from each other, of schools to protect from predatory adults? I mean, we had two more stories this week of predatory female teachers on teenage boys. And that's an epidemic. We get one of those a week or more. We haven't talked. Part of it is. I don't know how to talk about that on this thing, but we haven't talked about that. But Anthony Bradley has talked about it a little bit on his X feed. But this is common. And, you know, people, Roman Catholic sociologists have looked at this because obviously, and deservedly so, the church came under such attack for how they handle the sexual abuse scandals of a decade or two decades ago and how the perpetrators were not punished, they were moved around and so on. But also, you know, just clarifying, hey, look, when you do the comparison, kids in public schools are far more at risk than they are going to Catholic Church. When you talk about homeschooling, it's not even in the ballpark of close. And you still have, you know, people kind of punching around. Oh, well, you know, they don't they're not, you know, qualified to teach. As if taking 25 pedagogy classes from a woke perspective qualifies someone as a subject matter expert.
- [22:30]
A
But Johnny, you know, so many heads of, you're in at colleges and specifically Christian schools a lot, but you're always talking to students and talking to administrators. Is it not true that if an administrator, I feel like it's an open secret that somebody applies to, you know, a kid applies to university and the university sees that they were homeschooled and they're like, boom, this is going to be the top of the class kid. Like, obviously that's not in every case, but these are some of the best. The cliche is that these are the best educated kids in the country at this point.
- [23:00]
B
Well, listen, you're not hearing, and that's, that's a good point because you are not hearing academic performance reasons from these. You, you hear that on X, you know, that kind of thing that I just said, which is, I'm not qualified to homeschool my kid because I don't have a degree. You hear that from, you don't hear that from educational professionals because the academic performance speaks for themselves. You hear it differently. And of course there's questions about what do we mean by academic standards. But that's a whole nother thing. Academic performance and teachability, seriousness, not having a return to junior high status, you know, playing video games all day and never going to class. I mean, now are you going to find homeschoolers that do that in public schools? In public schools that do well, of course, but the averages just don't speak to that. So what you're hearing is, is that the state's job is to protect kids from parents who are abusive. But it's so selective ideologically. It's clear kind of where this is coming from.
- [24:06]
A
Well, let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week in just a moment.
- [24:14]
C
The Colson center is excited to have Sovereign Private wealth as the Wilberforce sponsor at the Colson center national conference. Sovereign private wealth exists to help people be good stewards of all that has been entrusted to them. We help you develop a values aligned approach to planning, investments and stewardship. Does your financial planning currently reflect your values and deeply held convictions? Did you know when you invest in the stock market, you actually own those companies? At Sovereign Private wealth, we eliminate companies that profit from or support abortion, pornography, addictive lifestyles, slave labor and other human rights abuses, while we embrace companies that contribute to the human flourishing in our world giving you a portfolio of companies you can be proud to own. Your stewardship shapes the world. Find out more@softeverpw.com
- [25:04]
A
we're back on Breakpoint this week. John, I wanna go out west now, away from all those tiny little New England states that I can't keep track of and talk about something that happened in Seattle this past week. I believe it was on Mother's Day. The Seattle Times published a piece about the work of our friend Katie Faust. And we spoke on last week's episode about her new Greater Than campaign, which is really trying to relitigate this issue of so called same sex marriage in the public eye with the rights of, of children at the center of the conversation. And we love that effort. Well, the Seattle Times published a piece about Katie Faust personally and published the church she goes to, I think the neighborhood she lives in, something about the gym that she works out at. It was obviously a very negative piece about Katie and it, for all intents and purposes, doxxed her. I think I knew that this kind of thing was coming. I'm sure Katie did too. Because to have this conversation about to view same sex marriage not as a foregone conclusion. This is a part of our culture that we're never gonna undo and we just have to find our way around it. But to really look at it and say we should reconsider what this has done and is doing to children. And we're starting to get now a few decade or so of data on what this has done to families and children and it's worth talking about it. I think we always knew that restarting that conversation was gonna lead to some pushback. This seems like beyond the pale, certainly in terms of etiquette and ethics, to publish somebody's whereabouts and that kind of thing.
- [26:35]
B
But no, it was wrong and it was a way to intimidate. It was a way to shortcut a debate and actually threaten Katie and the work of them before us and also anyone who would dare to work with her. They knew it would get readership and attention and also action. And it has. There have been follow up threats because of, or follow up risks that have, have increased for violence because of what they exposed in terms of, you know, her neighborhood or church. I mean, just things that would have been unthinkable. I mean, it would have been considered journalistic malpractice if, you know, the proverbial shoe were on the other foot. It was, it was an attempt to intimidate. This is what this reporter was trying to do the Seattle Times should fire this person for that kind of behavior and not. Not listen? This reporter in the paper has every right to say there are people that are trying to challenge Obergefell. This is what they believe and this is why it's crazy. They can say that. They can say that ideologically, which everyone knows the Seattle Times and many newspapers are. But when you actually then put a target on a person by exposing some of these personal details, it's like laying out breadcrumbs.
- [27:59]
A
It's appropriate to name Katie, and I'm sure Katie's totally on board with that. She's very public about this and name her organization and all that. But yeah, where you can find her. Different story for sure.
- [28:11]
B
Well, and it's also in this environment and you know, there may continue to be a denial of this from folks on the social, cultural and political left, left. But I was thinking about this week. There's another story, by the way, that play that happened at the same time this week. Chloe Cole, who is featured in the Truth Rising program, who will join us for the Colson Center National Conference, was headed to a University of Washington, I think Washington state event this week for Turning Point USA and made the decision to cancel it. She said she did not cancel it because there were threats, although there were organized antifa kind of threats, but because the security around the event could not respond to those threats. So she committed very publicly to continue going to campuses and advocating for what's true about people, about male and female in these really hostile environments as long as the security is there. I just, you know, I was asked about this on the World and everything in it and the weekly podcast that I do with World magazine. And I thought to myself, you know, it is interesting that a decade ago the accusations of violence against the right tended to be hate speech. Right? Remember, the words are violence and your hate speech and your increase stochastic terrorism. You're increasing the potential for this. I guarantee you. Chloe did not make that difficult decision to go to the University of Washington because of the threat of people saying bad things or mean things about her. She did not pull that event because of that. The reason that no one will do open air events anymore on the right is not because people are going to have bullhorns shouting, you know, cuss words at them. It is because that there is a very real, consistent threat of violence. And now we also have a track record to speak of one particular aspect of that population which is, you know, directly connected to Chloe's own story and the truth that she's going to share. And that of course are members of the trans community, that, that of course these trans identifying individuals have lots of mental health comorbidities. That's one of the things that we've argued has been ignored, but it comes along with now we have especially like in a place like Colorado, but we've got five or six or seven, you know, events right in a row here against conservatives or people of faith that were carried out, some of which school children just happened, happening to go to Catholic school, that are being carried out by individuals who have a deep seated confusion about who they are and don't want anyone to say anything out loud about it. There is a difference here and that difference needs to be pointed out. You know, I don't think Katie was worried that there were words that were spoken against her or her position in the Seattle Times. It's that the revelations that came along with that carried along with them threats that have very real punch to them. And of course, do we even need to say to people that she cares deeply about? And we know that in this kind of stage we're in, the guilt by association framework is applied across the board. And I don't want to downplay this, but it is different. It is different to be have accusations of hate speech on one hand or word violence or whatever things that are said versus actual violence, physical harm. These are different things and you're seeing them play out in very different ways.
- [32:12]
A
What's a strategy to take the temperature down? Like, how do we even begin to combat a cultural reality like that? Because it's important to talk about and to lament. But you know, when it starts to get on the ground scary for you and your family, you start to think, how do, what do we do at this point?
- [32:31]
B
Well, I think first of all the option is not to stop talking because we believe at the heart of reality are words, God's words. We believe that the answer to the deepest problems that humans have as individuals and as a, as a culture, a society, a nation, a community, a family is the one who was called the word. You know, the old saying that's often given to Francis of Assisi, which isn't true. He never said it. You know, preach the gospel at all times and when necessary, use words. As my friend Ed Stetzer likes to say, that's like saying, you know, feed the hungry at all times and if necessary, use food. The gospel is a message. It is words and it's message about who we are made in the image of God. It's A message about what is our human condition, not ignorance or disconnection or something like that, but sin. And it's a message about what is our hope, which is in salvation, not in other places like self state science or sex. So I think that that's got to be in the non negotiable and throughout the history of the world, including for example, we just hit this quickly, but our brothers and sisters in Nigeria, to say certain things comes along with an incredible risk that is something that we should be wise and avoid whenever we can and we shouldn't fight over things that aren't worth fighting for. And conservatives right now, especially conservative minded Christians, are not very good at that. We want to turn everything into a fight over, you know, purity and it just doesn't get there. But I will say that the idea of being quiet about what matters, that's not an option. So let's be, I think answer number one is let's keep talking and speak the truth. Number two is let's remember that people are not the things that we fight against, but it's the principalities and powers which according to that same passage, takes the form of bad ideas. So we have to counter these bad ideas as a way of speaking the truth. I think it also means being wise, choosing what we care about carefully. And I think the rest of us have a responsibility whenever we can to stand for those who are facing this challenge. So I don't know what God's calling you to do. What I did is I wrote the Seattle Times and asked them to fire the reporter for putting a person at risk. They did not write back.
- [35:04]
A
Not yet.
- [35:05]
B
I'm sure. I'm sure that they're just taking care of some details and they'll get back to me.
- [35:09]
A
Yeah, and sometimes, John, that even is gonna involve challenging people who share some of our own convictions, you know. And so last week we talked about the growing tension between the pro life community and the Trump administration. For example, you know, we were talking last week about the slow walking of an investigation into rolling back the FDA's kind of wild west blanket approval of the abortion drug, which we know is far riskier to women than the label currently admits. And the pro life community has been calling to return to some of the restrictions on that medication and doctor's ability to prescribe it. And unfortunately, the Trump administration has been very slow to act on that. And so this tension has been growing. Well, then news this week was that the Trump administration made another announcement calling for expanded access for people to ivf. And they were talking this week about another way to open up insurance coverage for this, to make it more cost effective for people. And as we know, and we've talked about before, that the way IVF is currently practiced and the industry is set up right now, the way the incentives work is that it's not economically feasible to do IVF in any way that doesn't amount to either the putting on ice or the outright destruction of more human embryos even than are destroyed in abortion right now. And so that is directly incompatible with a pro life view. This just seems to add to this tension.
- [36:45]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's just a point of clarity. At least there are more lives lost through IVF than by Planned Parenthood. I mean, the problem is we don't know everything that chemical abortion is doing, but it's still bad, let's just put it that way. In one sense, there's nothing new here except that it's another thing that Trump is lobbying out. And that's why I think it matters, is because let's be really clear, Trump has not minced words on where he is on abortion, which is he doesn't like it. He thinks it should be with the states. He accomplished that with the Dobbs decision and naming justices. And he's not going to do really anything else. He has said that from the beginning, the he was instrumental in getting any sort of pro life talking points and anti abortion language off of the Republican platform. He has defended the FDA and the releasing of abortion medication regulations around abortion medication. And he has said repeatedly he's going to be a champion of fertility. And. Which is confusing because what does that mean? And. Well, this is what he has done over and over is by saying he's a champion of fertility. He has expressed that by trying to defend and increase funding for and widen insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization. Okay, so this is a consistent thing. And he made promises that he hasn't kept in terms of increased access to ivf. And he hasn't kept them primarily because he's got pro lifers around him that are squealing. But in light of this, I wonder if there's not a clue here about what really all this is about, because I think a lot of people have been confused about it. Me, too. You know, why all of a sudden is he on this bandwagon? And when this announcement came out just last week about another proposal from the administration on how we can increase insurance coverage of ivf, Health Secretary RFK said the US Is facing a fertility crisis, which is a threat to our economy and to our national security. Now, what he's saying there is exactly right. In fact, we've talked about this, that the greatest existential threat to the world right now is not climate change, it's not global warming, it's not overpopulation, it's the demographic winter. It's the fact that the economic pyramid is going upside down. So we're not going to have the money, particularly in those nations which have really, really big social safety of workers bringing in enough to cover those who can't work. And so I, I wonder if what's behind all this to some degree is the fact that this fertility crisis is really real. Maybe that's where President Trump got this kind of language, that he's going to be a champion of fertility, champion of fertility in such at least, perhaps he's taken seriously. This is a demographic winter. We are not having enough babies. You have to have 2.4 babies. The UN says 2.1 babies for every woman in a society in order to perpetuate your population. We're not even in that ballpark in the United States, and we were 15 years ago. So we've been on this plummet. The rest of the world has been on a plummet. Even Islamic nations that had birth rates of 7 to 9 are now down to 3 to 5, which is above replacement rate and way above the rest of the West. But it still has reflected this this winter. You talk about Japan. They've been in this winter for longer than anyone. South Korea, also the Scandinavian countries, you know, the European nations and so on. Now, it's interesting because France, for example, has been one of the nations that has proposed a financial incentive to have babies. In other words, trying to deal with the fertility crisis. Yes, to have more babies. They resurrected a policy of financially underwriting parenthood, like they did after World War II, when so many French young men were killed in the war. Back then it worked. Today it doesn't work there. It's nudged it up a little bit, but they haven't even, you know, they haven't come close to cracking that, you know, magic number of 2.1. Russia had the more creative solution, you know, by trying to connect it to patriotism. Vladimir Putin years and years ago, instituted National Conception Day as a national holiday. It has not stuck on, even though everyone likes having the day off work, this true story. So they're trying to do it. So, I mean, so here's the question. If we give the benefit of the doubt that the concern here ultimately is the great demographic winter that the civilized world is facing then the question is what policies can be put in place at the government level in order to help now. The government can't change hearts and change minds. And we've seen that that's the problem. Many women don't want children. They don't want children before they have a career. They see marriage as being a capstone, not a cornerstone. And young men haven't been helpful in the whole process either. In terms of the sexual economics of being able to get satisfaction between pornography and free sexuality without giving any sort of relational commitment. We've got all, I mean, in other words, we've just got a relational breakdown of epic proportions on every single level. Does the president really think increasing access to IVF in which more babies are killed then that, that's fertility. I mean, that's what's so wrong about this. Listen, IVF has been sold to us as a way for adults to get what they want. And that's the primary good adults can get what they want. And there are then these excess, that's literally the words that are used for these children in freezers or that are sent to destruction. They're just called excess embryos as if they're not babies, including by advocates of IVF who are otherwise pro life. It's an astonishing math thing that's happening here. It just is bizarre to me that if this is the solution to that, if the fertility crisis is something he's trying to tackle here, that IVF would be the solution to this. I mean, it's just a bizarre step, I guess.
- [43:11]
A
I get it. I think one of the main problems is that the fertility crisis is fundamentally really just not something that the government is equipped to fix. That doesn't mean it can't incentivize it and disincentivize it. And it can help and it can hurt, but I mean, I think that's going to bear out if that is. It is fascinating though that this, this effort, if it is connected to that, and I think you're probably right, is coming around the same time. There was another study that was released this week showing that the average first time, the average age of a woman at the first birth of a child is the highest it's ever been. It's the average now is 30, close to 30, 29 maybe. And then it looked at this report also was looking at the average age of first time mothers in blue versus red states. And there was a very clear statistical difference which again just gets to the point that I want to make, which is that this is not fundamentally as much as we would hope it would be, because that would make it an easier fix. But this is not a political problem. This is a cultural and a norms problem. And, you know, this is something that Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies has been writing about for quite a while and a lot of other places as well, is the changing in norms around marriage and having families and ivf. While, you know, whenever we challenge the ethics of ivf, we inevitably hear from people for whom that was perceived to be their only option in terms of having children. And for a lot of people, maybe it is. And I know that it's. A lot of times it's sold that way as well, that it's a solution to intractable infertility that has no other solution. But the way it's utilized and the way it's talked about, especially elite circles, is more of a lifestyle enabling option than it used to be. So women have. It's the same way that about a decade ago, the egg freezing kind of. This trend kind of went berserk where women, having little to no information about whether they had fertility issues, were freezing their eggs anyway because they either didn't have any relationship prospects and weren't seeing marriage on the horizon, or they didn't want to get married or have children until a much later date. And we've. For better or worse, and I think morally it's worse in our cultural consciousness, IVF is a stopgap. Like it's your option in your back pocket. If you don't have a child during the normal kind of highly fertile years for women, which tends to be your 20s and early 30s, then that's okay, because we have this option, and now it's subsidized and. And you can have kids whenever you want. But the reality is it doesn't work that way. You can call that unfair, but it never does. But it's just gonna exacerbate the problem if we continue. Because making IVF even more of a normal, you know, just another option that you can choose, I think will ultimately prove to hurt the fertility rate because it continues establishing that norm that having children is your choice and you can delay it as much as you want.
- [46:15]
B
Well, I mean, you have to ask if you're going to solve the fertility problem with this, you have to ask, what is the fertility problem? Is it a problem of infertility? The fertility problem is not coming from suddenly a mass, you know, problem of infertility. It's coming from a catastrophic loss of relationships. It's coming from a catastrophic devaluing of children and antinatalism that's inherent in our, you know, calling for pets, fur babies and parents, pet parent, pet parents, parents. I mean, in other words, it is a worldview. Now, most people tend to chalk up, I mean, oftentimes what you'll hear, these fertility ups and downs. And we're not just in a down, we're falling off a cliff. And that's the difference. But you can chalk some of the ups and downs to economics. You can't. Now this is not an economic issue. It's far too dramatic for that. The comorbidities, if we can use that language, of people not getting married, people not wanting long term relationships, people not valuing children, people not wanting children going in, all of these are preexisting conditions to the problem that they're trying to solve. I appreciate trying to solve the problem, but you're right. The reason that people. I wanted to say this too. This is really important. You mentioned something that made me think of this also. IVF is kind of being sold as the solution to everything. You know, if you don't want to have kids, you know, this is your, you know, backup plan. If you can't have kids, this is your backup plan. If you don't want to have this kind of kid, this. If you're in an infertile same sex relationship or a sterile same sex relationship, you know, this is, this is your solution. There are other things that could be done to help deal with the population. For example, let's take the millions, a million and a half or 2 million embryos that are frozen and let's subsidize those adoptions. So now you're not creating additional life, you're subsidizing that. Let's make sure that the children whose lives are subsidized have a married mom and a dad. Because without that, you've dramatically reduced the chance of this child being a, to use crass terms, a successful member of society. There's just a million things that are fact based and this right here is certainly not. I do want to acknowledge, by the way, there are people who have done IVF in more ethical ways than others. They have committed to implanting all embryos or only having as many embryos as they will implant. But you're right, financially it is impossible to create an industry around that sort of model. That's why it's not done. And the regulations, there's just no regulations to this. We had another story this week of a same sex couple Choosing IVF and being convicted of abuse and basically securing a child in order to abuse them. This is a tragic thing. There's just no regulations. It's the Wild West. It's not the answer to the problem.
- [49:35]
C
Hey, Breakpoint listeners, the Colson center is coming to Knoxville, Tennessee. Join John Stonestreet and Os Guinness at the Knoxville Convention center on May 27th for a truth Rising watch party. Truth Rising is a groundbreaking documentary about courageous faith in this civilizational moment. It tells the stories of Christians like Chloe Cole, Seth Dillon and Jack Phillips choosing courage over fear, making a difference where God has called them. We'll have free popcorn and soda at the Watch party and we'll enjoy a live Q and A with John Stonestreet and Os Guinness after the film register today at colsoncenter.org Knoxville that's colsoncenter.org Knox Knoxville
- [50:17]
A
I want to get to a couple of the comments and feedback we've gotten from listeners. And somebody did write in and asked why we on this program sometimes use the term gay instead of homosexual. They point out that, that they feel that this would be to accept a worldly view of same sex couples. And they say that the Bible does not use the word gay. Why are we using it instead of homosexual?
- [50:40]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. I, I don't know that we, I was, I couldn't figure out where we had in terms of that. We, we say something like so called gay marriage which refers as an adjective to an institution. I think that meaning is, is pretty clear. Not a capitulation. Gay couples, you know, maybe that's the, some of the language that were used. I always struggle about when to keep words and when to fight for them. I think you should always carefully define them and if it's not clear, we try to always go back and carefully. It's not like some words, A, that shouldn't exist, like cisgender or B that you know, are still in competition. You know, no one uses the word gay for any other reason now. Right. Maybe we've lost it. Maybe we should take a stand on that one. You know, no one is, you know, hears it and goes, I wonder if they're talking about happy or if they're talking about homosexual. You know, that it is a word that has been completely captive and maybe it's wise not to. We pay an awful lot of attention to that. I will say that we try to be very, very careful when we're talking about for example, gay marriage, to say so called gay marriage. Because gay marriage is actually not marriage. It's something that, it's a relationship that's legally called marriage, but it's an innovation and not actually in reality. There is no such thing. And we try not to use gay as an understanding of identity because someone's fundamental identity is that they're made in the image and likeness of God. We may not bat a thousand on that and it's a to Good morning. But I do think there is a difference between words that are still kind of competing for a definition and words that have been completely taken over.
- [52:24]
A
Yeah, fair enough. Okay, next question. Someone is looking for a recommendation for a book that could be a daily devotion to discuss in the context of biblical truth, contemporary topics with their 16 year old son who's going to be a senior in the fall, heading off to college in a year. Wow, that's amazing. So they're looking for a recommendation from you, John, on something culturally relevant and biblical?
- [52:49]
B
Yeah, well, I don't know that there's a book like that that can stay up to speed. I mean, you know, when you write a book, you're 12 months away from it being published and culture's moving really, really, really fast right now. So you'd be better off finding a book around kind of the big trends of culture, hitting some of the issues that pop up over and over and over again. And the book that I think could be helpful would be a Student Student's Guide to Culture. Now it is 10 years, 8 years old. I think this is co written by Brett Kunkel and myself as kind of a derivative of a practical guide to culture. But that's one that you could work your way through. And it's going to talk about what culture is and why Christians should care about it. So it starts off in terms of our posture to culture, and then it goes to what we call cultural undercurrents. These are big shifts that have shaped the world that we all live in now, including your son. Some of us have lived through that shift a shift or two and we look back and go, how do we get all the way down here? And you know, but folks like your son are just, they're native, right? They've never known another normal and so they don't understand how not normal maybe something can be. And then you have the topics, some of the big, big, big topics. So that's, that's an option. If you want something that it's not, you know, directly dealing with the headline. You do have, I think the briefing from Al Mohler, which is about 20 minutes long. You've got the, the daily breakpoint commentaries that are five minutes, six minutes long and are always trying to bring that back to a theological point and are more headline oriented. So maybe those are a couple resources that you can go with.
- [54:31]
A
I'd say too. This might be a little lofty, but if Your son is 16 and heading off to college next year, then, wow, probably he can handle it. Is Biblical Critical Theory by Christopher Watkin, which kind of goes issue by issue.
- [54:45]
B
That is ambitious. God bless you.
- [54:46]
A
That is ambitious. Yeah, I know. But you know, expect hard things. I bet our kids could do it. And maybe, if nothing else, it could be a source of discussion for the two of you. So maybe if you haven't looked at that one yet, check that out, see if that could be right. Okay, let's go to our next question. This was in response to the conversation we had last week, John, on the show about Mother's Day. In the recent podcast for the Mother's Day program, the importance of a biological mother and father to a child was discussed. It was talking about in reference to same sex couples, which I understand, but it made me think of several friends I know personally who, through the inability to have children of their own, either through adoption or foster care, now have children. Of the instances these children do grow up having issues and thus desire or want to return to their biological parents. My question is, do those scenarios also apply in the same way because the adopted parents are not the biological parents of the child? Therefore, would adoption ever be a wise choice?
- [55:51]
B
Adoption is a wise choice. It's often a beautiful, redemptive and loving choice. And it is as close as humans can get to being, being like Jesus, because that's what is described as the work of Jesus is adopting us into the family of God. And obviously too, if you think about the flow of the story, creation, fall, redemption, restoration, God created the world one way, something went wrong. And then there's a redemptive behavior. Adoption is described as that redemptive behavior. That's obviously true in the case of our salvation before God, but it's also true I think here and in terms of our social behavior with those who themselves oftentimes, most of the time, if you're talking about a child, maybe all the time, are victims of family loss at no choice to themselves. It is a wise choice as a way to deal with a fundamental brokenness. The reason we oppose things like same sex marriage and certainly IVF and surrogacy, commercial surrogacy especially, and irresponsible, completely unethical IVF I guess you could say is that this is a way to create the brokenness and then purport to fix the brokenness. When a same sex couple acquires a child through IVF and surrogacy, it is intentionally breaking the relationship between the biological mother and the child. And then it's pretending as if men can be women and women can be mentally. In the case of where a family takes in a child who's experienced some kind of loss, a loss of a mother, loss of a father, loss of both, loss of stability, loss of safety, then it is providing hope to an already broken situation. I think maybe what you're referring to in the question has a lot to do too with. There's kind of been a Pollyannish happily ever after tale of adoption. Like as if everything goes well. And I used to have that. I didn't know any better. I had friends who were adopted and knew couples that had adopted and then met someone who shared having adopted a child literally at the hospital from a mother who was a drug addict and the abandonment and what had been abused during the pregnancy. And it wasn't just the physical long term effect, which by the way speaks to the fact that we're dealing with valuable individual human persons. In the womb. There was brokenness that this baby had understood or embraced or experienced. I don't know what the right word is in utero. And that went on. And that often is what happens. The fact that so many children who do grow up in loving adoptive homes still want to know the biological parent just speaks to what's true. And that's why, you know, I think wise adoptive parents walk with them through that process because it's not something that you can kind of always shake off. Not everyone, you know, we hear from people who said I was adopted and never wanted to know, you know, xyz and you have other situations where I was adopted. I've known my biological mom my whole life, but it's not the same. So I think I don't want to trivialize this by saying everyone's different. I think at some level what we're talking about is there's something consistent about who we are. And that biology is not an alternative thing. It's not an optional part of who we are. We are not just our bodies, but we're not less than our bodies. And the biological aspect of who we are is essential, as Christian theology has long endorsed and science tells us and the Bible reflects and these sorts of stories tell us. But I just listen, to be clear, and I think Embryo adoption is a wonderful way of dealing with a brokenness that has just gotten so far out of hand. I mean, any loss is out of hand. But when you talk about a million abandoned children in freezers just in the US a million and a half, that's a human rights crisis of proportions that it would be hard to find any sort of comparison. So what do we do? Well, we act like Jesus and. Yeah. Do we need to do it in the right way? Yes. Do we have the temptation of doing the right thing for the wrong reason? That's always there. But we've got to fix the brokenness. We've got to address the brokenness as much as we can. So yes, it is not only a wise choice, it is a loving choice. It is a redemptive choice. It's a choice to be like Jesus.
- [60:30]
A
Thanks for that, John. Well, that is gonna do it for the program this week. I'm gonna take a quick point of privilege and just as a quick recommendation, Myrna Brown at World did a two part story this week about the Colson Fellows program, the program itself and then heard directly from a Colson Fellows who was commissioned, Colson Fellow who was commissioned last year and just her story, 70 year old grandma just doing awesome, awesome stuff in her community. So if you didn't catch that, go back to the Wednesday and Thursday episode of this week's the World and everything in it and you'll hear that there. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint this week. From the Coulson center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet. We'll see you all back here next time. God bless.