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It's Monday, December 8, 2025. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Sometimes there are issues with really big worldview significance that don't get a lot of national attention. And they should, because for one thing, today we're going to be talking about a national issue that is a very important pro life issue. This has to do with IVF assisted reproductive technologies, IVF in vitro fertilization. This is the process whereby the male and the female cell are brought together in a laboratory setting. Embryos are created, and in the general process, the general application of the IVF procedure, multiple embryos are made. And that's one of the big problems. There's a fundamental problem, I would argue, with alienating the process from the conjugal act, that is to say, from the act of marriage. But the larger significance is the fact that pro lifers have to look at the discarding and destruction of these embryos, also the sorting and quality screening of these embryos, something that is deeply, inherently, morally, murderously wrong. And the IVF is right now a very crucial issue. In one particular respect, this has to do with tricare, the reauthorization for the medical coverage for military personnel in the U.S. armed forces, particularly for medical facilities outside of the military facilities themselves. Now, this is a big issue because you're talking about millions of Americans within the US Military covered by this. And you had people in both the House and in the Senate, Representative Sarah Jacobs in the House, Senator Tammy Duckworth in the Senate. They've been pressing for the full inclusion of IVF for all personnel. Now, this is really a much bigger issue than it may even sound at first. And it was Speaker Johnson who pulled this out of the authorization bill last year, out of the insurance coverage for tricare. And he is doing it again, and he is under direct fire. He deserves our support. There's a very important reason why at this juncture this has to take place and the forces against the speaker are coming out in full force. And, and quite honestly, this is a situation that may well divide some Republicans. And indeed, one of the big questions is how President Donald Trump will respond to this himself. President Trump has, has identified himself with IVF treatments and has said that one of the goals of his administration is to make those treatments more available to American, he always says, basically to American couples who want to have children. What is not in even acknowledged in a lot of this conversation is that there are so many multiple issues, and one of them has to do with the fact that if you just put this out there, available through, say, insurance policies, or in this case, this policy, this entire program for medical coverage for US Military personnel, then there are going to have to be some strictures. And the strictures thus far when it comes to IVF has been that IVF was available only to heterosexual couples when there was a military reason, an injury or some other reason for why the IVF was made necessary. So it wasn't just blanket IVF coverage even for married heterosexual couples in the military. It was for some linkage to a military cause. And that has left some couples very frustrated. It's not just couples. And I want to point out something that, that several military advocacy sites have noted. For example, military.com, which is a news site, reminds us of this quote. A Biden era Defense Department policy in March 2024 expanded TRICARE eligibility for infertility treatments to unmarried service members and those needing donated eggs or sperm, adding onto a previous policy when the Department of Defense only offered such treatments to certain married service members. So here's 2024 President Biden, the Biden administration, enlarging that so that marriage isn't an issue. All right, so even then, however, there were some people who didn't have access. And so listen to the next sentence. Quote. Eggs or sperm donated by a third party were also prohibited by the Department of Defense at that juncture, effectively barring same sex couples from the benefit. Okay, so the way that it would stand if blanket coverage is given is that it would be blanket coverage. And that even means that individual service members, unmarried, who want to have a child by IVF could call upon this policy and upon this medical coverage. This is a very, very important issue. This is where we either stand or fall when it comes to the pro life movement and when pro life conviction, when people who hold to those convictions say very clearly that our belief is that life begins at fertilization and life is to be protected from the point of fertilization. And by the way, that's the only logical point. It's the only theologically viable point at which we can possibly make the argument. If you say it's at some point thereafter, then all you have is an argument about which point, which could take you all the way up to the point of birth. And that's exactly the way this argument has operated. This is the way the abortion argument has unfolded. This is why we have to keep pressing back to an objectively true point when life begins, when God says, let there be life, and that Point is, when the sperm and the egg come together, and we believe, let's remind ourselves of this. We believe that that should take place within the context, the conjugal context of marriage, the union of a man and a woman before God. And at the very least, we should not be paying for the very issue as to whether these things should be available legally. You know my position on that. But to force the American taxpayer to pay for it even beyond that is really a stretch. And in this case, I think we need to acknowledge that Speaker Mike Johnson, who is already in a very difficult position just because of the small margin that Republicans have in the House and all kinds of political pressures from within the Republicans themselves, we need to support Speaker Johnson in this particular effort. And those on the other side are going at him full bore. And they are also trying to work the Republican Party and they're trying to work the White House into forcing the speaker to back down on this issue. It reminds us of how important elections are. Every single election. The speaker of the House is elected to the House by his congressional district there in Louisiana. He is elected by fellow Republicans in the majority to the office of Speaker. If Republicans aren't in the majority, he simply becomes the Republican leader. And what you're looking at in this case is, is the fact that this is incredible political pressure and an incredibly delicate moment. And with so many other things piling on in terms of big issues at the end of the year, this is one of those issues that should have the attention of Christians, and Christians need to understand what is at stake. I have gone through page after page of legislative and media material on this going into the background. And I think most Christians would be, and most pro lifers would be very surprised to know how long advocates for the inclusion of IVF have been working in terms of the US Military, and sometimes from within the military, sometimes on behalf of military personnel. But we just need to recognize that we have multiple problems here. And one of them is that once you even offer this, the question is, how do you exclude anyone? And long term, I think we all know, just look at the people pushing this. Everyone will be included, and everyone's going to mean everyone. And so we're looking at multiple levels of moral collapse. It's a subversion of marriage, it's a subversion of sexual morality, and it's a subversion of the sanctity of human life. And we just need to understand that on this issue, things are not moving in our direction. And that's just something we need to recognize. The culture is pressing really hard on this issue. And I think of the president, for example, President Trump speaking about this, speaking of couples who want to have children, I understand he has the right heartfelt concern there. But by the time this is put into law, by the way, it won't even be restricted to couples, much less a man and a wife. The Supreme Court's decision on same sex marriage pretty much took care of that. It's always been hard to have to show up all the time in defense of human life. It's never been easy. And things are getting more complicated all the time. That just means we have to bring even more conviction and more clarity to these issues. One other related issue, by the way, that's just much lower, frankly, in terms of moral significance, is the money. Because the cost of this, if it's approved, as Senator Duckworth and others have pushed it, will be astronomical. That's not my main concern. But you would think, if nothing else, that we get the attention of some Republicans. It's a big concern. All right, so we just talked about what the Biden administration had attempted to do on this issue in 2024. The former president is back in the news, and he's back in the news because of an address he gave just in recent days to the LGBTQ Victory Institute. The New York Times defines that as, quote, an organization that supports LGBTQ people in public office. The particular issue here is also the context. President Biden, former President Biden is in a very weak position at the present. He's in a very weakened political position. Even people in his own party don't generally want to be seen with him. He's having difficulty raising money for a presidential library. Democrats generally want to try to forget the Biden administration, at least in terms of the end. And they especially want to try to forget the 2024 presidential election. They want to just move on. And it's also true that the former president's in a weakened physical condition. He's fighting a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer, and he's had other issues as well. And so his appearances in public have been fairly rare. That makes this one even more important, more worthy of our attention. As Amy Harmon reports, quote, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. On Friday offered a defense of his support for transgender rights, addressing an issue that has prompted debate and soul searching among Democrats, some of whom attribute losses in 2024 to a focus on identity politics. Well, okay, so a focus on identity politics. But you know what? The way the the article began was honest. It's not just identity politics. It is the specific identity politics of the transgender movement. And there is no doubt that played out in a big way in the 2024 presidential election and also in other dimensions of that election. It played apparently a lesser role in the 2025 off year elections. But those elections are not necessarily a bellwether of anything other than, say, a political direction, party by party. The point is that President Biden was pushing the transgender agenda just like he pushed the same sex marriage agenda ahead of his own party. And so he was basically bragging to this group about the fact that he had, in effect, pushed former President Barack Obama, he was serving at that time as President Obama's vice president, into support for same sex marriage by mentioning it out loud before President Obama was prepared to. He said he basically didn't regret that. He said, he, quote, I got myself in a bit of trouble, good trouble, he said. But of course, all this is reflective of the fact that you. You have to consider that the former president also had a very long, very long tenure in the United States Senate. And then he ran for president, ran for president more than once, had to withdraw, was. Was certainly not a leading candidate in the 2008 round, but ended up being chosen by Barack Obama, who won the Democratic nomination as his vice president. Former President Biden has always been gaffe prone, and yet he's also changed a lot of his positions. And you look at same sex marriage, you look at an array of some of these issues, even some of the transgender issues. He knows he changed his positions, in his view, to get on the right side of history. And in this address Friday, he was speaking to a group that thought he was on the right side of history. They're on the same side of this issue and pushing very, very hard. It is really interesting to see what the former President had to say. And when it came to transgender issues, it's really clear he was pushing them. No less than 16 members of his administration were publicly identified as transgender. In his address, the claim was made that about 15% of his appointees identified as LGBTQ. Now, to point out that that's a much higher percentage than activist groups have historically claimed for the LGBTQ percentage in the population. So that's another way of saying, we all knew President Biden was sending a message. We knew that he knew he was sending a message, and we and he both knew what message he was sending. He came to this LGBTQ activist group on Friday to brag about that activism. Biden was also proud of the fact that in 2022, he signed the Respect for Marriage act, which was an attempt to try to put in place, place federal legislation. It was a successful attempt. The legislation passed. It doesn't guarantee a right to marriage in all 50 states, but it says that every state must recognize a legally issued marriage certificate from a state that does approve of same sex marriage, which means basically the same thing. You might not be able to get a same sex marriage in every state if the Supreme Court's decision on Obergefell were to be reversed. Of course, that's, that's out there in the future. The point is this was activism on the part of Congress, activism on the part of the White House, and they, they got it through in 2022. I think it's also important to look at some of the comments made here in this article. Evan Lowe, president and chief executive of this group, the LGBTQ Victory Institute, quote, said that Mr. Biden had been intentional about understanding that an historically marginalized community can participate full, fully and openly in our democracy. End quote. And what you need to note there is the doubling down on identity politics, because this is a group, by the way, groups don't vote. Citizens vote. They may be members of any number of groups, and they still have the right to vote. This is really not about the right to vote. When they say participate in democracy here, they're talking about the affirmation of their sexual identity and their lifestyle. We also read this quote. Mr. Biden's support for transgender rights stands in contrast to the Trump administration's efforts to impose strict limits on transgender people, including requiring that U.S. passports reflect the sex on people's original birth certificates, a reversal of a decades old policy. Mr. Trump has called transgender teenagers mutilated and barred transgender people from serving in the military, asserting that having a transgender identity is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of people who serve in the US Military forces. It's a very interesting point made here, by the way. That President Trump has appointed a number of openly gay men to his administration, but not transgendered individuals shows you something of a line in the Trump administration. It's something of a line in the culture, too. And this is where it is clear that the culture writ large is rethinking the T in LGBTQ and has been, especially when it comes to, say, private spaces such as locker rooms and bathrooms, and especially when it comes to males in those spaces. And when it comes to, especially minors, to children and teenagers, but also to women in women's sports, girls sports, you're looking at, let's just say, very legitimate concerns and they have resonated with the American people, the Democratic Party, by the way. And this is also clear in the background to all of this. The Democratic Party recognizes that the transgender issue lost him a lot in 2024. They are at least claiming that they don't think it lost them so much in 2025, in the recent off year elections. And yet they're not going to avoid having to deal with this issue in 2026 and in 2028, and especially in 2028, the next presidential round. And so they can say, we don't want to make this an issue. We don't think the American people want to make it an issue. But it's going to be really interesting to see how this, this argument shapes up in the larger context, the larger political and national context, because I don't think most parents are going to become friendlier to the idea boys on their girls team or boys in the girls bathroom or for that matter, men beating women in women's sports. I don't think that's going to get better. Now, that doesn't mean that I think most Americans have a comprehensively healthy and accurate understanding of these things. I'm telling you that Christians have a reason for explaining. There's a moral intuition. We believe it's put there by the Creator, it's in creation order. That is at least. Well, it's showing up in the resistance to the transgender agenda, and it's showing up in a big way. So much so that we see an interesting development. We'll talk about more on briefings to come in which you have some gay men in particular who are now openly complaining about transgender identity being lumped into one group. We're not one thing they're saying, and of course they're not, many of us said that all along. But they are united in rejecting biblical commands. They are united in rejecting creation order to a greater or a lesser extent. And they are united in terms of the moral agenda. Before I leave this story, I just want to go back to the language that is just routinely used. And it's a matter of heartbreak to notice this. So just even trying to take this out of politics for a moment, it's the president, the former president who's making the statement. Former President Biden, he said, as the story comes to a conclusion, quote, because of our national debate on LGBTQ issues, he said, there are young people sitting alone as I speak, scrolling through social media, wondering whether they will ever truly be accepted for who they are. The former president said, evidently, as if he were Addressing those young people, you are heard and you belong. And we're told he said that to a standing ovation. Okay, so here's the thing. The crucial language is they're wondering whether they will ever truly be accepted for who they are. Okay? That is a seismically important statement. For who they are. It all comes down to who they are. It all comes down to who determines who they are. It all comes down to whether or not their bodies, by God's intention, tell them who they are. And in this case, we know what the former president's point is. We know he's trying to say that whatever they feel themselves to be, that's what they are. We have to resist that. We have to resist the idea that it is. It is those who hold to a biblical worldview who are not telling people they're free to be who they are. That is exactly the point we are trying to make. It's the question as to where in the world they come to know how in the world they come to know who they are. There is simply no way that Christians can come to a biblical understanding that says that who they are is separate from the body that God gave them. All right, finally, there was some really big business news also breaking over the weekend, and that is that Netflix announced that it is going to buy Warner Brothers, the famed Hollywood studio and much of that Warner Brothers empire, for $83 billion. Okay, so that's $83 billion. According to most reports. Netflix had never made a purchase of even a billion dollars. Now, $83 billion. Now, why in the world would a streaming service this vast platform, Netflix, why would it want to buy Warner Brothers? And a part of the deal is that they're not buying some parts of Warner Brothers, including some parts of the empire, like cnn, but they are agreeing that they will continue in theater distribution. They don't say for how long of Warner Brothers movies. And you know, that something is quite unexpected because the leadership at Netflix had actually made fun of theater, saying that that was much a part of the past and not so much of the future. Well, now I. They're counting on it being a part of the future, at least for some term, because they're putting $83 billion on the line. Now, this is going to have to go through review process. You know, the. It's going to have to go through antitrust review and all of that. And there are enemies of this, of this plan. But the fact is that these two giants wouldn't have agreed to this unless they think it's going to go through. Now, I want to bring up one of the issues that I think will come up in that kind of antitrust challenge, and that is whether or not this reduces the number of companies that are operating in terms of entertainment media. And it does mean that. There's no doubt it means that. And if they weren't trying to economize, this deal wouldn't make any sense. They're gonna try to cut down the cost at Warner Brothers and they're gonna try to bring in more profits to Netflix. Otherwise, there's no purpose to the deal. That's the only way the deal works. But you can hear some people saying, look, this is too much consolidation in the hands of one company, and this gets into some very deep waters and antitrust matters. But I just want to point out, from a Christian perspective, this shows further consolidation in these giant companies of the entertainment attention of the American people. And at the very least, this ought to have some attention from Christians. We ought to be more thoughtful about the media we consume than others are. We understand more is at stake. We understand that what we let in our eyes, what we let in our headphones, we're also effectively letting into our brains and effectively letting into our hearts. And we need to know that others are, too, including the little kid with the iPad screen and the teenager with the earpods. This is a huge problem, and we are huge consumers of entertainment. For most of human history. Think about this. For most of human history, people saw very little entertainment. They consumed very little entertainment. They might see a play maybe somewhere, they might see some work of art in public somewhere. But their access to entertainment was basically members of their own family, their own extended community, and in their neighborhood, that was basically it. And entertainment had a place, of course, in every society. That's why you have surviving plays from ancient Greece, and you've got artifacts and cultural products from ancient peoples all over the world. But now we're talking about an entertainment world that is 24 7. It's all around us, it's everywhere. It's all accessible, it's privatized. It's no longer, in the main, a group experience. That's why Netflix made fun of the theaters. My guess is they're not going to make fun of them anymore. But nobody thinks theaters are the wave of the future. Everybody knows that the streaming platform is hungry for more content, and it's hungry for more contracts. It's hungry for more customers and for more contact hours. That's what's behind all of this. It's a battle for your eyes. It's a battle for your ears. It's a battle for your attention. It is a battle for your hearts. It's an $83 billion deal. Just let that settle in. $83 billion. This company is putting its own existence at risk. Netflix is basically putting itself at risk in an $83 billion deal. They wouldn't be making it if they didn't think it was pretty much a surefire win. We need to know and think about the fact that someone's paying $83 billion just for a bit more chance to have our attention. That ought to have our attention. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmohler.com, you can follow me on X or Twitter by going to twitter.com AlbertMohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, go to sbts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.