Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Back in March, Chris Elston, known as Billboard Chris, was detained in Australia for protesting the harm done to children in service of radical gender ideology. And then in early June, he, along with Lois McClatchy Miller, a senior legal communications officer for the Alliance Defending Freedom International, were detained in Belgium. They were simply standing in a public space, offering to talk to anyone interested about the realities of transgender treatments, wearing billboards that stated, children cannot consent to puberty blockers, and quote, children are never born in the wrong body.
Though they called the cops to ask for protection from harassment, They were told to remove the signs or face arrest. After being detained and strip searched, they were released without charge.
Now thought and speech has not always been treated this way in the West. Because the West was deeply influenced by Christian consensus, citizens largely enjoyed the liberty, to various degrees, to challenge dominant paradigms and ideologies. That liberty is, based on what we are seeing in Belgium and Britain and in other nations, on quite shaky ground from both state and institutional pressures. In some places, just praying to yourself can be considered unruly protest. Recently, Lila Rose of Live Action shared the story of Naomi Best, a therapy student at Santa Clara University, an ostensibly Roman Catholic school in California.
As part of her coursework, the university insisted that therapy students should view extreme pornography and share their own sexual history. When she asked for the same exemption that's regularly granted to Muslim students, the university refused. When she described what had happened to her in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Best was kicked out of the program. As she pointed out, and I quote, if we don't have a set of therapists with diverse worldviews and with tolerance for people with diverse worldviews, we will alienate people who need psychological care and we will cause more harm than good, end quote. Totalitarian states like East Germany and Soviet Russia would guarantee its citizens the freedom of worship, but then levy fierce and often violent penalties for spreading that religious belief outside the church walls.
You see, in those countries, the freedom of conscience was only Only the freedom to believe in one's own heart and one's own head, and maybe one's own house of worship. Worldview diversity was never something to be allowed in the public square.
Now, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed more. In just 45 words, it protects conscience rights that are public. Thus, nonsensical campus chants like speech is violence or silence is violence are in law separated from actual violence. The founders wanted a country in which citizens could think and worship as they believed, but could also assemble together and take those beliefs out into the wider world.
Both Belgium and Britain, which by the way is currently debating whether saying things that offend Islam should be illegal, could use something like this written down in law just about now.
Now, of course, all freedoms, including our rights of conscience, have limits. In the United States, that limit is not one's own head or own heart, but real harm that's done to another. Certainly, that harm has to be constantly clarified and defined and adjudicated. But this is a far better arrangement than a limit that's simply based on just how someone else might feel. The First Amendment is a bulwark against speech police, and it's one of the Founding Fathers' greatest legacies.
It's a structured freedom. It's part of our inheritance. An inheritance shaped by the Christian view of humanity, recognized as both sacred and sinful. And yet, it's a legacy that can never last. If people are not actually willing to express their deeply held beliefs and then defend the right to do so.
For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Paget. And I wanna say a special thank you today to Alan and Lee of Smyrna, Georgia, for being a Cornerstone Monthly partner of the Colson Center. Thanks for helping make this episode of Breakpoint possible.
If Breakpoint is a helpful part of your daily worldview diet, please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for a version of this commentary that you can print or share with others, you can go to breakpoint.org.
