You're listening to Breakpoint This Week, where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian perspective. Today we're going to talk about the U.S. operation in Venezuela. We're also going to talk about the swearing in of New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani. We have a lot to get to this week.
We're so glad you're with us. Stick around. Welcome to Breakpoint This Week. From the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Coulson Center. John, we've got to start this week with Venezuela.
Most of our listeners will know the details at this point. On the 2nd, the U.S. issued a military strike, essentially capturing the. A man who claimed to be president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro. He's been in power there for many years now.
and has presided over a a tyrannical state of government. which is I will call a transgender socialist government because they pretend that that's what they set up and that of course always devolves into tyranny. The U.S. has captured him and brought him to New York to face Legal charges related to drug trafficking and other illegal activities. This is huge news.
It's big political news, which is not necessarily our lane. It's big international kind of geopolitical news. It's definitely been a cultural touch point this week. Interestingly, there have been a lot of protests in the United States against it. And a lot of Latin American people celebrating it.
So, how do you want to start here?
Well, you know, I think just because Trump did it doesn't make it bad. And just because Venezuelans are happy that Maduro has been ousted, which many of them seem to be, that doesn't make it a justifiable action on behalf of the Trump administration as well. Kind of is where it becomes a difficult thing to analyze. We're talking about. Categories ethically of just war.
And this was a bold action.
Now, I think there's a couple of things worth saying. Number one, is that Venezuela was once one of the most wealthy and well-to-do nations in the world. And it wasn't that long ago. And the difference between then and now in which it Has mired under poverty. Our colleague Roberta Rivera back in 2019.
wrote about something that was being called at the time the Maduro diet.
So Hugo Chavez was the first socialist dictator to take over. Maduro followed him. And the Maduro Dahe it was in one year, the 70-some percent of Venezuelans lost 24 pounds. And trust me, it wasn't because of ThighMaster commercials. It was actually because of starvation.
And this is, again, coming from a place that was at one time one of the wealthiest nations in the world. And what what's changed between then and now?
Well Easy socialism. A vision of life in the world, which ironically, and we'll talk about this in a little bit. Zoran Mamdani boldly claimed from his inauguration address as the mayor, new mayor of New York City, proudly claiming this kind of socialist mantle. That, you know, what do you call it, warm collectivism. And we'll talk about why that's a misnomer, I think, in a little bit.
This is dramatic. And you know what? You can. Here are all kinds of people, including many people who are condemning the actions of the President. In this operation, saying that Maduro needed to be ousted.
Maduro needed to be, you know, there needed to be a regime change there.
So, gosh. Again, speaking of not our lane, the success of this particular military operation is stunning. I mean, if you actually are interested in, you know. And that kind of thing, it's hard not to be impressed. Not exactly up to.
Remember the whole pager thing with the Israeli operation against Hamas officials? And you're kind of like, that's the most impressive military thing. This is not quite to that degree, but it was a very, very impressive military operation on a number of levels. But the other thing I I want to say is I was really struck. As we think about the legality of this, I don't know that I have any sort of unique view to be able to.
to wrestle with this. I think a lot remains to be seen. In terms of, you know, is this the beginning of some sort of empire building? You know, I don't like the fact that. This followed with: We're going to run things here for a while.
And oh, by the way, let's take over Greenland. You know, that whole conversation this week, this. This does not make me encouraged in terms of we're going to stay in the lane of what this thing was supposed to accomplish and not extend that, extend beyond that. But I was fascinated in a line that was used by an analyst for the New York Times, and this was on the New York Times podcast, The Daily. In which the whole analysis of this thing, and you have heard this a lot.
in various analysis sense. It started this way. He said, there's two kinds of law. International law and domestic law. and then went on as if those were the two categories that mattered here.
And the whole, you know, the whole set of Trump's actions. Including what kind of trial Maduro was going to get back here in the United States. Of course, he's now in New York City with his wife. You know, that was going to be subject to domestic law going in, that's subject to international law. Can we justify this?
And you know who else said there were two types of law? The great David Noble, the author of the. one of the most comprehensive texts comparing different worldviews. understanding the times. And in that book, he compared First of all, three worldviews, then five worldviews in a future edition.
in 10 areas, 10 areas of culture, including law. And he would also say amongst the five worldviews, there were two types of law. But it wasn't international and domestic law. There's a deeper category. Uh, that matters here.
And uh, if you just start with international law, I appreciated what Konstantin Kissen said this week: the international law is just a made-up category. What makes it obligatory? What makes any law obligatory other than power? How do you keep a law from devolving into power?
Well The two types of law David Noble talked about always were natural law, That there is actually a law that is built into the fabric of the universe, which of course requires a design to the universe, including a moral design to the universe, which, as people would also say, I'm thinking Norm Geisler here: if there is a natural law, there must be a lawgiver. Or, what's called positive law. And positive law is an evolutionary view. of law in which we just get smarter and smarter and smarter and better and better and able to manage ourselves. And if you divide All law up into just international and domestic, you haven't got to the real point.
If there is such a thing as international law, where does it come from? Says who. You have the great question of says who. In the question of law, who gets to make the law? Are we subject to the law or is the law subject to us?
And, you know, all the conversation right now about international law is in and of itself a made-up category. You know, in fact, there's a movie out, Russell Crowe's in it. I understand. I haven't seen it. Have you seen the New Nuremberg?
The movie Nuremberg, it's about the Nuremberg trials. Have you heard? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes. Yeah.
That entire conversation, right? We put Nazi war criminals. On trial. For crimes. But they didn't violate any laws and their own.
Nation. Why? Because they made the law.
So, somehow, international law has to step in and say that that's that law is not legitimate. The real law that's legitimate is the one that we're making up. But what are you appealing to? You're just appealing. And this is, of course, what many of the Nazis argued back: the only reason we're on trial and not you is because you won and we didn't.
And if we'd won, we'd be putting you on trial. And is it really all that relativist? Is that all there is to this stuff? Or is there something deeper that we can appeal to? And this is another place where I think Christians.
have something really wonderful. to offer the world, which is A creation theology, a theology of right and wrong, a moral theology that's built into the creation. And by the way, also, we've talked about this in the past too: a theology of nations and states and groups of people, one that doesn't trivialize human dignity outside of a particular ethnicity or whatever, but also recognizes nations as such.
So, anyway, all that stuff is, I think, in the backdrop here of how we're thinking and talking about this. this action. Contracts, if we're talking about rules, you know, I guess there's different uses of the word law, right?
So there's reality. And then there's rules that we've collectively agreed to follow. I think. International law is hard because the biggest question is who's going to enforce it and what mechanisms do they have to enforce it and what kind of buy-in. Do they have from interested parties, which is why, for example, the UN seems so.
Ineffectual, like to have a UN Security Council that has Iran on it. Like these are the things that make a mockery of. these sort of processes. But I did hear Neil Ferguson talking about this fascinatingly before we went into Venezuela, and he said. I think it was Barry Weiss asked him if he thought we might do something like that.
And he was like, I don't know. It doesn't seem likely.
However, this kind of thing did used to be much more normal. And you talked about Cuba and Panama. And very selective operations that the US did there. And just the general view that the US had a moral responsibility because of our capability to enforce. norms and human rights laws, for example.
to involve ourselves in usually very surgical ways in other nations, specifically in our hemisphere. He said it really wasn't until Obama that we kind of developed this embarrassment related to that kind of thing. It was the whole like, we're not the world's police and we shouldn't assume that we're better than you know, that kind of thing.
So in one way, that did kind of comfort me because this news felt so shocking and abnormal that it it seems like it's not as abnormal as it seemed to me at the time. I will say I also predated Mr. Rivera because in 2016, I covered Venezuela in world. And just like the descent into absolute chaos that was happening under Maduro there, like you mentioned, was one of the wealthiest countries in the world because of its oil reserves. And then they decided to set up what they pretended was a social collectivist government.
And the government took over all the farms and they set all the food prices. And there was this ridiculous interview with the story of a woman who had talked to the LA Times, just a normal citizen of Venezuela, who was trying to go to the grocery store. And because of the way they were running the country, the grocery store told her, okay, you can buy the rice and the bread you need if you also buy this watermelon. And she was like, I don't need the watermelon, and also I can't afford it.
So she went home with no groceries. And it was just like, that's the absurdities that you get when you try to run a country that way. Which is a good segue to our next topic, which is the swearing in of New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, who is a self-described democratic socialist and has already hired people in his administration to do things like forced rent control and supposedly seize property in New York City. It remains to be seen how much of this they can do. I'm struck by how Mamdani talks as if he's like the president or some kind of almost president when really, I mean, the mayor of New York City is certainly an outsized role and has an impact on the public.
Like national conversation more so than any other city in the US. But it's still he's still the mayor of a city. He's not exactly a senator, you know, vice president or anything like that. But he has said that he wants to usher in this kind of government. And that has always struck me as one of the most hubristic.
And frankly, you could put it in these terms. racist assertions because In order to say you want to do that and that it's going to work and be good. You are implicitly saying that everyone else who's ever tried it has done it wrong, and you're going to be the first and the only person who's going to do it right because it has never worked. It has always led to extreme poverty, usually hunger and almost always violence.
So I guess he's the guy that's going to get it right this time. I mean, you're talking about something dramatically different just simply because New York City is part of New York and New York's part of the United States. And that's a very different thing than Venezuela. And so the things that he's claiming to do, and he did in his inauguration, say unapologetically, we're not going to back off of this vision. Because it sounds too radical.
So And of course that I think that is the complaint. Of people on the far left, that there's not a willingness to follow through. It's why, you know. Bernie Sanders continues to be popular with a particular group.
Well, in 2016, when I did that story in World, Maduro was quoted as saying he was a Bernie Sanders fan. Oh, of course, he is. But, you know, Bernie Sanders has not really ever had power. Uh like a mayor. In order to actually get something done, right?
I mean, he's not going to be held accountable. All he's held accountable for is if he continues to. Vocally support policies that are radical and not back off of them. Same thing with AOC, right? I mean, there's a reason that the two of them were there at the inauguration.
Neither of them can be held accountable for anything other than not stopping saying the crazy things that they're saying. Imam Donny is going to be held to a different standard, I think, from both the right and his supporters on the left. We'll know. I appreciated Al Moeller's commentary on this. We'll know.
If he's a disappointment, or if he actually is as radical as they say. You know, most of us think there's just no way you can't promise all that when you actually don't have that much power to pull through. Even as a mayor, you can't just radically pretend that there's not a city council, that there's not a state government that you've got to deal with, and there's not federal law. That you have to deal with. But listen, both political parties, but especially I think the left.
uh has a tendency to have its kind of vision and platform. really shaped by these outsized personalities. And especially when you're talking about a party that You know, I don't want to say it's in shambles, but certainly has aged out of most of its leaders and is sitting there kind of waiting for a new identity. The identity for the last, gosh, where are we at almost 10 years now has been, you know. You know, anti-Trump in every way.
At least we're not him. But there hasn't been something like this. And that I think to some degree explains Mandani's. popularity and people really wanting to. you know, get on board.
Say utopianist or socialistic kinds of things. in somewhat coded language. That's not what you heard in the inauguration speech. He talked about warm collectivism. He knew exactly what he was referring to.
He talked about being proud as a democratic socialist. and not wanting to back off of that. But I do want to point something out. Uh and that is is that like a lot of language that emerges on the left. And I think a lot of language, for example, that emerged from progressives wanting to push.
Uh the sexual revolutionary things, right? We've talked about, for example, The word cisgender is an unnecessary word and it doesn't actually refer to anything that you need it to refer to. The language games are profound and both sides play it, but I think from a progressive vision, you get more of it. Collectivism is designed, and he did this in his speech, to contrast his vision with. Individualism.
And individualism and capitalism, those are the bad guys, those are the boogeymen. That's the thing, right? And individualism is cold. He said collectivism is warm. But notice what he didn't say.
A collective of what? Every time that language has been used in collectivism, you're not talking about communitarianism. You're not talking about neighbors looking after neighbors in snowstorms like Little House on the Prairie, right? You're not talking about like, oh, the mediating institutions of society that Edmund Burke theorized about and Alexis de Tocqueville noticed in the American Experiment that in between the individual citizen and the big government, you had all of these robust middle ground of Boy Scouts and. Yeah, rotary clubs and sewing clubs and local governments even and school boards.
And in other words, you had all of these kind of ways that we took care of each other. And that's the hard thing because Christianity is not an individualistic religion. We are individually saved. We are valuable as individuals. But what we know to be true, made in the image of God, is that we're made in the image of that God, this God, the one that actually exists, who is a trinity.
God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And so there is a community. in the Trinity. And we are made in that image.
So our relationships are essential. But it's not just the relationship with the powerful. It's our relationship with God. It's our relationship with self. It's our relationship with others, both in our personal and family relationships, but also our social relationships and communities as a citizen.
And then our relationship with the creation. uh the rest of the world and and and the role that we play. The communitarian word Kind of sounds like that's what we're talking about, right? Like we're talking about community. You're not.
The communitarian vision lived out is always forced from the top down. Right? In other words, you have to give. to the collective good, but not because you want to. That's the details that are always left out.
It's why it's such a utopianist fantasy. You know, it's like we're going to help the poor. Everyone's going to help the poor. You are too. And if you say no, I'm going to put a gun to your head and make you help the poor.
That's not charity. That language of collectivism is designed to sound woman fuzzy, but it's never that. It's cold and it's forced. And we need to understand the difference between that. Because Christianity, the other thing it does is a lot of the language of the sexual revolution, you know.
Makes you either tolerant or a hater, right? But it makes it an either. This does the same thing. It's like you're either for collectivism or you're for this hard, you know, this whole thing. You don't want to help anybody and you hate the poor.
And yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's bogus. It's a bogus choice and it's a bogus language. And it pretends like this has never been tried before.
Mr. Mom Dani. This stuff's been tried. Everywhere. You ain't the first, bud.
You ain't the first. I did see a couple of people being like, man, he sounds like a freshly post-graduate of Oberlin thinking he came up with this. And it's like, geez. Yeah, I think one of the beautiful parts of the Christian vision of this kind of thing is the the Necessary element of self-sacrifice. This is the wisdom of Jesus that you don't achieve the kind of healthy, actual communitarian living without willing, virtuous self-sacrifice.
And that is inherently antithetical to force. Like of to outside force. And that's what a secular collectivism has to rely on. You know, this is, yeah, you're exactly right. And this is one of the things I think we've missed in our understanding.
The image of God. And we've said here before that we need a robust Christian anthropology. It's not something that has ever really been, I think. Hugely challenged.
So, we don't really have kind of this kind of whole systematic theology of what it means to be human. And people have noticed that. The Roman Catholics, of course, John Paul II came up with the theology of the body.
So, here you're talking about that missing aspect of what it means to be human. But when we talk about these relationships that are part of our social lives, our outward relationships, we mean those are created too. Then, you know, and in other words, it's not just the state that determines. the nature of these relationships. There are givens about family.
Kids need a mom and a dad. And that if you have a society with strong moms and dads, you'll have strong citizens and you'll have stronger neighbors and everything will be better. Right. In other words, the Theology of the image of God is about dignity. It's about value.
It is about the body. These are all things that have been in the water. We also need to talk about these kind of structured relationships, the givens. And yes, the state is one of them. God created the state.
It does not hold the sword in vain. It has a purpose, but it's also not the only game in town. And those who have embraced the language of collectivism pretends like it's just the state, and the state will determine the structure of how we should relate to anything and everything as if nothing will ever go wrong with that. And that it should, and that's their role. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting that these two things-the Mom Dani thing and the Venezuela thing-happened in the same week, that there was an appeal to collectivism. The Lord is a poet for sure. But I like what you said. I think it's true. It will be in pretty short order.
And I mean, I like a guy who makes a bold claim.
So it will be in short order that we'll start to see whether Mom Dani can actually accomplish what he's saying and whether it goes through. My prediction, I don't make political predictions, but if I were to. Uh i he's not going to be able to I still think what remains to be somewhat parsed out too, because we have two worldviews at work. in in allegiance to Islam. and an allegiance to s democratic socialism.
And All the way throughout the West, you have one using the other. Does that make sense? One is a means and one is an ends, and it's not always clear what's a means and what's an ends. And I think that's still to be debated with Mom Donnie. Yep.
Well, we'll keep our eyes on it. Let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more breakpoints this week. Hi, John Stone Street here from the Colson Center. If you've ever taken a close look at a really old church building, most of the time you can find a cornerstone.
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John, I want to turn now to looking into this year, 2026, at the state of abortion laws and just abortion culturally.
So we're recording this in the middle of the week. And just today, the Supreme Court of the state of Wyoming struck down. Two laws that had passed and were signed into law in that state, calling them unconstitutional on the state level. That would have outlawed the abortion drugs and effectively closed down abortion clinics. I mean, it was outlawing abortion in the state of Wyoming.
And the Supreme Court there said this is unconstitutional because of another constitutional amendment in that state that says adults have a right to health care.
So this does not sound to me at all like an actual decision in this case. I assume it's likely that this goes on. But I know there are other states considering similar laws and particularly kind of turning their sights, rightly so, on the abortion drug. Where do you see this movement heading this year? Yes.
I mean, we already have a whole lot of things clouding the water. I mean, but I think at some level, we're still kind of where we were, which is that the Dobbs decision Did not settle the issue any more than the Roe decision settled the issue of abortion. That it is. a state-by-state sort of thing and s states that are pro life are trying to push more and more laws to protect the unborn. Those are going to be challenged in court.
those states that are more and more pro-abortion. are going to and have been pushing further and further and further. And then you have these laws also that are being put in front of the voters. And right now, that hasn't that's probably the closest we have of really knowing where the public is. on this and those aren't going well.
We also saw something coming out of the state of Colorado, one of the big pro-abortion states, where the state law there was attempting to penalize. Uh anyone who prescribed abortion pill reversal.
So after an abortion pill regimen is prescribed, if you, it's two pills. You intervene after the first pill with a dose of progesterone. It's very possible, and we have thousands of lives right now that have been saved from chemical abortion through abortion pill reversal. What Colorado is trying to make that illegal? And you kind of think, well, even on the grounds of choice, you would have supported that, but they didn't.
But you know what? The Supreme Court of Colorado or a district court ruled against that.
So we have, you know, Colorado. Being kind of held back from the ways they're trying to go forward in Wyoming. I think legally, a lot of this stuff. Has yet to work out. But you're right that it's all focused on the abortion pill.
in chemical abortion. And the reason that matters is Because of two things, two things that have always been. the the dark reality of abortion. And that is whenever Evil is hidden. It flourishes.
And the exposure of evil. ends it. You think about, you know, The photos of Emmett Till, who was lynched in Money, Mississippi, and it exposed something that was being hidden in the South. A surgical abortion, quote unquote, is awful. and the results are awful.
And that was largely hid. And you think about what Francis Schaefer did exposing the evil of abortion and how that launched. Particularly Protestants and joining the Catholics and their pro-life work. The abortion pill, you don't even have to go see a doctor.
Now, right, with the FDA regulations being reduced, it could be sent to you in the mail. You can do it with in the privacy of your own home. And What that brings up is that this is a way As abortion itself is being more and more exposed and more and more people are more uncomfortable with it, chemical abortion is a roundabout because it hides this whole evil further. And it privatizes it even more. The other thing is that we know that there's psychological trauma that comes with abortion, and there will be psychological trauma that goes along with this kind of abortion.
So we're going to have victims, certainly the unborn children are the victims, but we're going to have women. that have to go through this all by themselves. And are they morally culpable for their decisions to do this? Absolutely. But at the same time, Evil complicates itself.
So evil when it's hidden. Flourishes and then evil becomes complicated. And this is like an example of both of those things in what is kind of the great national sin. That America has had for a long time now.
Well, and John, women aren't always morally responsible for this, unfortunately. And I. I just want to bring people's attention to four stories, and I know there are more, and there are certainly going to be more. Yeah, if there's those four, you're exactly right. Yes.
And these are cases, these are now criminal cases. In three states, but there's four cases: two out of Texas, one in Ohio, and one in Indiana, of men. procuring the abortion drug, And effectively poisoning their partner, their pregnant girlfriend or wife. with this medication against her knowledge and or her will. and causing the death of their child.
So in Ohio, it was a physician. in out of Toledo who's being charged with this. In Indiana, the case in Indiana is particularly gross. They all are truly shocking. The media coverage of it is maybe not as shocking, but is as disgusting.
Um and I I recommend people Just stay agile with this because of the way that it's talked about is so euphemistic and wrong. In Texas, the story about it there. About this, there's a man, a former Marine, who there's like pages and pages of text messages in the indictment of him just pleading, like forcing this woman. Pressuring her, you've got to get rid of it. You're going to be a terrible mom, et cetera.
He gets the drug, he puts it in her hot chocolate. And she sues. And the Texas newspaper that covered it said, A new lawsuit could endanger women's access to the abortion drug. That was the headline that they chose.
So just stay on your feet when you're reading media about this. But the case in Indiana, I want to highlight in particular because it was a college student who. According to the affidavit, bought the abortion pill from another college student for 50 bucks. Kids are dealing the abortion pill. Who knows?
I mean, so there was no doctor even directly involved in this case in particular. At some point, somebody prescribed it and probably sent it through the mail, procured it, didn't know anything about it.
So he took. four pills, which is way more than you should take. And he forced them. I don't know how to describe it. He forcibly inserted them into his girlfriend without her knowledge, and he caused the death of their baby.
So In every and any conversation about the abortion drug going forward. We should demand that part of that conversation include the absolute license and opportunity for abusive men to take this and force it on women. In a really kind of glass half full sort of way, John, I'm really hoping that this. exposes what has always been true about abortion, which is that It so often, much more often than not, like over 70% of the time, according to Charlotte Lozier, involves a man pressuring a woman into it, either by ignoring her completely, telling her she's going to be on her own, not giving her any financial help, or outright pressuring her like all of these men did. The abortion drug and the way we've relaxed all the regulations around it under Biden and during COVID have created a wild west where men can do this and they're going to continue doing it and there's going to be more and more victims of it.
As long as we continue on this path of just unfettered access to it, and everybody should get it. And it is particularly demonic. that the people who support this characterize it as An issue of agency and freedom and rights, human rights on behalf of women. Because these four cases and the many more that have probably already happened and certainly will. should fly in the face of that.
Yeah. I mean This is what happens when you don't know where to draw the line when it comes to what. Is a human life because this has been done with contraception, it's been done with emergency contraception where. You know, you quote unquote increase access. You call it women's health care.
And then you're surprised when men use it opportunistically to abuse women. You know, and you can see that in the trafficking world, or you can see that here when it comes to the abortion pill. Regimen, both of those things matter. And it is. That's what I mean when I say.
When evil is allowed to hide, when you know, this is what scripture talks about that. Love sometimes covers Uh but love sometimes exposes. And the most loving thing you can do in some senses is to expose, is not to allow something to remain hidden. And the more and more we privatize these moral decisions, which aren't private moral decisions to begin with because they clearly affect other human beings. the more danger we put ourselves in.
and we put others in and that's I think the future.
So what does this mean in terms of the future of 2016 or 2026 as you asked? And one is the vigilance that the movement needs to continue, that the case still needs to be made. It still needs to be made along the lines of what does it mean to be human. And what is the moral status of the pre-born that still needs to be made? It needs to move into a strategy that takes seriously.
That we are now not talking about clinics, we're talking about. Mail order. Apparently we're talking about a black market. On college campuses. You know, you might remember that some of the early stories about Plan B and the abuses of Plan B.
were vending machines that college campuses, college health departments put on, as if the most important thing you could do for kids engaging in risky sexual behavior is not hold them accountable. It's not make it possible so they don't have to look anyone, not even a doctor in the eye. And of course, that's exactly what happened after COVID or during COVID by the FDA. And, you know, the other part of this in terms of pro-lifers is, you know, we have a lot to be thankful for. We got an incredible, for example, win in the Ninth Circuit.
We'll talk about that in just a second. And that had to do with the complete remaking of the judiciary by the president. By President Trump. But we also know that in this term right now, if we're looking for like rescue from on high on this issue, we're not going to get it.
So far in the second term, We have had instead an encouragement of underregulated in vitro fertilization, which increases the number of abortions. We also have a commitment to not only increase access to the abortion pill. But also generic forms of mefopristone and to advance that. And then we had this kind of throwaway comment this week from the president, which was really weird, and which He tried to make a case that the Hyde Amendment, which is An amendment which says no federal funding can go towards abortion, that needed to be flexible. The Hyde Amendment needed to be made flexible.
It was a weird statement. Let's all remember that sometimes the president says things off the cuff that he hasn't thought through. Uh this might be the case there. But the bigger lesson now, in light of everything that we said, is that A, the movement's not over, the cause is not over. It needs to be pushed back more and more and more and more local.
And if we are waiting for rescue to come from The courts on this, then we're doing it wrong. We need to be as engaged and active in all these levels. As we can. And I think that's going to require pivoting. And I've been pleased at many of the pregnancy research.
Sorry, pregnancy resource centers that I've spoken to and spoken for over the last couple years are pivoting.
Some of the best. They're moving towards abortion pill reversal. They're trying to figure out new. ways to use technology to get in front of abortion-minded women to provide this sort of care. Not just Prior to birth, but you know, ongoing.
And they're also committed to. Not covering up, not whitewashing at all what it is that we're talking about when we're talking about abortion, we're talking about parental responsibility, and we're talking about children. I think there's a lot of good news, a lot of good things that are happening. We've got the March for Life coming up here at the end of this month. You know, this is the longest running.
Political movement of my lifetime and has seen some incredible change. And so, you know, support that. There's state-level Marches for Life Now 2. I would encourage you to look at that. That's another way to be involved.
Um but The movement continues, and it's just as important as it's always been.
Well, Don, tell us briefly what happened in the Ninth Circuit.
So, this is a fascinating story. It could be crazy that the most significant. Win for religious liberty of the year came like six days in. It has to do with an organization out of the state of Washington.
Now, if you hear religious liberty ministry, state of Washington, and the red flag goes up, yes, that we're talking about the same state that has gone after Baron L. Stutzman for years as a private business owner, but also has really tried to whittle away. at uh religious liberty across the board, especially in the name of sexual sexuality and LGBTQ things.
So, this is a rescue mission in the state of Washington that was, you know, basically did a pre-enforcement challenge because the state law basically said. Uh you can't um uh hire uh people who have Christian views on marriage. In the name of the inclusion goals that we have as the state of Washington, you know, you can't you can't um Just hire people who agree with you, especially for non-ministerial positions. What's called the ministerial exception has been argued in various forms for a really, really long time. Basically that In terms of your identity, you can say if this person is a minister, if they're actually kind of advancing the public message of whatever it is that you believe.
then you won't be forced to hire someone who disagrees with that. What's significant about this initial decision from the Ninth Circuit Is that it doesn't argue on the grounds of ministerial exemption. It actually argues on the grounds of personnel as policy. In other words, who you hire. whether internal or external facing.
Is a part of your identity. Basically, creating an incredible amount of elbow room for nonprofit religious organizations. It's not clear how this applies to groups like hospitals or for-profit groups. But uh those in that are 501c3 religious n organizations. Can hire who they want.
And they can't be forced to hire someone who disagrees with their fundamental goals or their views on things like sexuality and marriage, which was the thing that was at stake here. in this particular case. It was incredible language. Particularly making it around personnel and how the persons that you hire in your institution have to do with institutional identity. The other big thing is: look, I'm old enough to remember when everything wrong with the world was coming out of the Ninth Circuit.
It was not that long ago when literally the Ninth Circuit was the notorious ones. Known for advancing a progressive agenda on all kinds of, you would get the crazy decisions out of the Ninth Circuit. And that circuit court has been completely remade around originalists. And so it's a fascinating change to not only get this decision, to get it this early in the year. But to get it out of the Ninth Circuit.
So that's an important decision, and we can. If you want to read it, just read the we'll link to it in the show notes, but you can look up this decision. And I would tell you to read it. The case was the union gospel mission of Yakimal versus Brown. And it's really a remarkable.
Uh The Ninth Circuit affirmed, and this is how I put it in a commentary that I co-wrote with. Our attorney, um Ian Speer. The Ninth Circuit affirmed what many of us already know: religious organizations are more than just employers of labor. Rather, they're communities of shared belief and religious mission. As the court put it in its decision, personnel is policy, who a religious organization hires.
goes to the very character of its religious mission. Incredibly important decision. We're really grateful for it.
So, would I be correct, John, in that this is not the same as saying, for example, a secular tire company does not have carte blanche to say we refuse to hire anybody who doesn't support gay marriage, for example. No, I mean, that's for-profit. That's going to. The the the ramifications there unfortunately. Are going to come from the Bostock decision, which was the decision that Neil Gorsuch wrote, which was a dreadful, dreadful decision.
And basically said that when it comes to basically created an enormous amount of space. for activist groups to claim public accommodation, honestly, is where that ended up and how that applies to employment law.
So this is very different. This has to do with religious organizations. But The important thing is is is that it has to do with even what you might call ordinary positions or non-minister positions. that you can care about who you hire as a janitor, you know, kind of thing. And it wasn't argued in the sense of, in the past, some of these cases have been argued by expanding the ministerial exemption.
Like, well, you know, this person might talk to someone, so therefore we need to conclude him as a minister. Basically, the court is saying, listen, when it comes to those decisions, the government shouldn't have any say whatsoever. I mean, I do know some really chatty janitors, so I feel like that's plausible at all. Because you remember the HHS. I'm kind of crossing lines here, but remember the HHS mandate that was famous?
What made that was so dreadful under Obamacare is that Kathleen Sebelius at the time. not only said that that that this mandate applied. to everything but nonprofit organizations. Or religious organizations, but that religious organizations had to fit a criteria.
So basically, she weighed in and said: if you are trying to witness to someone else, and if your organization's bigger than 50 people, then you don't count.
So, in other words, they were forcing a definition. They were meddling in how you actually could process your own exemption. What this decision basically said is, is once we get into this territory, the state needs to sit down and be quiet. You're talking about the HHS mandate to cover abortions? No, no, no, no.
This is, sorry, I was jumping around.
So let me back up and make sure everybody's clear. The original famous HHS mandate. Uh which came out of the Obamacare. Which basically said that all employers had to provide. Birth control and abortion medication, although they called it birth control and contraception, in their healthcare plans.
And that the only people exempted were people who fit this very Small definition of this is how we got the little sisters of the poor case. This is the little sisters of the poor case. And basically, they created this brand new definition of who counted as a religious exam. It's kind of like TSA, right? TSA suddenly invented their own definition of a minor that nobody else has to go by, but they just called it themselves.
And it always comes back to the TSA, but they did this. This is like international law again. Like, who signs the other part of that contract? That's the whole difference. You see how we full circle here.
This is what David Noble got right. The difference is between positive law and natural law. If it's positive law, people just make stuff up. What's brilliant about this is that they're saying, look, no, this line between church and state, this line between religious freedom is hard and fast. And the state can't cross over and suddenly tell the church how to run its business or can't tell a religious organization how to be religious or what counts as religious or who you think is this or that or the other.
At this point, the state doesn't belong. And that's a very, very different thing than what we have seen in just recent in the recent past of the state trying to redefine, oh, you will only count as a religion or a religious group or religious conviction if you do these things. If you're hesitant to speak up about your Christian beliefs because you're worried about being criticized publicly or shut down, even canceled, well, maybe you're trying to help your kids or students build courage when they face challenges, the new Colson Educators course, Navigating Cancel Culture, is here and can help. Created in partnership with No Safe Spaces, the documentary by Dennis Prager, the course is led by the Colson Center and Brett Kunkel. Using real-life examples, the course explains cancel culture, how it shows up today, and why truth matters, how you can learn practical ways to stand firm and push back.
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Okay, John, I want to swerve now, and I want to talk about something that we got a question about a couple of weeks ago, and this has been on our radar as well. And that is, you know, there's a growing trend of something called adult-child estrangement. And this has been percolating for several years. We talked gosh, I remember talking years ago because I remember recording this in my attic where thankfully I no longer have to record. But we do you remember when we talked about how there was this new trend of like considering everybody who Hurts your feelings all the way to like maybe expects something from you every once in a while as toxic and you should cut them out of your life.
This kind of started entering the zeitgeist around the same time as the kind of therapeutic, like therapizing of every human relationship and emotion. Like you're never just angry, you probably have unresolved trauma or whatever. It's just a new packaging of Freud, I guess.
Well, this horrible trend has really seeped into, predictably so, the relationships between parents and their kids, and in particular, Kind of the millennial generation of adult children who are. Cutting out their parents for a lot of the same kind of therapeutic-ish reasons, calling their parents toxic, essentially deciding that culturally we don't think there is any such thing as an ethical duty to our parents or family, or really to anyone, unless we've chosen to. And then usually we're given a long list of what would deem someone worthy of our time and attention. And it's if they only ever make us happy and they never expect anything from us and they've never hurt our feelings or let us down. Of course, assuming that we've never done the same thing to others, but this is a really, really sad phenomenon.
It's something that's touched my family personally. And You know, do you see this as I do as an extension of this kind of therapizing of the culture? Or is there something deeper happening here that I'm missing? Were the Boomer parents just really, really bad parents? There have always been bad parents.
We can certainly read about a whole bunch in the Bible. That's certainly true. And at some level, you could say, well, this caused this, and this caused this, and this caused this, and pretty soon you're back. In a garden with a snake and an apple, and you know, everything kind of has that common thing. But I don't think you're wrong that there is a.
There's a level of this that is kind of the The interpersonal application of critical theory, right? There's a, and we've often talked about critical theory. Meaning less that people have actually read any of these critical theory textbooks because we haven't. That they actually reflect a mood. And I think postmodernism was the same way, and critical theory is a child of postmodernism, so it all makes sense to me.
But there there is a mood, and the mood is one of critical theory, which is People are guilty because of belonging to a particular segment of the population. And we might make that racial, we might make that socioeconomic, we might make that political or around a particular issue. And certainly the LGBTQ issue has become the dominant one. Or has been the dominant one for a while on these. And if you're on the wrong side of any of these things, then you're guilty.
The other thing, of course, is. There's a sense in which critical theory has no room for forgiveness. Because you're guilty because of the group you belong to, not necessarily because of what you've done.
Now, obviously, that gets complicated because there are bad parents and they're parents who've done hurtful and harmful things. And you kind of think of the generational trends. You're not wrong to say that. This is happening in a particular generational time in history. And it's the same generation that's also basically saying.
I don't want to work because I don't want to work for that person, or I don't want to work for that system. Or, in other words, you're separating yourself from anything that you feel is toxic. And for the record, the parents are coming out of a generation that we complained about, you know. 30 years ago, right? The Gen Xers or the old boomers and saying that the old boomers or the or the Gen Xers themselves are selfish and they're living for money and they don't care about things that matter and that sort of stuff.
Now, Is it Right to put everybody into the category of these generations? No, it's a new form of critical theory. But you do have real, I think, expressions of this, and you have common trends of this. Listen, I started to notice this. about the time.
We put out a practical guide to culture, which is a book aimed at parents and pastors and teachers. And I had a whole bunch of older parents say, what do I do about this? And in the book, we dealt with the LGBT issues, and it was primarily like, how do we help our kids think well? Because we thought we were talking to parents of teenagers. What we were talking to also, though, were parents of 20-somethings.
And the 20-somethings, the parents were saying. My kid won't talk to me anymore. Jim Daly has talked about this out of focus on the family and helping parents deal with this. I started to do some work with a wonderful organization that people in our audience need to know about, the Legacy Coalition. which is all about intentional grandparenting.
You think about all the wonderful family organizations. Very few have anything for grandparents. The Legacy Coalition. has been leading the way on this and they do wonderful, wonderful work. You know, and I would go and speak there, not because I'm a grandparent, but because I was doing some of that translation between the generations of here's what's happening in culture and social media and what's happening in technology and the LGBTQ stuff.
And the question I would get was, okay, but what do I do if my kids won't talk to me anymore? Or my parent my kids say, I can't see my grandkids. Unless I agree never to talk about this, that, or the other. And then it became really tragic when it was. My kids won't let me see my grandson.
Unless I call him her. And in other words, now you're binding someone's conscience and And it was really, really kind of awful. How it all went down. I saw the trend line kick in. You and I talked about Leaving loud from our churches.
You remember that whole conversation, which is associated? And then, you know, not going to Thanksgiving because it was toxic. I think that was the maybe the scenario of it. I think it's a very real thing. This letter that came in asked about what do you do, I wish I knew.
I think some of that's softening, but it is a trend line. It behaves like a cult, which is why the question of what do you do as a parent is so hard. A cult notoriously separates people from their loved ones, especially if those loved ones don't affirm. The truth claims of the cult. And then it leads to any challenge to that just being interpreted as further, you know, refusal to affirm or to love or to include in a very specific way or whatever, which does leave a lot of these parents and families dealing with this in a place of absolutely no winning.
It's truly heartbreaking. The other kind of unspoken perpetrator here is a generation of therapists. That I mean, I'm willing to accuse of just outright malpractice. If you're a therapist seeing somebody and you take at face value, Everything they tell you about their home life and their parents, as if our memories aren't naturally skewed, and if our emotions can't be reined in, or that we can't control our behavior or make room for forgiveness. And then you're either telling people outright, and I know that that's happening, or you're affirming people's decision to cut out their parents.
I feel like you should lose your license for that kind of thing. I mean, it makes me so angry. I mean, because you're not helping the person either. By telling people, yeah, you are so emotionally fragile that you do need to avoid your parents or you do need to cut this person out or whatever. That's not therapy.
But, John, the question I want to ask you is: do we have, as Christians, a duty to our parents? And what does that look like? Biblically speaking, you absolutely have it, a duty to your parents. I don't know that. That means that there's never an occasion to cut them off.
I think oftentimes, I mean, I think we have a whole history of. Bad and abusive men in a family situation, and you know, the best thing is to cut them off. I think some therapists understand the difference, and there's a difference between. Personal responsibility and keeping yourself in danger, but that's the line that I think has been, you know, to your point, increasingly blurred. with a kind of a I don't know even what you call it, a kind of a narcotic therapy.
The only good therapy is affirming therapy and also just reiterating your own fragility. Go back to something we said earlier about recognizing that certain relationships are givens. Right. In terms of our understanding of the image of God, you're not going to get therapy right if you don't get the image of God right. And part of getting the image of God right is getting the givens right.
You know, the givens about us, the givens about our nature, the givens about the moral structure of the universe, the givens about. The essential relationships that we have that God created. And you're not going to get a lot of things right if you don't get the image of God right, but this would certainly be one of them. The Bible, though, is really, really clear. that.
Honor your father and mother. That The one who doesn't care for his family is like an infidel. I mean, there's all kinds of different statements where the Bible assumes, and I think. portrays it in the creation narrative. To the extent, if you think about the kind of the essential family relationship or the essential relationship of family being marriage.
The way Jesus talks, for example, about divorce b being like Yeah, I mean it it's there because the world's a broken place and you're an idiot. But that's not what God wanted. I mean, that's my deep, deep paraphrase there. God didn't want this. God wanted this instead.
And this is, you know, and that these are givens. These are part of it.
So I think there is. But you said something years ago that I I think uh I think what we were talking about this is that There's also just something fundamentally wrong about thinking that Getting rid of everything that's hard is better for me. And it's not, right? Do we believe that God has put certain relationships before us, even the hard ones, even the ones we don't like. And then what is my responsibility to love God and love neighbor?
And who's the neighbor, right? That was the question, and the answer was. Even that guy that you don't like, and from that, from that whole region, you know. But if you think about the presumption being that this entire group of people And the individuals from there that you don't like are your neighbors. I mean, we think God's put our neighbor in our path.
Our neighbors, not less than our family. I would love to see, like, I know there's overlap because of some of the stories you've mentioned and the people you've talked to, but I'd love to see the number of people. I would wager a guess that the majority of people who do this kind of thing, cut out their parents, don't have children. Because that is the most difficult, everything you could complain about with regards to your parents is like amplified a thousand percent when you're a parent. Like, they just zap my energy and I don't feel like I can fully be myself in front of them.
And they're just always saying things that are so upsetting. And they have these moods or these tempered. It's like, yeah, I mean, this is called human relationships. And God help us if we all just decided we literally cannot or should not. stay in any any of these relationships.
I tell you the interesting, I don't know the exact numbers. I haven't seen any numbers like that, but I do know of stories of being estranged until a kid came around and a kid has a wonderful ability to pull that back together. And your parents seem a lot smarter after you feel a lot more clueless. Or you feel a lot more compassion towards them, I suppose. But you remember the book that Ryan Anderson and Alexandria DeSanctis wrote after the Dobbs decision?
Which is religion has poisoned everything. I was religion poisons everything. That was the new atheist. Ryan Anderson and Alexander was abortion has poisoned everything. In other words, it put things into the water.
And what's the most important thing that it put into the cultural waters is that life, the value of life, is convenient. And I remember years ago reading a piece and I can never remember where it's from. I think it was in a First Things. I may have mentioned this last week. I feel like I just mentioned it recently, but I don't know if it was to you or somebody else.
What what people were talking about the conversation about doctor-assisted suicide and so on. And it's like, remember. That the the generation we decided whether to kill or not kill based on their convenience is the generation that we're going to ask to take care of us when we're when we're old. And Yeah. for our older generations.
Just in the cultural waters. Is really going to be shaped, you know, by and large, by some of these presumptions of human value and human dignity. And if we're a world that's already decided that lives that are super inconvenient. aren't worth living. It's a short step to lives that are super inconvenient, aren't worth loving, right?
I mean, it doesn't seem like that's that hard of a step. And and then and then, you know, I I think that I'm not trying to blame us for You know, our own pathologies, but in a sense, You have to fight against the zeitgeist. You have to fight against these presumed ideas that are put into the waters of a civilization. And it's hard to do.
Well, John, I want to get to two other questions quickly that listeners had sent in, which you can do by going to breakpoint.org. and click on contact us. We'd love to hear from you. This first one asks, why is Breakpoint using the what they call leftist Marxist media and socialist Marxist Dems talking points? They're taking issue with us using the word allegedly when we're describing the strikes on Venezuelan boats carrying drugs to the United States.
He's questioning, he's saying that you use the term, I guess, allegedly to say these boats were allegedly narco-terrorists. I'll let you answer this one. I do know as a journalist, at least there's some legal things at play here, but go on. No, I don't want you you don't have to take the blame for this and say we no one else does. I actually added that specifically into it, allegedly, because that's That's what the administration told, and there are questions about it.
It wasn't taking a political talking point.
Well listen, I I'm one that thinks. Language absolutely matters. We talked earlier about made-up words like cisgender or something like that. And when you start using this sort of thing, gay, Christian, you know, when you start using these sorts of language, you're communicating an awful lot. But this was just best practice.
This is, you know, not taking on. Leftist Marxist media and socialist Marxist dim talking points. It was just, yeah, these, when we say allegedly, I dare say those are some talking points right there, but they're going to weigh it into it. They were alleged drug boats and they were alleged drug boats coming to the US. All of that sort of stuff is stuff that's beyond my knowledge.
I didn't get a security briefing. And nobody else did, so it was the best thing for us to say.
So we can move on.
Okay. The next question says: why has there been? seemingly a sharp rise in the number of people claiming to be They wrote transsexual, which is interesting. I feel like this person must be of an older generation. Transgender, other non-binary sexualities.
We've talked about this statistically. There has been a. historic, meteoric rise in these numbers of alternative genders or sexualities. What is that about?
Well, and there's an immediate turn of that number too.
So there's so much in this question that I thought was super interesting. That first of all, yes, there has been an incredible spike of those claiming to be transgender. Not only that, but a specific group. We talked about this in the past where. Oliver O'Donovan in his book on this, on his book of essays, one of the essays has to do with gender, he notes, and he was right when he wrote this 25 years ago, that the overwhelming number of those who are struggling with gender identity.
uh or transsexualism, which is the word he used, which tells you how long ago he wrote it. were middle-aged men with a sexual fetish. What we have seen in the chaos of the current transgender moment. And the backpedaling based on whistleblowers and the Tavistock clinic and all that sort of Matt Walsh documentary and everything else is that the vast majority, five to one, of those struggling with their bodies being born into the wrong body. It was no longer middle-aged men with the sexual fetish.
It was pre-pubescent girls. It was junior high girls. Who had an identity crisis? In other words, they hated themselves.
So that tells you everything you need to know. That there has been a sharp rise, and the sharp rise is not biological. The sharp rise is cultural. That part's been clear. But I did have good news, and that's one of the things that I've seen.
We're seeing a sharp drop off. It's early, but we're seeing a sharp drop off. It knows. young people who are claiming this. In other words, this w seems like it'll be a blip on the screen.
Now, why? It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that there weren't legitimate crises happening with these kids or something like that. Here's why. You have a culture that has An identity crisis.
We've talked about that before. There's a philosophical explanation of this. And we've undermined all the institutions that help us understand our identity, especially family. In a culture like that, you're going to have a bunch of young people with an identity crisis. When you have an identity crisis, People will feel oppressed.
They will feel. Disenfranchised, they will feel harmed, and they will identify with groups. that are kind of the popular harmed group. This is especially true when everything from education to media is making the entire narrative of the world around oppressor and oppressed.
So in other words, in an age of identity crisis, those with an identity crisis identify as the oppressed. Who was the most popular oppress group in the last little bit? I'm not just saying this can be simplified to just, oh, they just wanted to be popular. I'm not saying that. Because many people, it's that they felt like this is who I am.
And I can date this back to an incident in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, where we learned that at a little public school. When the gay issue hit where a remarkable number of young people were identifying as gay or lesbian, they had never had gay sex or lesbian sex or anything like that. They just felt lost and they felt like.
Well They're lost too, I must be like them. And that's what happened on the trans issue. And that's why I think we saw a spike with young women. And I think we're seeing a sharp drop-off now. that in some cases the T in the acronym They're no longer seen as the good guys.
They're seen as the bad guys that are invading women's spaces and that sort of stuff.
So all this stuff is in flux right now. Threatening to claw back the so-called advances made by the L's and the Gs and illegitimizing the whole movement. They're going to be less identified with. Yeah. This, this, what you're describing is such a normal part of human nature, which is what makes the fact that this was medicalized and championed by so many adults so evil.
Like if you say, don't think about an elephant, everybody's picturing an elephant right now. That's how our brains work. If you go into a school to kindergarten and first graders and say you might be in the wrong body, a thing that they never even considered or thought to be possible until two minutes ago, of course they're going to start thinking it. That's how our brains work. And then you add to that the challenges like you're describing of puberty, of your crisis of meaning, all the cultural issues we're having right now.
And of course, you got a toxic soup. Makes total sense. But again, you would hope that you would have a ruling class of at least medical professionals who would not jump on board. But our toxic soup got even more toxic when that happened. Hopefully we can see a continued rollback of that.
In 2026.
Well, John, that is going to do it for the program today. Any quick recommendations you want to throw out there? Oh, you know, I wanted to echo something that somebody wrote in after our conversation about the Ken Burns documentary last week. I've recommended this before, actually, which is Liberty Kids. If you have little kids and you want to think about the 250th anniversary of it, it was so well done.
The list of voice actors for this animated series, which has like 40, 35 or 40 episodes. Anyway, it's a it it it yeah, I thought Liberty Kids was great, so I'll recommend that. Oh, that's a good one.
Okay. I'll recommend Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout. It's been a long time since I've recommended books. But I always get really fun feedback from people when I do. And if you've read this or you plan on reading it, please talk to me.
It was absolutely drop dead gorgeous and an incredible exploration of human nature and just a masterful novel. I think it won the Pulitzer Prize. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout. All right, well, that's going to do it for the show. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint This Week from the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview.
I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street. We'll see you all back here next week.
