Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. In March, with an 8-1 majority vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, quote, counseling conversations are speech. and that states cannot silence viewpoints in the counseling room.
The majority included all the justices but Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, who claimed in her dissent that states should be able to use, and I quote here, police powers to establish and enforce the standards of care that bind medical professionals, including what she called professional medical speech. And apparently, for Justice Jackson, that power should also include the ability to determine what should count. As scientific consensus, given the collapse of consensus on this issue of so-called gender-affirming care.
However, in a concurring opinion to the majority decision, liberal justices Kagan and Sota Mayor noted that the Colorado law was not viewpoint neutral. Had it been, they said, it would have raised a different and more difficult question. In another instance last summer, Justice Sotomayor did not agree with a Trump administration policy, but she also believed it was not the place of the court to decide. Justice Jackson, on the other hand, described her appointment to the Supreme Court as her opportunity to, and I quote, tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues, end quote. What's happening on the court is an example of an ongoing fissure between liberals and progressives on both the political and ideological left in America.
As Colson Center Senior Fellow Dr. Glenn Sunshine previously described, part of this difference is that standpoint epistemology, the liberal idea that each has our own truth from our own perspective, has now devolved into expressive individualism, the idea that our truth should be imposed on everyone else as a matter of our own human dignity. The implications of this shift from liberalism to progressivism are quite significant, especially when it comes to the rights of speech and conscience. Back on April 22nd, Lois McClatchy Miller posted a clip of a British police officer informing a street preacher he could not share the gospel in places or ways that might cause offense or dissuade people from seeking abortions. And back in March, Paivi Razanin, a lawmaker in Finland, was found guilty of, quote, inciting hatred for calling homosexuality a disorder back in 2004.
Now no riots and no hatred were actually ever incited in the over twenty years since, but she was guilty of believing and expressing wrong things. And also in March, the Chicago Bulls waived guard Jaden Ivey due to conduct detrimental to the team. That's a loaded phrase given the conduct that is regularly tolerated by sports franchises. It's notable that Mr. Ivey had only posted a video of himself critiquing the NBA's promotion of Pride Month.
You might remember when many progressives left Twitter when it was purchased by Elon Musk. But that was not because they feared that their ideas would be suppressed, only because they feared that contrary ideas would not be suppressed. And so they moved to the alternative social media platform Blue Sky, which has turned out to be quite a mess. The progressive drive for ideological purity has stunted any real conversation there. As biologist Colin Wright noted, and I quote, I'm blocked by thousands of accounts on Blue Sky I've never even interacted with since I almost never post.
People over there block on the first contact with any ideological friction. That results in a bunch of small isolated communities. Not ideal for a social media app, end quote. But that kind of intolerance is of course a feature of progressivism, not a bug. Though people will often use liberal and progressive as interchangeable terms, they're not the same thing.
Like the new dissident right, which devolved out of classic conservatism and rejected core tenets of it, progressivism and liberalism are certainly not the same either. Liberalism called for tolerance. Progressivism silences dissent and then calls it tolerance. Progressivism claims to be about moving forward, but forward is really just a rejection of everything old, traditional, and settled. In fact, to modern progressives, progress is transgression.
They sense the world is not as it should be, but then they're threatened by the idea that there is a way it should be. Divorced from reality and reason, compliance with this vision cannot be argued. Rather, it has to be enforced. And thus, we've had this shift from encouraging all viewpoints to punishing all dissent. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to breakpoint.org. What would it look like to see everything, the world, this cultural moment, and your calling in it from a Christian world view?
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