You're listening to Breakpoint this week, where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian worldview. Today, we're going to talk about the attempted hijacking of a plane full of Israeli passengers. We're also going to talk about the expansion of school choice tax credits across the country, and we're going to talk about a new study which suggests a rise in the death of moms with ectopic pregnancies. Thank you so much for being with us this week. We're excited to get to the show.
Stick around. Welcome to Breakpoint this week from the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview. I'm Maria Bear, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Coulson Center. John, we're recording on Thursday this week, and you and I have been following, like most people, the story of the flight from Dubai into Israel that was attempted to be hijacked. That sounds like yesterday.
By a pilot who started stabbing his co-pilot until a group of Israeli passengers charged, took control of the situation, put this attacker in a chokehold, and somehow landed the plane safely. This is a wild, wild story. You know there are sport stories in real life where they're so crazy in terms of how the ending goes that if somebody made a movie of it, it would look fake. There are adventure stories the same way. This is unbelievable.
Everything about this story is absolutely stunning, and not just the courage of the passengers to do what they did after the plane had plummeted thousands of feet in like seventeen seconds. Which, you know, a little bit of turbulence turns me into a coward. I just am so amazed by this. But the courage of this pilot who had been stabbed to open the door. Remember, since nine eleven, where we were trying to prevent that sort of hijacking and terror from happening again.
The the door to the cockpit is is closed and locked from the inside. It's inaccessible. This demonstrates something that the Christian doctrine of sin teaches: is that there is a kind of a perpetual creativity to evil. Evil can be mundane and take that form, but there there's always an innovation that there can be kind of the combination of human creativity made in the image of God and human sin rebelling against God's design. Very often results in more creative ways to sin.
There's not not a limit to this, and now you have the threat from outside the cockpit door becoming a threat from inside the cockpit door. And there's so many things that had to happen just right for this not to turn into just an incredible disaster, and it did. And that is a mark of something that Scripture talks about that God continues to intervene and has His hand. In the creation, I know it's very difficult to look and say this is what God did here and this is what God did there, and I know exactly what He did. It's even more difficult to say why.
But there are some stories where you're like God intervened, and God had not intervened. This is where you you have what you you have the other ending, and the other ending should have happened, and it did not because of the way these individuals showed courage, the way that certain. Situations were able to to take place just at the right time. I mean, absolutely incredible story. Can I ask your advice on this?
This unlike nine eleven. I mean, every year on nine eleven, we see all of the news footage and videos, and we hear some of the phone calls. And I'm glad that we have a lot of that evidence because it's important to remember what happened. This. It happened yesterday.
This isn't a time and place when there are already cell phone videos of from inside the plane. I mean, we we have this attack almost fully on camera at this point. Is it wise for people to watch that when it comes across their news feeds? I mean, I think some people have to, right? It's their job.
People who are. Cued up to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, you know, and to learn best practices in subduing aggressive hijackers, you know, that that's their job. Should the rest of us, I think, that's really a case by case basis. But but what you're asking is something that is just the reality of living in a new day. I mean, look, we can look back at nine eleven as being one of the first kind of tragedies like that.
That was videotaped. It wasn't videotaped from every angle, constantly and consistently, like it would be had it repeat itself today. That tsunami of two thousand and four had very spotty but very thorough videos that were just overwhelming, you know. And at one level, there is no need for most of us to see what happened on the other side of the world and let that. Kind of notion of "quote unquote" staying informed give us the illusion that we're actually being helpful, which is something that Neil Postman wrote about in "Amusing Ourselves to Death." That the age of constant information makes you think that staying informed is actually participating, or staying informed is actually doing something, and it's not.
But then you have something like October the seventh, where evil used those videos to perpetuate its evil, as evil as everything. Was that the Hamas terrorist and and the and the Palestinian terrorist did to the Israelis on that day? The fact that it was shown over and over and over around the world in a celebratory way. Remember, the evil of 9/11 was what Osama bin Laden accomplished in bringing those buildings down. It was also the celebrations that happened around the world to the deaths of innocent people.
That's only enabled. You know when the videos get shared, so there there is a moral complicity that happens in a video driven age. There's no question. Yeah.
Well, I want to shift gears now to some good news. This is something announced by the Trump administration today, which is a dramatic expansion of school choice opportunities on a federal scale.
So it's it's a federal tax credit. I'm going to try to explain it as best I can. Starting in 2027 in January, you can give up to $1,700 as an individual or $3,400 as a married couple. If you file your taxes jointly, you can give a donation to what's called a scholarship granting organization, so an SGO, which can then disburse those funds to kids who want a schooling alternative. And crucially, under this expansion under the Trump administration, you can use these funds, these scholarship funds, to attend private school, to support a homeschool curriculum.
You can also use it towards extra services while you remain in public school.
So, if you need additional services, you can use these funds towards that. And if you give up to whatever amount you give up to that thirty four hundred dollars, if you are a married couple that files your taxes together. If you, as long as you have that much tax liability, you are going to get every dollar of that back on your taxes.
So this is this has the potential to become a really, really gigantic program to expand access to additional schooling options across the country. We talked about this last week about. Really, the crisis facing public schools and the opportunity for the church to step into the gap and to start offering new alternatives to the broken public education system. And in a lot of ways, Christian schools have been doing that for years. But one challenge has always been access.
You know, and it it takes money to run a school, and it takes money to attend a private school. And this is going to go a really, really long way towards granting families more access to it. It's a really, really exciting opportunity. And the the interesting thing about this too is that states had to opt into this program. Thirty states have opted in.
I think six states have explicitly opted out. That is remarkable to me. That just drives home the reality that this is an ideological conversation for people because there is virtually no cost to a state. There is they only stand to benefit for something like this because this is just citizens giving donations and then getting that money back on their taxes. It does not take money away from public schools or anything like that.
But that so that states would opt out of it, I think, is really telling. But this is an extremely exciting opportunity.
Well, I think of a couple things. Number one is, is the Trump administration has been widely criticized and rightly so for increasing the the national debt to the level that we have, and and also implementing programs or at least floating out ideas more often than not. There really are kind of a big government form of high spending, and and you know even. I don't want to say socialist adjacent. Certainly not in the same way that we see government-run grocery stores in New York City or something like that.
But but it's not traditionally conservative. And there is a real crisis right now, politically speaking. And what what do we mean by conservative? This does not fit into that category. And that is a very very important point.
This is not additional. Spending it actually is a way of taking tax dollars and directing them in in a particular way. All of us pay and support the public schools. If other schools are actually providing the services that are needed in order to meet the goals that public education was founded for to begin with, then then we we should basically create that level of competition and increase that.
So I think that is a it's it's innovative. It's it's it's it's of course. I think that there's going to be some some interesting developments in the future.
So depending on who the next administration is, if this program proves Sticky enough to to to last and to make it, you'll see some of those other states that opted out opt in because they're not going to miss out.
So you know it's not over that this is just going to be thirty states forever. I I would think that um that there's at least a decent chance that we'll see.
Some of those other states, you know, come back to it, and and then we'll also see how the accounting is done. You know, things can be proposed where the accounting is done one way, and then either under different administrations or because of different issues that are that that that are front and center, the accounting can be done differently, and and then maybe it can the program can lose its integrity. Let's hope that doesn't happen. I just keep going back to something as young as I look, which I know is really really young. I have been privileged enough to to have a seat at the table at some conversations that happened at the state, but also the the national level with you know different Christian people that were engaged in issues of policy, either you know things like to advance religious liberty or to you know protect Christian.
Freedoms and light of some social changes like same sex marriage, and you know we would be called to meetings in D.C. and talk about different things, and and and people would be looking for ideas, and you know and so on. And you know in the early days, I really had nothing to contribute. I would sit there try not to say anything silly and just learn and listen. And I remember early on, at least a handful of the conversations that I was part of, you know, just kind of floating out to the room.
People that were thinking and talking about various ways of increasing school choice, and at the time there was no possibilities. You were going to pay taxes, and you may or may not have the right to homeschool. You were going to pay taxes, and you could certainly expect none of that money to come back with you to the private school of your choice or whatever. I mean, the innovative idea back then were charter schools. Which is okay.
We're going to start schools that are really parent controlled and not state controlled, but really they're still state controlled. But we can do it in freedoms where, or in states where they have increased freedoms. And you know that was a great idea. And then it was followed by another and another and another and another. The idea that something like this would happen literally was unthinkable.
And even at the time of You know, a a Republican or conservative president, it it just it just wouldn't have happened. It they're just it it was a pipe dream. I mean, people were floating out pipe dreams. I mean, I remember people would be like, you know, we're trying to maintain the space that we can for charter schools to have the freedom that they can. And oh, by the way, wouldn't it be great if.
Our tax dollars could go to Christian schools. I mean, it was just, and it was just like floated as if it were the craziest idea that would never happen in the history of the world. And I think of what's happened in the last five years at the state level, and now here at the federal level to expand choice to not only create additional elbow room for innovation. But to also fund it and to free up that funding and to be honest, I mean that's the big part of the story. There's no question about it.
Big, big part of the story is still the wake of COVID. What parents discovered—it's still in the wake of COVID. You know, which at the same time there was this—you know—crazy push for transgender ideology to make its way top to bottom. All the way through the schools, even in a way that the L and the G and the B that that sort of traction that they never got, at least in the educational space, suddenly everything was happening for the T's, and and people were like, "What? And what's happening in the locker room?" And then school board meetings, and you saw you saw these professionals, these educational professionals, and again, we did a piece not too long ago.
What are they teaching these teachers these days? We could have entitled that. What are they teaching these teaching professionals or these teaching association, you know, administrators these days? Because I just think a big part of the story too is seeing the crack in the system. That really, what was hidden was exposed, and it just was something like, well, that created tons of opportunity.
For this innovation to gain some traction, so we needed the innovation. We needed the pipe dreams twenty five, twenty years ago, or whenever they started. Praise God for those people that met in those rooms around D.C. and just floated out ideas. I mean.
Maria, they seemed insane. I I just remember hearing them go, "There's not a chance," and you know where that this is going to go. Any, this is going to go for it, and and here we are.
So, oh ye of little faith, and I'm talking to myself. Praise God for you know some of these innovations. It's better than the previous status quo. There's no question. Yeah, and just.
Yeah, let that be an encouragement. Don't ever accept that. Don't ever accept the idea that something's not possible, even not politically possible, because it wasn't politically it wasn't possible twenty years ago that boys would be playing on girls' sports either. But just as there's an ingenuity to evil, there is a greater ingenuity to good ideas and to faithful service to each other. And this is an example of that.
The it is a federal tax credit program, which means if you live in one of the states that opted out, you know you can give to other states if that makes sense.
So unfortunately, for your federal taxes, right? Yeah.
So the right, you can still give to scholarship granting organizations in other that exist in other states or that are you know over and above the state level. And enjoy that tax credit. That it just means that kids in your state, unfortunately, won't benefit from those scholarships. But right, I mean, do you want do you want the government to have your tax dollars? Do you want a local Christian school or homeschool co op or some sort of something like that?
Now, listen, I want to say this. There's a lot of these now programs. Then these children, these educational. Funding. What did you call them?
Educational funding opportunities. Scholarship granting organizations. Yeah, just just what I said. SGOs, scholarship granting organizations.
So so they're they're popping up and developing these kind of funds, and there's a lot of options right now.
So do your investigation. If you've got passion in one area or another, if you have a particular interest in one state or another, I wanted though to throw this national option out to folks. That is from a partner organization of ours. We've done a lot of stuff with ACSI over the years. ACSI has established the Children's Tuition Fund.
To take advantage of this program, this is a way for you to designate. And again, let's be really clear: it's not just if you have a kid in school. This is for anybody. This is for all citizens to be able to redirect your taxes in one way or another. And so they they've been telling me about this opportunity for a long time and waiting for it to for the headlines to hit.
It hit this week. Get all the information that you need. List of the participating states. You can get a list of how the program, a description of how the program works. And so let me give the website redirectmytaxes dot org.
Redirectmytaxes dot org. You can learn more about the ACsi Children's Tuition Fund, and again, there are more. There are state-run ones as well. My guess is, Maria, that that your husband's organization is doing something like this in Ohio. They are doing it nationally as well.
So they have they have started the Christian Education Network Scholarship Granting Organization.
So if you go to censgo dot org, and actually, if you are a Fox News watcher, you would have seen a commercial for it today, and I believe my handsome husband will be on Fox News next week or in two weeks to talk about it. But they are doing it in Ohio, but also nationally as well.
So that's another option. Two different organizations you guys can check out and take advantage of this. Yeah, but this is this is a great. This is a new day. This is really really exciting.
Has the potential to be really really big.
So very exciting. Let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more BreakPoint this week in just a moment. Christian educators have an incredible opportunity to shape how the next generation understands truth, purpose, and their place in God's story. But to teach from a Christian worldview, educators first need to be formed in one themselves.
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I think it's really going to transform biblical worldview immersion in our Christian schools. Your gift can help bring this transformative experience to more educators and schools across the country. Give today at ColsonCenter.org/slash-October. We're back on Breakpoint this week. John, I want to talk now about something from ProPublica, which I make it a point not never to trust.
But they have come out with supposedly a new report. They're looking at data from the CDC, and they're suggesting that there has been a spike in the number of women who who have died due to ectopic pregnancies. Since abortion has been restricted, so I think they're talking about after Dobbs, or they're looking specifically in states with abortion restrictions.
So, I will just explain really quickly. An ectopic pregnancy is when a pregnancy forms in the fallopian tube instead of in the uterus, and it is never viable. And it is discovered by an ultrasound and needs to be surgically removed because if it ruptures, it can be lethal for women. And so they're claiming, obviously, between the lines, and I believe explicitly, that restrictions on abortion are leading to these increased deaths of mothers who have ectopic pregnancies. I know we both are friends with Ryan Anderson, and that others have pushed back on this.
What are they saying? Is the truth?
Well, listen, ProPublica is not trying to. Hedge what they're blaming this on. They they are blaming this on states that have abortion bans or abortion regulations, and basically they're saying, "Look, what what's causing this this increase in deaths from ectopic pregnancies is that women aren't getting the treatment that they need, and they're not getting the treatment that they need because either the states have banned it, which is never true." No state has a ban on on caring for a woman who is in that vulnerable situation, or that doctors are scared. They're scared that because of the law, they they might get in trouble.
So let me just quote from the article. I mean, they do point to other factors that are kind of covert related and that sort of thing. But here's how how the basically the summary of the article goes. ProPublica analyzed the data collected from every state by the CDC to look for patterns. The analysis shows a growing divide for women in states with strict abortion bans compared with those without.
While the uptick in ectopic deaths occurred nationwide, the climb has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In 2022, so basically they're saying not only is it those states that have those regulations, but especially when Dobbs, you know, what do we say? It kind of greenlit. There were these standing laws that that that Dobbs that restricted abortion in some states, and the Dobbs decision basically made that that law.
Let me just quote Ryan Anderson because first of all, let me say before that. This is not new. Ever since the Dobbs decision, we have every few weeks, sometimes every few months, another article that wants to blame some sort of lack of care on these laws. That basically not only. Is it wrong to rob women of the freedom to get an abortion when they want, for whatever reason that they want?
But it's actually dangerous for women. It actually will increase maternal mortality. It actually is bad for them, and because now, listen, remember the mantra. And the mantra that said over and over and over, and it repeat it.
Sorry, replaced the earlier mantra. If you remember from the Democratic Party and the abortion advocates, safely going rare, safely going rare was. Replaced by abortion is healthcare. Abortion is healthcare.
Well, if abortion is healthcare and women don't have access to abortion, then you have to have the conclusion. You're you're telegraphing that you have to have the conclusion that more women are suffering, maybe even dying, because they don't have the healthcare that they need, and the healthcare that they need is in the form of abortion. The pro publica argument is just another way, or article is just another way of saying that. The problem is not only does the data not point to Dobbs being at fault here, for example, as Ryan Anderson tweeted out, and Jamie Hall wrote in a piece at National Review Online, the big jump in ectopic related deaths occurs a year before Dobbs.
So how do you blame Dobbs for something that happened a year before?
Now, of course, there were abortion restrictions before Dobbs as well. Dobbs just made sure that the restrictions weren't dead in the water coming out of it because of the the long standing legacy of Roe v. Wade. But think about it: if the jump in maternal deaths that were related to ectopic pregnancies happened across the board in states without any restrictions on abortion, as well as states with rejection, and and and it's a noticeable jump across the board. If it's a bigger jump in states that have restrictions on abortion, right?
Which is what the article and the CDC data says. Is there another thing that explains that kind of strange combination of the data? If you don't have access to abortion in terms of surgical abortion, and you want to be able to acquire an abortion. You're basically now have to resort to what mifepristone, misoprostol, the abortion pill regimen.
So it is more likely that percentage-wise, the number of abortions happening in these states with abortion regulations are more chemical abortions than surgical abortions. And guess what? The data does correspond to. The data does not correspond to Dobbs, but it does correspond to the loosening of restrictions on the abortion pill regimen. And one of the things that we've said here a number of times, quoting folks like Christine Francis at APLG and other places, is that that's one of the big dangers of the abortion pill regimen, which we're told over and over and over and over and over and over and over is safer than Tylenol.
But one of the big things is is if your pregnancy is an ectopic pregnancy, you don't know unless you've gone to the doctor, gotten an ultrasound, so that you know if you're dealing with a pregnancy. It happens to be ectopic, and you go through the abortion pill regimen. It is highly, highly dangerous. But now the FDA had remember under President Biden. Had reduced in response to COVID, had reduced the requirements, the in-person visitation.
Now we're giving this stuff out through telehealth. The most likely explanation for this jump in the CDC data, including that it would be higher in pro-life states than pro-abortion states, is not the increase in abortion regulation. It's the decrease. In chemical abortion regulation from the FDA, because it can only be revealed an ectopic pregnancy, I believe, has to be revealed by an ultrasound, and crucially, that was the restriction—one of the major ones—that the Biden administration relaxation of the rules undid.
So now, and we know we've talked about before the growing black market and the kind of unrestricted wild, wild west of access to these medications. That are happening now, including in states that restrict it, and so women are taking these medications, and sometimes they're being given it without their knowledge by abusive boyfriends or husbands, and not knowing whether they have an ectopic pregnancy, and that's as you said, it's extremely dangerous. Did we articulate the level of the surge too? I mean, this is this is noticeable. This is important to mention.
So I'm quoting from the National Review summary of the data.
Okay.
So, in 21 years, from 1999 to 2021, the average number of ectopic pregnancy-related deaths per million—so out of every million, 4.2—very, very low, right? From 1999 to 2021, suddenly in the year 2021, it more than doubles. That's the surge. I mean, we're not talking about. A small thing here, four point two to nine point eight, and over the past five years, it's averaged seven point eight.
So we're talking a significant jump. And what's the year? Twenty twenty one. When did the Biden administration reduce the in person requirements for achieving the the abortion pill regimen? Yeah, twenty twenty, or mid twenty twenty.
So I mean, it it just is it it's right there in front of us. It's just right there in front of us. It it is interesting too that ProPublica includes in the beginning of their story that abortion bans or restrictions on abortion specifically make allowances for ectopic pregnancies because that's not considered an elective abortion. That's it is a life saving surgery of a non viable pregnancy. That this is not the same thing ever as going in and killing a child.
And in fact, when they they you know they have personal stories in here of women who've suffered with ectopic pregnancies and you know were turned away at the hospital or didn't get the surgery that they needed. And in all of those cases, like these hospitals, ProPublica is saying did not follow their own protocol, did not follow the law. The law that was in place and that is still in place, like none of this has to do with abortion law. This is, I mean, there might be medical malpractice in individual cases, but at the very least, there's no way to ignore the correlation between these increased deaths and the abortion pill regimen. It's just a dangerous situation.
Well, it's important for us to talk about this because, again. It's kind of like if you continue to say the lie, eventually it becomes truth for people, and this is the lie that gets is repeated more and more and more and more and more since Dobbs. No one, you're not, you don't hear the other side say, "Oh no, a group of women have lost their autonomy." I mean, you hear some people say that. But most consistently, the way people are trying to change this back to the way it was is that women have lost their health care. Women have lost their health care.
Women have lost their health care, and therefore they're going to die. And so you have to have this. This is why we had all these stories that came up around the last election as well of these women who were supposedly not treated the way that they were supposed to have been treated, and they died from these you know complicated pregnancies. And then the details continue to come out, and it's what you said. You know the doctors were were guilty here of malpractice.
This is their fault. This is the hospital's fault, and this is a group of doctors and a group of hospitals that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo when it comes to abortion care and abortion rights. And by the way, when when ProPublica is saying the hospital didn't follow their own protocol, what they're saying is the hospital didn't adequately test the woman's pregnancy with an ultrasound, which is what used to be required before you could take that pill. But now it's not.
Now they're they're trying to celebrate a law or celebrate a deregulation that allows hospitals and you know allows doctors to prescribe this medication without doing an ultrasound. In the same breath, saying while they they really failed these women by not doing an ultrasound. It's hard to know what you're asking for here. Right. No, I agree.
It's it's important. Thanks to. National Review for publishing this. That's the that's my recommendation for the week. Is to pick up that article from Jamie Hall that's in National Review.
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Well, speaking of surveys, John, I want to talk about a new report from Jean Twenge, who, of course, was one of the illustrious speakers at the Coulson International Conference last summer, who has done extensive research on online habits, sexual and dating habits among young people in particular, and one of the things she shared this week was that. The percentage of young adults who are identifying as LGBT, but I think mostly LGBT, is in an absolute freefall. And you know we've talked about this before, but it is becoming even more pronounced than it was even last year. She found that in 2022, I think 20 percent of young adults ages 18 through 24 were identifying as LGBT at least. And now it's just over fifteen percent, so this is adding up to around a twenty-one percent decline in three years.
And then the the cliff is even steeper among younger kids.
So thirteen plus the number of those kids who are identifying as somehow non-binary or some other You know, sexual orientation is just absolutely in a free fall. You know, I am so thankful for Jean Twenge. I appreciate her work so much, mainly because she's just willing to go where the data goes. She's just honest about it. She's not ideologically committed to you know the biblical understanding of male and female as as you and I would be, and as most of our listeners would be, and as everyone, and especially every Christian, should be.
She she she's she's a data person, and we talked at the conference primarily about kind of some of the changes to the younger generation in terms of mental health and how it corresponded with cell phones and social media and things like that. And the evidence is just undeniable, right? When you look at the the the the charts or the graphs that show the up into the right. Increase in mental health issues as well as increase in social media and cell phone use—they basically lay on top of each other. But the other third one that lays on top of that same sort of trajectory is LGBTQ identification.
And I asked her at the time, "Are we going to see now that we see more and more adults willing to say no to social media and that sort of stuff? Are we going to see a reduction?" In the T, the LGBTQ identification, and she said more data needs to happen. What's interesting, more data needs to come in, as she put in one of her articles on on this study.
Well, the data's in, and she's willing to say out loud what it actually reveals.
Now, fascinating enough, a couple weeks before she published this piece, basically saying that. Among young people, it is in a free for all. This identifying as LGBTQ, it is not in free for all with other generations.
So, if you're talking about millennials, you're talking about older generations, particularly that one that first experienced the big spike in it, which is the millennial generation. It's holding steady. In fact, in a particular age group of young. Of of of women, middle aged women, it is even on the increase. There, not actually going down.
I have so many thoughts on some of those realities in terms of. It's just that every bit of this data suggests that this has always been a social contagion. It is a social contagion, and oh, by the way, we talked about the T as if it's a social contagion, but not the L and the G and the B. But it's also a social contagion. Look, I I don't know many other issues that I could say I've lived through the whole kind of trend.
You know, like I was there at the beginning when when people were warning about it, and now we're on the end. But I'm almost there on this one, right? I remember as the growing calls for acceptance of gay and lesbians. And you know, gay lesbian rights and came initially through non-discrimination laws. One of the big arguments that was used was a false use of numbers.
It was quoting Alfred Kinsey's statistics, who said that ten percent of a population is homosexual. His study group, as you might remember, were prostitutes and prisoners. They were not a representative sample of the larger population. When the real numbers came out, they tended to come out pretty consistently for about a decade, as two percent or three percent, maybe four percent. And we would talk about that to our kids because, at for example, at youth group and and because look and at Christian schools and and and talking to parents and helping them understand, like it's not ten percent; it's it's two or three percent.
Why is this very very small group of the population having such an outsized influence and having such an outside, you know, power to change things and so on? And then I remember when the numbers spiked to ten percent, and then twelve percent, and then twenty some percent. I remember not that long ago we had this conversation here on this program, where I had two different people working with youth. One was a Middle school teacher in New England, and one was a middle school youth pastor in the Midwest, and both of them said, in one form or another, when asked how many of kids in your group identify as LGBTQ, and their response was, "Do you remember? Like all of them, all of them, and the reason wasn't so much." That they wanted to identify as an L, a G, a B, or a T, or a Q, it was because they didn't want to be identified as the oppressors, which were straight and cis.
No one wants to be, and that was the line one of them says. Oh, no one wants to be straight or cis anymore. If you know what cis means, cisgender, the opposite of transgender. That was not that long ago. That was not that long ago.
And now we have among this growing generation, this this free for all. And what can explain it? You know what can explain it? There was a group of adults saying, "You know what? You don't have to believe this." That's almost all it took.
Yeah, there was a whole bunch of teachers saying, "You have to believe this." There was even some parents saying, "You have to believe this." But just the courage of a group of grown-ups. Including our president, but also the Riley Gaines of the world, and also the celebrity, the J.K. Rowling's of the world, and also just others not making it the central thing that happens that that defines everything else. Just saying, you know what? You don't have to believe this, and a whole bunch of them are like, "Good, I don't want to believe it anyway." There's just not better example of a social contagion, or more proof.
I mean, it just it it just goes back to this over and over and over, and I think. I think of all the parents, and I think of all the Christians who were not confident in their worldview, and we talked about this at the time too. Because remember, you remember there was one program where I said, "You know what? I'm starting to sense that more Christians are second guessing themselves, just like they did on the same sex marriage issue. They were saying, 'Well, maybe I'm, maybe I am a bigot.
Maybe I got, you know, Christians were wrong about.'" And a racial marriage, which, by the way, many many were not. A whole bunch of people were wrong about that one, and it was not specific to religion. But they were saying, maybe we got that wrong. And now they had moved on to the trans issue and said, well, maybe my kid was born. After all, and then the suicide myth, you know, was what was being used as a sledgehammer to pummel them into guilt.
And and and you you think about the people that kind of got along with the agenda.
Well, maybe we just need to get along. Maybe he should have just baked the cake. Maybe he should, and just you know, you talk about being on the wrong side of history. Boy, that accusation didn't age well, did it? I think it's really important to stress that when we're talking about numbers and we're saying you know they were way overblown.
Obviously, when we're talking about survey data, we're usually talking about self-reporting. But even the measurements that are like ten percent of people are gay, or two, two or three percent of people are gay, I'm even trying to be careful about how I say that because I think it is measurable to ask people about their sexual attraction, and it seems demonstrable to me that some people have genuine, earnest sexual attraction for their own sex. But I I don't want to talk about this because I don't think it's accurate. As if it's the same thing as measuring the number of people born with blue eyes. Like, well, two to three percent of the population are born with this condition or that have this, whatever it is.
And it may be. I mean, it may be true that like. Two to three percent of people will have those earnest desires or whatever it is, but even the way we talk about that is so important because a certain percentage of people are also born with, you know, a proclivity towards addiction or. To lying, or who struggle to understand sympathy or empathy, or or have or have whatever particular difficulty towards or away from a certain virtue, that can be that should be like noted and dealt with in whatever proper way you can. But to to say you know, well, this is like two two to three percent of the population are this, and and that means this.
Now the the stats changing is a different kind of story, and is also So fascinating, and I think it, you know, it reveals once again that kids are extremely mimetic. We've always known that about kids, and that that's just what social contagion is. But the crucial difference with this one was that there were so many adults, just as there are now adults, hopefully invested in helping kids see that they don't have to go along with this. There were so many adults that doubled down on this, as opposed to other social contagions among young people that are just normal and general that go away with time, and that we we've always been happy to chalk up to just kids being weird and their brains being underdeveloped. This was one of those rare times when adults, because they had something to gain themselves, were able were were looking at this and saying, "No, that's correct.
You must be homosexual, or you must be born in the wrong body because X, Y, and Z." And I think that should also, though, inform how we understand those two to three percent. What we're calling the two to three percent people, too, because how have we ever really explored how often it happens where a kid either has some sort of sexual confusion, has maybe, God forbid, a sexual abuse story or history, or some kind of trauma, or some kind of Even like a cognitive challenge or whatever, and to tie it up in a bow, we come to the to it with the explanation that they're gay and that's or that they have same sex attraction, and that's not what's happening. But because kids are impressionable and mimetic, we say it to them, and then especially when it carries social cachet, they accept it, and then they integrate it into their understanding of themselves, and then it becomes real when it never was because. I just don't accept that sin is unchangeable or is ever fixed and real. The two to three percent never suggested that at all.
It was just reporting those who had same sex attraction, and the the idea that because they have that, therefore they are this, and this is a legitimate category of what it means to be human. That was that that was all ideological back backloaded onto this whole thing. Right, I mean, there was never a reason to assume that because there is a group of people, and that was kind of the conversation that we were having back then.
Well, people have all kinds of proclivities. Proclivities. If we're born with our proclivities and we can't change, then whatever implications you're drawing out for being gay or lesbian has to be applied across the board to other things that no one would would want to do. And and so that's the way the argument went.
So somewhere along the lines, a part of the social contagion was creating these new categories of what it means to be human, and then you know basically disenfranchising young people, especially in their identities, so that they were looking for new ones, and a lot of them settled on these innovative categories, and and that's really you know kind of you know the story here. It it it it was it was it was always obvious.
Now I will say. That not only were there, you know, adults that were encouraging this and leading people into this because they had something to gain.
Now they have something to lose, and I think there is going to be an incredible conflict.
Now, first thing we should notice: not only is that there is a conflict of interest because many of these people are trying to advance identities for themselves, but also that there is a crazy inconsistency. Right, because in the whole, so here you have this plummeting number of young people, especially younger kids, identifying as these alternative categories, and they're doing it to a group of people who deeply believe that that was, you know, the identity of of a crazy number of of these of these young people anyway, and. They told us that proof was that they said so themselves. Remember, we're just supposed to believe the kids.
So I'm really curious if some of these adults, particularly educational professionals and medical professionals and government professionals, that were so committed to this myth going forward, are going to be as quick to believe the kids as they told us we should be as quick to believe the kids. My guess is the answer is no. I also think that there's going to be Huge conflict. There was a story out of, I think it was Burlington, Massachusetts, or Burlington, Vermont, this week. It was somewhere in New England, and this is just an anecdote.
And anecdotes aren't data, and this isn't what we see across the board. But at least made the local news, where local news reporters basically did a whole story interviewing teachers about their deep concern. That the kids, that there was this bigger group of kids that refused to participate in pride celebration. It was like an episode of Seinfeld. The report, do you remember that one episode of Seinfeld where Kramer wanted to wear the ribbon?
He did. It was a ribbon. It wasn't a sticker.
Well, these are kids who didn't wear the sticker. They threw the sticker on the ground. And they also said that their pronouns were USA, which is actually pretty funny and creative. Don't laugh at that, John. Why can't I laugh at that?
Is that not? I think it's. Am I going to get in trouble for laughing at that? It doesn't make any sense, but I do find it amazing, and I feel like all of the boys in my high school. The other use of pronouns didn't make any sense either.
So that's fair. You know, let's just take. I still have yet to meet a person who had. You know, because you had to give your your singular pronoun and then your possessive pronoun, and I always wanted to meet someone who flip flopped between those. Like I'm a he when you're referring to me as the object of noun, but when it's a possessive, it will be hers, please.
So that my email signature can say he her. Pronouns—the growing use of pronouns—corresponded with the decreasing understanding of grammar. Grammar, it's just an absolute free for all.
Now, now, to be fair to the CBS News Group, there was a little bit of a aggressive counter protest to these pride celebrations.
Some rabble rousing, some light shenanigans. They destroyed the rainbow decorations. Actually, what they said destroyed was they put they threw them on the ground. I don't know if they ripped them up, and maybe there's you know these chanting and all that. But you know, as one board member said, I'm very upset.
I've lost sleep over it. It shocked me to my core. I didn't think it could happen in Burlington. Are they talking about an Islamic terror cell? No.
Are they talking? Are they talking about some incident of violence or some you know flash mob? You know, robbing the local. Nike store, no. You know what?
What shocked him that he didn't think could happen is a group of elementary students not get on board with the pride celebration. Not get on board.
So I just think we're in a new day, and I think we're gonna have. For one, think I think the children are our future, and we should allow the children to. We should trust themselves. We should let them take the lead in their education. Um and you know maybe Timmy um just felt that way that day and he needed to express his feelings and we needed to allow space for them and it does not sound like this was a school board member in Burlington was hey middle schoolers have feelings man it was middle school they need to express them.
It is an interesting thing. It will present an opportunity to use the logic of the pro LGBT movement against them.
Now, I I don't know that that will always be wise or the virtuous path to take. But we've been lectured for the past fifteen years that the children are in charge of themselves and their identities and their behavior and their feelings, and that the only way to appropriately engage with them is to allow them to express themselves in whatever way that looks like. And it sounds like they were expressing themselves in Burlington. The the co chair of the Burlington Equity Coalition says that they need to be consequences for students who participated in the counter protest. We don't.
Consequences in this family, we only do positive reinforcement, so they're out of luck.
Well, and the real problem, the real problem—that was a joke, by the way, everybody. That was a joke. Yeah, we heard it. the The real. I'm about to do another one.
The real. Apparently, the real problem in the Burlington school district is that there has been a diversity, equity, and inclusion staff member position that has been vacant for about a year. John. I will give you a reference. They can't do their very important work.
I think we know where you're headed. But this, this to me is just really, it's just like we've shoved this down and used all these levers of power to shove them down little kids' throats, and now you have a group saying no, and it's like the apocalypse happened. I mean the comments on this article. This is CBS News Boston. This, so you going to go look at it?
It's about Burlington Middle School, and I am guessing Burlington, Massachusetts, not Burlington, Vermont. But it's almost like the apocalypse happened at this school. I mean, the language that they're using about shock and awe is like they were in a war zone, and basically, you had a bunch of. Kids who would not wear the sticker chanted "USA" and said, "You know, threw the rainbow things on the ground." It makes me think of a. There's a band called Mute Math, one of my favorite all-time bands.
They have a song, and they have a lyric that says, "I preach love all the time, but I can't get these clowns to listen," which is such a great line. And that feels like what's happening here. We're trying to get these dumb kids to be inclusive, and there's going to be real consequences about this. Yeah, I don't know if this will happen more. Again, kids are mimetic, and you know, I don't even know that we should put stock into like these are all really brave, like morally courageous kids who are standing up to the these are.
But if if You know, if the pendulum switches and or swings back, and kids feel empowered towards at least something more closely resembling reality for a while, that will be a positive. Yeah.
Well, it seems like the parents were on board too, and that you know they're getting a lot of support from from their parents.
So we'll we'll see what happens. But speaking of narratives, I want to get to this. I know we're kind of nearing the end, but this story it just was. Too good not to share as well, and I feel like today is the good news program. You know, that time we're giving you good news and data, and good news and options, and good news about the younger generation, and good news about happiness.
So, there was a video that went viral from a San Francisco Giants game. Did you see it when it came out? Yes.
Okay.
So the so the video was a woman with a baby strapped to her her chest carrying a bunch of trays of food back to her seats, and her husband was there. And the video, I guess the announcer, the cameraman found it, and the announcer was saying funny things like, "Oh, honey, you forgot the ketchup," you know, and like like she was the mom of the year, and so she was proclaimed mom of the year for being able to multitask and all of that sort of thing. And then the social media mom got a hold of it, and literally called for her to divorce her husband.
Okay, well, hold on. Clearly, was let me describe. Let me describe the video a little more clearly. She had a baby strapped to her chest. She comes back to her seat.
She's holding like three orders of nachos. Right. She takes a minute to sit down because that's she's got a lot to manage in her hands. And it's you know risky to sit down holding nachos at a game anyway. It's you know they're cramped seats, whatever.
There's an incline. She sits down. She has like a little conversation with her husband. It looks like, and then he grabs the top thing of nachos and just starts going to town on these nachos. Yeah, yeah.
And and she's still kind of like trying to figure out how to hold these things while her baby is strapped to her belly, and it's it looks. It looks like it looks like the King of Queens, like it looks like a sitcom, right? It looked it looked compromised. It looked like this guy was a bonehead. It looked like the moment when like mom like mom is has three is holding three different children, one of them's crying, dinner's on the stove, and then dad comes in the room and is like, "Honey, have you seen my keys?" And you are like, "This can't be happening right now." But what was true?
Did you read her Substack about it? It was so sweet and beautiful.
So literally, she wrote a Substack in which she said, "I'm the mom who's the I'm the mom of the year." Let me tell you the real story of the whole thing. And she walks through the whole thing, which is predates the game. Even at the game, why he ate first, why she was carrying all the food. Why she went to the bathroom with the baby, and at every stage she makes the decision to even though he's like, well, here I'll hold the baby, or here just get whatever's quicker, or here you eat first, and here you and at every stage he looks like now husband of the year. I mean, and she looks awesome too, but it is a beautiful scene, and then.
You enter it right where you're like sometimes as a a dad, you see your wife just flourish in this, you know, ability to multitask in the ways that that she's doing, and it's it's just an incredible thing. And she talked about that and how happy she was as a wife, and and all of that.
Now. The reason I thought about this story is because of right before we went on the air last week, the Institute for Family Studies published another report. And when I say another report, like I, when I talk to high school students at Summit Ministries or other places on, kind of a sociological look, a Christian worldview look on marriage and the family, the two arguments that I make from from the social science data, is that marriage is Beneficial for societies, and that marriage also is beneficial for individuals, because the argument sometimes is, well, of course it's good for societies because it's good for a man, and it's a patriarchal society, and it's not really good for a woman. And I've started tracking the data, and there's been two areas in particular that's really fascinating. On this one is happiness studies, which I never know quite what to think about happiness studies because that's such a subjective category.
But given all the think pieces we have about women who left their families in order to be fulfilled, the data says exactly the opposite. Given how many movies we have of you know eat, love, pray, and all that sort of stuff, the data comes back over and over and over. And given all the false narratives about Sexual autonomy and sexual freedom. The numbers come back about satisfaction, and the category of human beings on the planet right now that rate the highest on meaning, purpose, happiness, physical satisfaction are middle-aged, married, religious, church-going. Got to go to church.
That's a big part of it. Women, it's an amazing thing, and I think it reflects something really huge, which is something that my daughter told me that Abigail Favally said in her talk at the conference that we mentioned last week there in New York. The this idea of defining womanhood from a Christian perspective that we can't just start with. What's above the neck, like psychological categories, which is where a lot of these conversations about the difference between men and women have have come from. But we got to start with what's below the neck, like the things that are obvious and that are real: the body, chromosomes, the hormones, the organs, the the the size, the shape, the all of that.
And it's just the the the social media chaos around this video of this poor woman. And as one Marxist writer put it this week, look, telling someone you've never met before and you don't know anything about that she should divorce her husband is just stupid and dumb and evil. I think he said. But but the narrative is there, and it the narrative was forced on this video, and it's understandable because guys can sometimes be idiots and insensitive, and we want our nachos before anything else. Like I get all that.
But it just wasn't true, and I just thought, what a beautiful, beautiful reinforcement of the truth of how God made human beings. I think you're right. I want a sick. I want no, no, I do. You feel like you're about to pivot.
No, I'm not. I'm not. I just i i saw a different angle that maybe is a little bit less good newsy, but but still like very sweet. This story is very sweet. Um, I just want a sick Sherry Turkle on this because.
Here's what I mean: the way people responded to this and what they read into it, and not just read into it, but felt like confident in. You know, like these sorts of videos are now are entitled to make a comment. Yes, like and so it's not. It's like people aren't even aware of what they don't know. They truly believe they know the truth of what happened.
I have to assume that, otherwise, you wouldn't say something publicly, right? Especially something as Well, it's like the you remember the story of the Cumbington Christian School, yeah, kid on the National Mall, and everyone knew he was being disrespectful. I mean, yeah, people say I've seen that look before. It turned out to be exactly wrong of what actually happened, right?
So, what I mean by Sherry Turkle is like she has famously studied the way interacting with digital technology has changed our perception, our perception of ourselves, and has sort of like made us think of ourselves in more mechanistic terms. And made us think of digital technology in more human terms, and all the havoc that that's wreaked, wrought. I don't know. I want some kind of. I know there are people studying this, but this is a story to me about the poison of social media and the constant barrage of it has so objectified people to us that that they are truly objects to us.
Like, and it's it is not. It it feels more possible to people that they should have the right and actually probably have the duty to tell this woman to leave her husband, than it's possible that a woman would sacrifice for her husband in that little sweet way, or that people would do things for each other in that way. It's like t here is t here is a language of love and sacrifice that is. Out of speak, and people don't even recognize it when they see it. Like it's so unlikely, and I think that part of that is from is a symptom of the same problem that leads people to say stuff online, like you should leave your husband.
Which is that we've spent so many years now consuming each other like their little avatars or little characters in a game. That we actually think that's what people are like. There is a joke in Thirty Rock where the Tracy Morgan character, who's like a hilarious, silly narcissist, says something like, "His character name is Tracy Jordan, and he goes, 'I'm Tracy Jordan. When I go to sleep, nothing happens in the world.'" And I think a lot of I think social media has given us. Kind of that impression that, like, first of all, there is a little bit of an irony given the sheer number of pop culture references you've given.
I know, sorry, in this program alone, which is really, really stunning. But we all have our vices. But you know, you're you're you're not wrong. I you made me think of I was talking about C.S. Lewis with a friend the other day, and you know what Lewis really believed in his and why he did Narnia and so on.
Is that not only where was there a unseen realm of the world by which we could really gain real knowledge if we took it seriously, but with a scientific approach which had defined modernism, we were forgetting really important stuff. And I think the same thing can be said or applied to social media.
So, like we said at the beginning of the program, nine eleven was experienced differently than Pearl Harbor. The tsunami of two thousand four was experienced differently than nine eleven. The October the seventh massacre was experienced completely differently than any other attack that we have ever seen in human history in terms of the number of angles. But what were we not seeing by seeing everything? What were we not seeing because of?
Or maybe not in that event, but what are we not seeing? And part of that is—is we're so convinced we're seeing it all, and and we're not. And then all the other entitlement that comes along with it. I mean, look, I, I think it's just weird that discernment bloggers, for example, in the Christian space, feel like they have a demand on getting to the bottom of everything, and everyone needs to answer their emails. I get emails from them all the time asking about other people.
Why? And and and and they get really upset if I don't respond. Why do I need to respond? Who says you're in charge? Like I don't understand any of this.
I have spiritual responsibilities to ABC, but not to you. I think that there's just so many ways that the social media world has changed our perspective, and it's not only keeping us from knowing stuff, but we're intentionally forgetting kind of an awful lot of stuff. And I I think that that place. But I also think the kind of analysis that was done on this video could only be done. By a culture that assumes certain things about men and women, and so I'm I'm not sure that it's just like we're seeing with eyes that have been shaped by our technology.
We're seeing with eyes that have been shaped by our ideas too.
So. I think that IFS study is is worth seeing in light of that video. And if, by the way, you haven't seen the video, don't look at any of the comments. Most, almost all of which are asinine that go along with the video. But the video is classic.
If you are married and you have kids, you will be like probably a cute metaphor in here somewhere too about wearing a baby because I think she mentioned something like this, but. My husband and I used to fight over who got to wear the baby. Like, there's nothing better, and it's not just because you love your baby, but it's like weirdly so comforting and comfortable. Did you see why she said it? She was like, "I was, I was freezing, and the baby was keeping me real warm." That's exactly what she said.
She's like, "It was cold. It was cold." We literally would fight over the source of heat, and you get so much, you get so much positive attention. You feel like a movie star when you're walking around wearing a baby like that. Like. I'm so excited.
It's well. Then she's like, and then I had to go to bathroom, and then I was like, well, I might as well change the baby. And you do that too. Like you don't, you change the baby based on convenience. It takes way more work to take the baby out of there and give it to somebody else.
Like yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it it just you just read it all. You're like, if you if you've had this experience at all, you're like, all the all of this makes perfect sense. But what's crazy, she would have written like a follow up piece. Did you see this?
She actually had to write a follow up piece. Because everyone basically said, "Oh, you have Stockholm syndrome." You know, oh, for the love.
Okay, well, she needs to turn off the internet, girl. Just go enjoy your life. They're just jealous. Like I don't know. I think she was enjoying, kind of pushing back on all this.
Okay, good for her.
Well, good for her. She's one of those happy people that Brad broke up. Yeah, you're right. No, I was sort of. I know she's religious and goes to church, but she's still happy.
She's yeah. She's got at least one thing in the bucket. I was like, dude, you can't take the other two things of naan. Like you can eat your nachos. Too, but you can hold the other two.
Like, come on, just take another. But yeah. Oh, that's the angle. You just couldn't let it go. I couldn't.
She explained that too. She's like, look, I'm here. He had dinner yet? She had. She she had eaten already.
Did you miss that part? And he and he had just recently lost a friend, and going to this game together was like part of helping him heal. It's a really yeah. You should you should check out her substack if you haven't already. And he potted up for three orders of twenty six dollars nachos.
So oh well, that's a whole other story. That's just highway robbery. They were probably just Tostitos that somebody used their bare hand to get out of a bag and put in there. But anyway, um, okay, that's gonna do it for. The program this week.
Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint this week from the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview. I'm Maria Bear, alongside John Stone Street. We'll see you all back here next week. God bless.
