The Capture of Maduro, the Inauguration of Mamdani, What's Ahead in Abortion Laws in the New Year and Adult-Child Estrangement

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 Venice, Wala. 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 Colson Center for Christian World View, I'm Maria Bear, alongside John Stone Street President of the Colson Center. John, we've got to start this week with Venezuela. Most of our listeners will know the details at this point. On the second, the U.S. issued a military strike, essentially capturing the man who claimed to be president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro. He's been in power there for many years now, and has presided over 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 touchpoint 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, I think just because Trump did it doesn't make it bad, and just because the 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, and that kind of is where it becomes a difficult thing to to analyze. We're talking about categories ethically of just war, and there are, this was a bold action. Now, I think there's a couple of things worth saying. Number one is that Venezuela was one of the most wealthy and well-to-do nations in the world, and it wasn't that long ago. The difference between then and now, in which it has mired under poverty, our colleague, Roberto Rivera, back in 2019, wrote about something that was being called at the time the Maduro Diet. So Hugo Chavez was the first socialistic tailor to take over. Maduro followed him, and the Maduro Diet was, and one year, the 70-some percent of Venezuelans lost 24 pounds. And trust me, it wasn't because of thymaster 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's changed between then and now? Well, easy. Socialism, a vision of life in the world, which ironically, we'll talk about this in a little bit, Zoran Mamdani, boldly claimed from his inauguration address the mayor, a 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. But this is dramatic. And you know what? You can hear all kinds of people, including many people who are condemning the actions of the president and this operation, saying that Maduro needed to be ousted. Maduro 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, in that kind of thing, it's hard not to be impressed. Not exactly up to, remember the whole page or thing with the, with the Israeli, you know, operation against hummus officials. And you're 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 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, you know, unique view to be able 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, we're going to run things here for a while. And oh, by the way, let's take over Greenland. You know, that, 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, 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 that was going to be subject to domestic law going in. That's subject to international law. Can we, can we, you know, justify this? So you know, who else said there were two types of law, the great David Noble, the, the author of one of the most comprehensive tax comparing different world views, understanding the times. And in that book, he compared, first of all, three world views, then five world views and a future addition in 10 areas, 10 areas of culture, including law. And he would also say amongst the five world views, there were two types of law, but it wasn't international and domestic law. There's a deeper category that matters here. And if you just start with international law, I appreciated what Constantine Kissons did this week. The international law is just made up category. What makes it obligatory? What makes any law obligatory other than power? How do you keep a law from devolving in the 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 geistler here, if there is a natural law, there must be a law giver. 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 enable, you know, 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 itself a made up category. You know, in fact, there's a movie out, Russell Crowe's in it. I understand. 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 in 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, which is 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 relative to this? 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 two, a theology of nations and states and groups of people, one that doesn't, you know, 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 disaction. Yeah, I guess all laws are 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, you know, 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, you know, interested parties, which is why, for example, the UN seems so ineffectual, like to have a UN Security Council that has a run 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, you know, 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 be, you know, that kind of thing. And so in one way that did kind of comfort me because this news felt so shocking that an 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 and world. And just like the, 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 he, the government took over all the farms and they set all the food prices. And there was this ridiculous interview with, you know, the story of a woman who had talked to the LA Times, just a normal citizen of Venezuela 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, you know, 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, you know, hired people in his administration to do things like forced rent control and supposed leases 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 U.S. But it's still, he's still the mayor of a city. He's not exactly a senator, you know, vice president, 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 hebristic. 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 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's part of New York and New York's part of the United States. And that's a very different thing than Venezuela. So the things that he's claiming to do and he didn't as 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. Of course he is, but Bernie Sanders has not really ever had power like a mayor in order to actually get something done, right? I mean, he's not going to be held accountable. He's always held accountable for as 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 that the mom Donnie's going to be held to a different standard, I think, but from both the right end his supporters on the left. We'll know. I appreciated Al Moller'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 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 say it's in shambles, but certainly is 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 we add 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 Mondani's popularity and people really wanting to, you know, get on board. And it's one thing to kind of say utopianist or socialistic kinds of things in somewhat coded language. That's not what you heard in the inauguration speech. When 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. And that is 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 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 a 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 Toekeville 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, you know, 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 family relationships, but also our social relationships and communities as a citizen. And then our relationship with the creation, the rest of the world 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, right? That's the details that are always left out. It's why it's such a utopian as 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 warm and 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 that 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 in either this does the same thing. It's like you're either for collectivism or you're for just hard, you know, just 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. Mamdani, this stuff's been tried everywhere. You ain't the first, but you ain't the first. I did see a couple people being like, man, he sounds like, you know, freshly postgraduate 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 there's it is 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 of the image of God. And you know, 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 in 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 that 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 are 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. It is interesting that these two things, the mom, Donnie thing and the Venezuelan 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, 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 Donnie can actually accomplish what he's saying. And whether it goes. My prediction, I don't make political predictions. But if I were to, he's not going to be able to, I still think what remains to be somewhat parched out too, because we have two worldviews at work in allegiance to Islam and allegiance to 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 breakpoint 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. A lot of times, the cornerstone will bear the names of the founders who built the church, not just the last during their time, but for generations to come. 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So please join us, laying a strong foundation for the future, by becoming a cornerstone monthly partner of the Colson Center. Visit us at colsoncenter.org/monthly. That's colsoncenter.org/monthly. We're back on breakpoint this week. Donna, 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 healthcare. 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 sites rightly so on the abortion drug. Where do you see this movement heading this year? Yeah, 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 road decision settled the issue of abortion, that it is a state-by-state sort of thing and 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 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 anyone who prescribed abortion pill reversal. So after an abortion pill regimen is prescribed, if you, if it's two pills, if 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 what 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 and against that. So we have, you know, Colorado being kind of held back from the ways they're trying to go forward and 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 and chemical abortion. And the reason that matters is because of two things, two things that have always been 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, one, 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 for life work of the abortion pill. You don't even have to go see a doctor now, right, with the FDA regulations being reduced. It can 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 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 is around about 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. 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, this, the case in Indiana is particularly gross. They, they all are truly shocking. The media coverage of it is maybe not as shocking, but as as disgusting. And I recommend people just stay agile with this because of the way that it's talked about a 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 sews. 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. 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. I, 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's so often, much more often than not, like over 70% of the time, according to Charlotte Loser, 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 the just unfettered access to it and everybody should get it and it's 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 know when we're 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 it's that's what I mean when I say when evil is allowed to hide when when you know this is what scripture talks about that love sometimes covers but love sometimes exposes and the most loving thing you can do in some senses is to expose is to it 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 you know 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 you know 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 ill 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 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 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 under regulated and 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 meffa pristone and to advance that and then we had this kind of throw away comment this week from the president which was really weird and which he tried to make a case that the hide amendment which is an amendment which says no federal funding can go towards abortion that that needed to be flexible the hide amendment needed to be made flexible it was a weird statement that's all remember that sometimes the president says things off the cuff that he hasn't thought through this might be the case there but the 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 then we're doing it wrong we need to be as engaged and active in all these levels as we 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 they're 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 prevent to provide the 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 so 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 their state level marches for life now too I would encourage you to look at that and that's another way to be involved but the movement continues and it's just as important as it's always been well don't 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 a organization out of the state of Washington 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 Baronelle Stutzman for years as a private business owner but also has really tried to widow away at 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 you can't hire people who have Christian views on marriage and the name of the inclusion goals that we have as the state of Washington you know you can't you can't just hire people who agree with you especially for non-ministerial positions now what's called the ministerial exception has been argued in various forms for a really really long time basically that you know kind of with any kind of public good you have a in terms of your identity you can say if this person is a minister if they're actually kind of advancing the 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 minister exemption it actually argues on the grounds of personalist 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 the supplies that groups like hospitals or for-profit groups but those in that are 501 c3 religious organizations can hire who they want and they know 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 so it was 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 the notorious ones known for advancing a progressive agenda on all kinds you would get the crazy decisions out of the ninth circuit and that circuit court has been completely remade around a regionalist 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 it's if you want to read it you can just read the what 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 Yakima versus Brown and it's really you know a remarkable a remarkable decision the ninth circuit you know affirmed and this is how I put it in a commentary that I co-wrote with our attorney Ian Spear the ninth circuit affirm what many of us already know religious organizations are more than just employers of labor rather their communities have shared belief in religious mission as the court put it in its decision personalist policy who a religious organization hires goes to the very character of its religious mission so incredibly important decision we're really grateful for 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 yeah I mean that's that's that's for profit that that's going to the ramifications there unfortunately are going to come from the postdoc decision uh which was the decision that Neil Gorsuch wrote which was a dreadful dreadful decision uh and basically said that when it comes to that basically created an enormous amount of space uh for uh activist groups to claim public accommodation honestly is where that ended up and how that applies to uh employment law so this is very different this has to do with religious organizations but the the important thing is is that it has to do with even what what you might call ordinary positions or non-minister position like you can care about who you hire as a janitor you know kind of thing and 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 mentor basically the court is saying listen when it comes to those decisions the government shouldn't have any say what so right 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 the HHS mandate that was famous what made that was so dreadful under Obama cares that Kathleen Sibelius at the time not only said that that this mandate applied to everything but nonprofit organizations or a 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 organizations 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 this is sorry I'm I'm I was jumping around so let me let me back up make sure I was clear the 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 health care plans and that the only people exempted were people who fit this very small definition of this was how we got the little sisters of the poor case this is the little sisters of the poor care and basically they created this brand new definition of who counted as a religious exempt 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's it always comes back to the TSA but they did this this is like international law again like who signed the other part of that contract right that's the whole difference between you see how we full circle yeah this what David Noble got right the difference is between positive law 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 and and and stay this this line between religious freedom is hard and fast and and the state can't cross over and suddenly tell the church how to run its business or can't tell religious organization how to be religious or what counts as religious or who you think is this or that of the other at this point the state doesn't belong and uh 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 an 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 ready to join go to colsoneducators.org that's colsoneducators.org to sign up 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 a recording this in my attic where thankfully I no longer have to record but we do remember when we talked about how that there was this new trend of like considering everybody who hurts your feelings all the way to like maybe expect something from you every once in a while as toxic and you should cut them out of your life this kind of the started entering the zeitgeist around the same time as the kind of therapeutic like the repising 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 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 heard 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 as I do as an extension of this kind of therapist of the culture or is there something deeper happening here that I'm missing where the booer parents just really really bad parents there've always been bad parents we can certainly read about a whole bunch in the Bible that's certainly true and you know at some level you can 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 in 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 the kind of the the the interpersonal application of critical theory right there's and we've often talked about the critical theory being less that people have actually read any of these critical theory textbooks because we haven't but that they actually reflect a mood and I think postmodernism was the same way in critical theories a child of postmodernism so it all makes sense to me but 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 ratio we might make that socioeconomic we might make that political political or around a particular issue and certainly LGBTQ issue has become you know 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 their parents who've done hurtful and harmful things and and you know you kind of think of the generational trends you're not 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 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 GeneXers or the old boomers and saying that the old boomers or the GeneXers you know themselves are you know 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 now 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 at a 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 they 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 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 it was really really kind of awful how how it all went down so I saw the trend line kick in you and I talked about leaving loud from our churches 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 this scenario of it I think it's a very real thing and 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 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 rained 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 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 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 different string personal responsibility in 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 it kind of a gnar so centric therapy piezing you know where the only good therapy is affirming therapy and also just reiterating your own fertility and go back to something we said earlier about you know recognizing that certain relationships are givens right in terms of our understanding of the image of God you can't you're not gonna 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 that God created and you're not going to get a lot things right if you don't get the image of God right but this would certainly be one of them the Bible though is is really really clear that honor your father and mother that the one who doesn't care first family is like an infidel I mean there's all kinds of different statements where the Bible assumes and I think or trace 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 being like yeah I mean 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 given these are these are part of it so I I think there is but you said something years ago that I think I think when 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 and that was the question and the 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 the presumption being that this entire group of people and the individuals from there that you don't like are your neighbors I mean that we think God God put our neighbor in our path and 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 they 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 that 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 clarifying pull that back together and your parents seem a lot smarter after you you feel a lot more clueless or or you feel a lot more compassion towards them I suppose but you remember the the book that Ryan Anderson Alexander de Sanctus wrote after the Dobs decision which is religion has poisoned every I would sorry abortion sorry religion poisons everything that was the new atheist Ryan Anderson and Alexander is a portion is poor boys and everything yeah in other words it put things into the water what's the most important thing that it put into the cultural waters is that life the value of life is convenience and I remember years ago reading a piece and I can never remember where it's from I think it was in the 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 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 you know our tolerance 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 that doesn't seem like that's that that heart of a step and and then you know I think that I'm not trying to blame us for you know their 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 done 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 um he's questioning he's saying that you use the term I guess allegedly to say these boats were allegedly narcoterrorists I'll let you answer this one I do know as a journalist at least there's some legal uh things that play here but go on uh no I don't want you know how to take the blame for this and say we no one else does I actually added that specifically um you know into it the allegedly because that's uh that that's what the administration told and there there are questions about it up it wasn't taking a political talking point well listen 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 it off a lot but uh this was just best practice this is you know uh not taking on leftist Marxist media and socialist Marxist dem talking points uh it was just yeah these when we say allegedly I dare say those are some some talking points right there but the alleged weight into it they were alleged drug boats and they 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 that 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 transexual which is interesting I feel like this person must meet 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 a there's an immediate turn of that number two 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 Donovan in his book on this uh on his book of essays one of the essays has to do with gender he he moat he notes and he was right when he wrote this 25 years ago that the overwhelming number of those who were struggling with gender identity or transexualism which is the word he used which tells you how long ago he wrote it were middle age men with a sexual fetish what we have seen in the the chaos of the current transgender moment and the backpedaling based on whistleblowers and the tapestock 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 their bodies being born into the wrong body was no longer middle age men with the sexual fetish it was pre-pubescent girls it was it was junior high girls who had an identity crisis in other words they hated themselves 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 in those young people who are claiming this and in other words this 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 and a culture like that you're gonna 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 around the world around oppressor and oppressed so in other words and in age of identity crisis those with an identity crisis identify as the oppressed who is the most popular oppressed 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 as 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 learn that at a little public school when the gay issue we're a remarkable number of young people were identifying as gay or lesbian they'd 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 tea 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 the stuff is in flux right threatening to claw back the so-called advances made by the elves and the g's and that's right they're legitimizing the whole movement and yeah they're going to be less identified with yeah this is 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 crisis of meaning all the cultural issues we're having right now and of course you got a toxic soup makes total sense but it again you would hope that you would have a ruling class of at least medical professionals who would not jump on board but we are 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 and the list of voice actors for this animated series which has like 40 35 or 40 episodes anyway it's a yeah I thought liberty kids was great so I'll recommend that oh that's a good one okay I'll recommend anything as possible by Elizabeth Stroud 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 Stroud all right well that's going to do it for the show thank you so much for listening to break point this week from the Colson Center for Christian World View I'm Maria Bear alongside John Stone Street we'll see you all back here next week