Andrew Klavan dissects left-wing campus bullying—from UT Austin’s forced anti-gun protests to CUNY law students shouting "F the law" at pro-DACA professors—while mocking Democrats’ weaponized "Russia collusion" hoax and Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisy on free speech. Theological guest Alastair Roberts argues Christian marriage isn’t just intimacy but a generative institution tied to God’s design, warning that same-sex marriage and transgender ideology reflect transhumanist rejection of biological reality, echoing C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man. Klavan ties it all to modern manipulation: whether through political fearmongering or campus "fake worlds," the left’s crusade against liberty risks eroding both faith and freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump has said once again that the Russia collusion investigation is a hoax by disgruntled Democrats.
But this time the Democrats have finally admitted he's right.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, quote, I guess we might as well come clean.
We were a little down after the election and we thought this would lighten the mood.
We didn't think anyone would believe us.
I guess the joke just sort of got out of hand, unquote.
House Intelligence Democrat Adam Schiff joined in saying, quote, man, I'm glad that's over.
I was having a hard time keeping a straight face.
We really had you going there for a minute, didn't we?
Unquote.
And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi added, quote, what are we talking about?
Does anyone remember where I parked my car?
Who am I?
unquote.
Reporting on the hilarious hijinks from the White House, CNN's Jim Acosta added, quote, look at me.
I'm Jim MaCosta.
Why is everyone talking about Russia when they should look at me because I'm Jim Acosta, unquote.
President Trump admitted the prank had been pretty funny and responded in kind by tying a dead goat to the rear fender of Chuck Schumer's limousine.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also sing hunky donkey.
Ship shape, dipsy topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, I am back in not that sunny California, but it is nice to be home.
I have to say, I had a terrific time.
I'll talk about it a little bit.
I had a really terrific trip.
I spoke last night at University of Texas at Austin, which was really terrific.
Just a great bunch of kids, I got to say.
And the whole trip was kind of inspiring.
And also, you know, you see stuff that you don't see when you're stuck in the studio all the time.
So it's really, it's really worthwhile.
Travel broadens the mind.
We're going to read your letters.
I asked you the question, what do you want as conservatives?
What do you want to see?
I'm going to read some of those letters.
And then we are going to have, we'll stay on today, Rob, right?
Yeah, we'll stay on.
I'm going to have one last interview with a theologian on the question of sexuality, and then I'm going to leave the subject alone for a while and just go home to my wife.
We will talk about it some more.
I know a lot of you are upset by my point of view, but that's why we're here.
We're here to discuss things and disagree and talk about things.
It's not going to kill you.
All right.
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I actually wasn't even a test.
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It's fun too, by the way.
They're actually really entertaining.
All right, you know, and it's funny when you see the at the reviews, they get these great reviews, which I'm really, I'm really impressed by.
Reviews actually, I pay attention to reviews because I find if you don't pay attention to the critics, but you pay attention to the people, you actually get kind of a good amalgamation of ideas.
All right.
Truman Show Walkaway00:02:40
So, UT Austin, and then before that, I was Grand Canyon University, and the audiences were just great and really friendly and terrific.
And I have to tell you that when you meet conservative students, they are several IQ points ahead of left-wing students.
I mean, I will show you some left-wing students on the show today, and I will tell you, but these kids are so impressive and so dialed in and knowledgeable and thoughtful.
And it really is, you know, for someone like me who's going to shuffle off the scene in about, oh, I give myself about 30 minutes.
You know, it's nice to know that people will be behind fighting the corner who are just so able to do it.
But the thing that really disturbs me is again and again, you know, we do these Q ⁇ A's and again and again, somebody stands up and says, you know, my teacher does this.
They won't let me talk.
They attack me.
They threaten me to take my grades away.
They make me go to re-education if I say things like, men and women are the same.
I just keep hearing these stories.
There was one high school kid there who said he's being forced to walk out for an anti-Second Amendment demonstration.
And he doesn't agree, but he's being forced to walk out.
And another kid who says, you know, and they can never get the good security.
I mean, at Austin, they did.
They had the police out there and everything, and they weren't needed, but they were there.
But they can't get good rooms for the events and just all kinds of things.
And I started to think about this.
You know, when I went in and made this speech, I was just, as I was walking in, it was kind of about Hollywood and the way they control the narrative.
As I was walking in, I started to think about the Truman show.
You remember the Truman show?
The Truman show was Jim Carrey, and he played a guy whose entire life is a reality TV show, only he doesn't know it.
So he's in this town, and the town looks like a real little town, but it's actually a TV set.
And all his friends and his wife are actually actors.
And it's a profitable show, so they want to keep it on the air, but they have to keep him in this town because if he leaves the town, then he finds out that it's all a fraud.
And so what they do is from his earliest childhood, they scare him.
So every time he tries to get away or do something, they dissuade him from adventure.
They dissuade him from challenges.
They say, don't go over the bridge, Truman.
You don't know what's going to be over there.
Don't go on vacation.
There's one very funny scene where he goes into a travel agent.
And you know how travel agents have posters on the wall, see sunny Florida and all this stuff.
Instead, they have posters of airplanes getting hit by lightning.
And it just says, this could happen to you.
So they just terrify him all the time.
Here's a brief scene of Carrie trying to get his wife to just leave and go on an adventure and how her job is to dissuade him.
Supreme Court Fears00:15:53
And she does.
I figured we can scrape together 8,000.
Every time you and Marlon get together, there's...
We can bum around the world for a year on that.
And then what, Truman?
We'd be where we were five years ago.
You're talking like a teenager.
Well, maybe I feel like a teenager.
We have mortgage payments, Truman.
We have car payments.
Where we're just going to walk away from our financial obligations.
I thought we were going to try for a baby.
Isn't that enough of an adventure?
I can wait.
I want to get away.
See some of the world.
Explore.
You want to be an explorer.
This will pass.
We all think like this now and then.
Let's get you out of these wet clothes.
Come to bed.
You know, it's a very, it's a really good movie.
I actually like it, and I remember it really well, which doesn't always happen with movies.
And I started to think that's what these people, that's what these professors are doing to these kids, basically.
They're teaching them to live in a fake world, a world where socialism works, a world where America is a bad country, a world where racism is really still as big a problem as it always was.
And when the kids try to escape, what they do to them is they frighten them.
They say, don't listen to those ideas.
Those ideas are fascist.
Don't let that speaker come to campus.
That guy's a white supremacist.
Don't even think about that.
Don't have free speech because they say to them, language is violence, which is like saying dirt is air.
If you're talking, you're not fighting.
I mean, that's one of the wonderful things about talking.
And they just create, they've created this false environment, this false philosophical world, and they just keep the narrative of fear up.
This Starbucks thing that's happening is a perfect example.
We're in a country of 300 million people.
The fact that two kids, got two guys, got turfed from a coffee shop is not a news story.
It's not a news story.
It wasn't about race.
It was about the fact that they were misbehaving.
They shouldn't have been there.
They were breaking the rules.
They didn't go along with what the police said.
The police come in and they say, sir, leave the building.
You leave the building.
You want to complain later?
You complain to the force, but you don't tell the cop they're not going to leave and then expect not to get arrested.
It is just creating this narrative of fear that something terrible is going on in a country where nothing terrible is going on.
I mean, this is obviously nobody's perfect.
No country is perfect.
It has nothing to do with that.
But in real life, things are going pretty well.
In fact, in fact, if two guys being turfed from a Starbucks is a news story, things are going great.
You know, things are going great.
That means that people aren't being blown up.
It means that people aren't killing each other.
It means that the economy is humming along.
If you're covering two guys who are asked to leave Starbucks, Donald Trump is doing a fan-freaking tastic job.
That's what they should be saying.
That's what Trump should be saying.
Trump should be saying, if that's what you're covering, if that's your news story.
So, you know, I was, it's just, you know, somebody called this, the guys at FIRE called it unlearning liberty.
They're unlearning how to be free, how to talk free.
And just the other day at City University of New York School of Law, it's called CUNY School of Law, there was a speaker at a college, a law professor named Josh Blackmun, and he went in to give a speech on the importance of free speech on campus because they didn't like some of his opinions, these social justice warriors.
I can't even, I hate to even associate the word justice with these kids, but like they show up and they start demonstrating against him because I think he was in favor.
He said it was right for Trump to rescind the DACA order because it wasn't legal.
These are law, these are kids in law school, right?
These are not undergrads.
These are kids in law school.
And Blackmun, as you will see, is as mild-mannered as it is possible to be.
And he goes in and he gives this speech and he's talking to them about why he thinks it was right to rescind DACA because it was against the law.
Listen to this exchange.
And were a member of Congress, I would vote for the DREAM Act.
Thank God you're not.
My position is that the policy itself was not consistent with the rule of law.
Which teaches a lesson, right?
The lesson is this.
You can support something as a matter of policy, but then find that the law doesn't permit it.
And then the answer is to change the law.
Why don't you support people?
Why don't we support law?
Right?
That's a very good thing.
You're in law school, right?
And it's bizarre thing to say f the law.
No, no, no, no.
It's not bizarre.
It's not bizarre.
But you chose to get them.
He says you knew what would happen if he came here.
Well, if you let them speak, I don't speak.
So f ⁇ the law, right?
That's a good mantra.
You think we can understand how many of us and how many of them?
You do.
And I'm actually very impressed.
Let me say this.
I'm actually impressed that there are so many of you.
You can be anywhere right now, and you chose to come out here and exercise your constitutional rights.
You want to exercise your rights.
We're just saying.
F the law.
That's what they were shouting at him.
F the law.
And he said, F the law.
That's wonderful.
You're in law school, right?
And if the girl has a sign that says free speech is not a shield for hate, which in fact it is.
Part of what defines us is what we hate.
And we can speak about what we hate.
And, you know, if it defines us in a way that's ugly, well, then don't like us.
Then, you know, you can reject people.
But they're not letting him speak.
Now, so he talks about the rule of law.
And I want you to listen to the logic of this one kid.
We're talking about the Truman show, right?
We're talking about kids who are living in a false America, an America that doesn't exist, an America that was built for TV so that TV can sell a narrative of racism and trouble that will get Democrats elected.
They are living in the Truman show America, okay?
And they have to be kept afraid.
And I want you to listen to the logic of this kid as he responds to Professor Blackmun talking about the rule of law.
Now, let me just pause here for a minute.
And Blackmun explains this himself, but I won't put this in.
The reason we talk about the rule of law and the reason I talk about the rule of law on the border, that it's not about whether a guy is Mexican or not, it's about the rule of law, is that if you don't have the rule of law, then it's capricious, right?
It's whether, you know, you have a billion dollars, then you get treated one way.
You don't have that money, you get treated another way.
We have a nation of laws, not of men.
I think it was John Adams who said that, because that means we're all equal before the law.
If the laws don't count, then who decides what happens on any given day?
It's like every given day is different.
Okay, so he talks about the rule of law.
Listen to this kid's logic.
When you say rule of law, now what are you specifically referring to?
Because that actually invokes messages of law and order, propaganda created by Roger Stone, promoted for Nixon, and right again for Reagan, and then once again, here we go with Trump.
So whenever you're saying that, you're bringing that into an isolated moment in time.
But historically, it goes back to the 30s when people were killed based on a certain kind of propaganda.
So whenever you say rule of law, it invokes a lot of reactive emotion.
So I would say it would probably better to choose a different kind of language so that you don't incite that.
Because then you're also accountable and responsible for using that language that has that weight.
Don't you think?
That kid should be kicked out of school.
I mean, he should be kicked out of school.
So his logic was, his logic was when you say rule of law, it reminds him of law and order.
And people he doesn't like, like Nixon, used to sell law and order.
And law and order maybe got people killed in the 30s when people were calling for law and order.
So you're responsible for people getting killed under the guise of law and order because you said rule of law.
I mean, that's like saying, you know, you said rule of law.
That reminds me of law and order.
Law and order is a television show.
I'm Sam Waterson.
You know, I mean, that's the logic that he's using.
And now, it's obvious bullying.
It's obviously a kind of emotional bullying.
You said that.
You better be careful of every word you say because every word you say gets people killed.
It's obviously a kind of emotional bullying, but it also is his fear.
It's the kid's fear.
It is the Truman show.
Do not step out of this little box and discover that the America we taught you about, the America that will get the people we want elected, the America that gives us power and prestige, isn't real.
It's not there.
It is about people posing in Starbucks on YouTube and people going on and discoursing about that as if that were important because it's not.
Because if they can get you to believe that this is a racist country where you're in danger when you go into a Philadelphia Starbucks, which must be filled with all kinds of people of all kinds of colors.
And of course, the university is only where it starts and only where people learn to accept this stuff.
It's only where they go to unlearn liberty and live in this fake world.
In California, they are proposing now a bill.
There's a bill before the Assembly that would make it an unlawful business practice to engage in a transaction intended to result, or that results in the sale or lease of goods.
I'm reading this from the law, lease of goods or services to any consumer that engage in sexual orientation change efforts.
That includes books and counseling.
So if I give somebody the Bible and I tell them, you know, before you live the sexual life you're living, you might want to look at this book and learn a thing or two.
California wants to make that illegal.
Now, I don't believe that's ever going to stand before the Supreme Court, but just the fact that they do it lets you know something.
It lets you know that wherever the left takes power, they become tyrants.
Wherever the left takes power, they become tyrants.
Why?
Because they're living in a false world.
You don't have to be a tyrant when you're telling the truth.
You don't have to force beat people up.
If I say to somebody, I am a man, the sentence, I am a man, I don't care if the person says, you are a girl, you are a black woman.
What do I care?
What do I care?
But if I say to somebody, I am a black woman, I've got to stop them from saying the obvious, you know, it's pretty obvious to me that you're a white man, right?
I've got to stop them from saying it.
As long as you're living in a fake universe, you have got to have that silence.
Hillary Clinton, I mean, let's take this all the way to the top, right?
Where first we're talking about universities, now we're talking about the state of California, but let's take it all the way to the woman who was just this close to being president of the United States.
And the reason that I have never lost a night's sleep, not one, for voting for Donald Trump is exactly this.
Hillary was obsessed with Citizens United, right?
With overturning the Supreme Court decision that said that my pal David Bossey, who runs this little film industry, Citizens United, could make a film against Hillary.
He made a film against Hillary.
They tried to ban it on the basis that it was illegal campaign spending.
The Supreme Court, they said it's corporate spending because Citizens United was the name of a corporation.
The Supreme Court said, no, you know, Bossey doesn't lose his right to criticize people politically because he's a corporation.
They made a movie celebrating Hillary Clinton.
This is Hillary Clinton's movie I'm going to play.
Hillary Clinton's movie where they celebrated the fact that she was out to get Citizens United.
And a woman named Christina Shake, I guess it's pronounced, was a Hillary staffer.
And she makes this movie and she explains, you don't understand.
You don't understand how shocking this was.
Citizens United started because someone attacked Hillary.
I mean, it's amazing.
Listen to it.
One of the things that people don't really realize is Citizens United has actually started from a conservative organization that wanted to bring down Hillary Clinton's candidacy because they didn't like who she is.
They don't like what she stands for.
It started with Hillary the Movie, a negative political documentary about then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The government blocked it from TV last year because it was made with corporate money.
And they took that fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court today struck down restrictions on political spending.
Citizens United changed our democracy at its core.
The most powerful and most connected American corporations of special interests had the right to spend as much money as they wanted to to get elected candidates that they thought best represented their agenda.
So think about that for a minute.
What'd she say?
This was a video made by people who didn't like what Hillary stood for and so didn't want you to vote for.
That's called democracy.
And on top of it, it's all a sham because Hillary Clinton raised twice as much money as Donald Trump did.
Some of Donald Trump's money came from his own pocket, like $66 million worth of it.
And his donors, Clinton's campaign received 16% of its money in donations of $200 or less.
So from people, Trump's campaign received 26%.
A quarter of his was coming from little folks sending in 200 bucks.
When I say little, I just mean that they didn't have the kind of money that a corporation has.
So she was the corporate candidate.
It was all a scam.
It was all about the fact.
It was all about the fact that they actually do think it is an evil that someone would stand against Hillary Clinton and what she stands for and try to stop her.
They actually thought that was suppressible speech.
It is an amazing worldview.
And why?
Because they're living in this fake universe where anybody who disagrees with them must be evil or else or else they have to look at the world in a new way.
They have to leave the Truman universe.
This was just yesterday, and it's kind of an unimportant little cut, but it just gives you a glimpse of the point of view.
Everybody who can is piling on Sean Hannity because he didn't say that he knew Michael Cohn and had Donald Trump's attorney and had consulted him a couple of times.
And I said, you know, he probably should have done that strategically.
That would have been the strategic thing to do.
But if he had a couple of legal questions about real estate that he asked Michael Cohn, I don't think it's anybody's business.
It certainly doesn't change where he was going to stand.
Does anybody think that Sean Hannity was saying, listen, I'm only supporting Donald Trump because I asked a real estate question of Michael Cohn.
I think we know that Sean Hannity supports Donald Trump.
So I think this is completely ridiculous, given the fact that unlike Sean, who is a commentator, all these objective news guys are tied in with the Democratic Party hip and thigh.
They're just completely in with the Democratic Party and they're supposed to be objective.
Sean isn't even supposed to be objective.
So they're beating up on him.
And this is Anderson Cooper and a panel.
And just play the cut.
It's amazing.
There is conflict for Fox News because, I mean, obviously during the day, they have folks like Shepard Smith, Brett Baer, who are doing reporting.
And yet, the nighttime is much more opinion-based.
Yeah, it's almost too convenient to say that, oh, no, no, no, we're going to use a kind of a nuanced semantics argument.
I'm an opinion journalist, not actually a journalist.
I'm not to be regarded and have the credibility as others, but please believe every single word that I say.
Wait, wait.
So she's expressing her opinion that opinions are no good on news shows.
That's what she's doing.
And the reason I played that is what's so telling about it is that she doesn't know it's an opinion.
She doesn't know the difference.
I mean, first of all, Sean Hannity would never say believe every word I say.
He's an opinion journalist.
He knows that people are not going to agree with him.
But they don't actually think their opinions are opinions.
And they don't actually think that their worldview is challengeable.
And the fact that Sean gets up there and is a very, very powerful voice for Trumpism and Trump, that's what they're bothered by.
It's that people are listening to his opinion more than they're listening to their opinion, which, in their mind, isn't an opinion.
Marriage Beyond Individual Fulfillment00:16:08
I mean, it really is, it's even part of this Russia collusion thing.
It is part of the mindset that goes into this Russia collusion thing that somehow Trump's victory, the victory of the people in the Midwest, the victory of the people who were overlooked during eight years of Obama, that somehow this is illegal.
Somehow this is criminal.
I mean, Trump went off on them again yesterday.
Let's just play that cut and we'll wrap this up.
But Trump went off on them again yesterday, and there was this atmosphere of shock.
Trump goes on a rampage, on a rant.
Listen to what he says.
This was Really a hoax created largely by the Democrats as a way of softening the blow of a loss, which is a loss that, frankly, they shouldn't have had from the standpoint that it's very easy for them.
They have a tremendous advantage in the Electoral College.
And this is what it is, and this is where it came from.
You look at the kind of money that was paid.
Probably some went to Russia.
You look at Podesta having a company in Russia where nothing happened and people don't talk about it.
You look at the fact that their server, the DNC server, was never gotten by the FBI.
Why did the FBI take it?
The FBI takes what they want.
They go in, they wouldn't get the server.
This is a hoax.
As far as the investigation, nobody has ever been more transparent than I have instructed our lawyers.
Be totally transparent.
He's basically right.
I mean, he's basically right.
This has gone on for over a year with no evidence of any kind of collusion.
The whole idea was kind of stupid to begin with.
You know, that's basically 10, you know, rocky and bullwinkle spies trying to put out propaganda on YouTube who didn't even know what they were doing.
That didn't have any effect on the election at all.
The whole thing is utterly absurd.
But when you are living in a Truman world, when you are living in a fake world, you have got to keep everybody frightened.
You've got to keep everybody afraid so that they don't go off the reservation and find out where reality lies.
Let me read a couple of your letters here.
I went a little long, but let me read a couple of your letters.
I asked the question last week.
What do you want?
What are the things?
What do you stand for?
Because this is something that always bothers me.
You know, it's easy to say, well, the other guy did this and the other guy did that, but what do you stand for?
What really struck me was how similar the responses were.
I mean, they really were similar.
So I won't read too many, but here's one from Ray.
He says, I want the government to shrink back towards its original size and only deal with the military.
I want basically all the government entitlements to be removed for anyone 50 and under.
If you are 50 or under, you'll never get benefits.
Just kill it all outright.
And I want all weapons to be legalized as the founding fathers originally intended.
From David, freedom for heterosexuals to pursue their dreams and ambitions without being judged or without judging others.
Freedom for homosexuals to pursue their dreams and ambitions without feeling the need to champion their sexuality in gay rights and gay right parade.
Freedom for all to express their ideas without condemnation or feeling the need to attack others for not sharing the same ideas.
From Joseph, recognition and the education that men and women are different, so relationships with two men are different than those with a man and woman.
Ensure the protection that religions can embrace or condemn homosexuality, however they want.
The right of states to define contracts that they grant, including marriage contracts.
From Lee, as for government, flat tax.
The federal government gets out of everything not explicitly in the Constitution.
Easy, peasy.
As for the gays, ha, he says, I'm not sure what that means.
I want government out of marriage.
Marriage is traditionally defined as what leads or can lead to a family.
That counts them out, excluding adoption, which I think should not be allowed, seeing as how children need both male and female role models.
I suppose they could find some church to marry them.
As for the policing of morality in general, it's a bit trickier, especially for a Catholic like me.
All laws are based on a morality of some sort, or at least a perceived morality, unless usually we decide what to police based on the amount of externalities.
Not sure what that means, but that's what he says.
So I guess it comes down to where we draw the line on externalities, where we draw the line on allowing self-destructive behaviors.
From Dan, when I think about this question, I always go to the preamble to the Constitution because I can't remember the whole Constitution, but I can remember the preamble, which tells us what government is supposed to do.
One, establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility.
This means the rule of law applies fairly and equally without preference to anyone, and the police are keepers of the peace.
Two, provide for the common defense.
This means securing borders and maintaining an effective military.
Three, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty.
This means the free marketplace and allowing everyone to do as they want and encouraging moral and ethical behavior, but not mandating any particular worldview.
From Joey, in regards to marriage, I want Uncle Sam fully out of it.
A lot of people said this.
Tax us as individuals henceforth and allow churches and captains to marry couples.
I want political correctness gone since it is just a bully technique against speech, disguised as kindness.
I want to be in charge of my own health care.
From Veronica, three things I want.
Government out of marriage, free speech, season two of Another Kingdom.
From Shauna, here are the three things I want from the government.
I want the law enforced equally and no laws changed from the bench.
I want to be able to protect myself, but I also want the government to protect my private property.
Regarding gays, religiously, I don't think their relationship should be recognized as it is against the Bible.
Politically, I'm not sure, but I do get angry when I hear about gay couples suing Christian bakeries out of business.
So do I.
I think that is incredibly fascist and bullying.
One more.
From AJ, I want church and society truly separated from the state.
Marriage should not be defined by the government as an example.
My wife and I are more than willing to sacrifice our government benefits as a married couple to fix this.
Two, I want the freedom to protect my family and my property in any way I deem necessary without infringing on the constitutional rights of others.
And three, I want a government that doesn't try to control my life or the life of my family on a daily basis.
Fortunately, I was able to enroll my children in a charter school, which helped.
Really, very big common theme, leave us alone.
Leave us alone.
And, you know, if you mean that, if you mean that, it means it might mean giving up some benefits.
You know, I mean, that's the thing.
And I, because I completely agree.
I mean, this is why, I don't know why everybody yells at me about this.
Like, all I want is for people to be for me to be left alone.
And that means I have to leave you alone.
And that's really all I'm talking about.
I do not understand why this upsets people so much, but we'll find out because we're going to do another interview with another theologian about sexuality.
These came together, and I'm glad they did because people have been really interested in this, and we'll follow this through, and then we'll move on to other subjects like, you know, my sexuality.
This is a man named Alastair Roberts.
He's the co-author of the book, Echoes of Exodus, Tracing Themes of Redemption Through Scripture.
He wrote it along with Andrew Wilson.
Dr. Roberts earned his PhD from Durham University, and he's also one of the participants in the Mir Fidelity podcast.
Dr. Roberts is a fellow of scripture and theology with the Greystone Theological Institute and writes for the Political Theology Network.
That blog, by the way, Mir Fidelity, is really interesting and provocative and intelligently written.
One of the reasons we asked Dr. Roberts to come on.
Here is my interview with Alastair Roberts.
Professor Roberts, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yeah, you know, I am, for a conservative, incredibly libertarian about questions of sex.
I am a faithful husband, and I would recommend that lifestyle to anybody.
But if you live a different lifestyle, if you're gay, if you're promiscuous, and as long as you're not hurting anybody or frightening the horses, it's none of my business.
Convince me that I'm wrong.
As Christians, I think there are two horizons that really shape our view of sex.
There's the horizon of the original creation, and then there's the horizon of the age to come.
And in both of those horizons, there is an emphasis upon male and female and the significance of our bodies as being means of engaging with the world in a way that honors God.
So within the original creation, the creation of man and woman is a creation for the sake of the wider world.
We're not just created for our own pleasure, to enjoy ourselves in relationship with each other, but to serve the wider reality of the creation.
So when you think about the relationship between men and women, it's a relationship that is generative for the structures of society, for the structures of the family, for the structures of the generations from one generation to another.
And it's something that fills and forms our social life.
And so within traditional societies, as they've recognized marriage, it's not merely been about a couple of people who enjoy each other and the celebration of their sexual intimacy.
Rather, it's a celebration of a formative relationship for society as a whole, for human life in the creation, and for a means of reflecting God's own creative rule within the world as God forms and fills his creation.
And so that emphasis is one that we bear out within the celebration of marriage, not just the celebration of individuals in intimacy, but of a relationship that has a generative character to it.
And is also as a result of that, I think, a particular form of the discipline of hospitality.
It's a means by which we take the world into our lives and also a means by which we go out into the world and bring life out into it.
And so the sanctioning of a particular sexual union is about that.
It's about not just this private bond that exists in the bedroom, but about something that is formative and generative of life for the world.
And also a means by which two people in their love together have a form of relationship that by its very nature is ordered to the inviting and welcoming of others into the world.
You know, I've never heard that argument before.
The last part, the hospitality argument, I've never heard that argument before.
And the immediate objection that comes up is, are we to be unwelcoming to people who are different, who are gay, who live a different kind of life?
Well, I think the first thing to talk about is what exactly is marriage?
And when we're thinking about marriage as this particular form of hospitality, it's one thing to ask the question of whether we should accept same-sex relationships.
It's another thing to say whether those should be recognized as marital.
I think that second question is the one that we should focus upon primarily.
And I think when we realize the character of marriage as something that is ordered towards this bearing of life, ordered towards this movement out into the world, this opening up to the other sex and opening up in some ways to our own sex, because what it means to be male or female is something that's always played out against the horizon of the other sex.
And that practice of hospitality is something that is unique to this particular sort of union.
It's one of the reasons why marriage has always been surrounded by regulations and norms that prevent you from just choosing it as whatever form you want to have it.
Because it's the recognition that this is a union that does not exist merely for the sake of the people in it.
It exists for the sake of the wider society and for the children that are welcomed into that bond.
The problem that people, the way these arguments frequently tend to go is that one person is arguing, as you're arguing now, from a series of principles and from the idea of the society.
And the other person is coming to us and saying, you know, I'm not attracted to women, but I want an intimate life.
I want a sexual life.
Are you telling me that I have to, I mean, let's face it, the intimate life is one of the great consolations of living.
I mean, this is one of the things that gives us joy.
And here is this fellow coming to you and saying, well, wherever I am, this is the only way I can have that life.
Are you telling me that that has to be absent from my existence?
Well, one of the difficulties I think we have within the modern world when talking about a Christian view of marriage is that the modern world is ordered around the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of happiness and individual fulfillment.
The Christian practice of marriage has never been primarily about that.
The Christian practice of marriage has been about a discipline that is, we find great fulfillment in, but it is something that involves at its very heart sacrifice, a laying down of your life for the sake of someone else, and for a placing of your individual ends, the ends with which you enter into the union of marriage, perhaps for your own pleasure, a laying down of those for the sake of something greater,
the union that can be formed through the mutual sacrifices on behalf of others.
And that is something that is not just a matter of individual fulfillment.
Now, when we have a culture that's built around individual fulfillment, the question that you raise is the one that will be prominent within our minds.
If we think that what it means to be married is merely about my individual satisfaction, having a successful sex life or whatever we might want to talk about as, then the reasons why we would distinguish between a same-sex couple and a male and female couple are not going to be obvious to people because sex becomes a means of self-fulfillment.
It's about my identity.
It's about my self-realization, rather than about a means by which an individual can enter into a relationship that propels them into something beyond themselves, into the creation of a reality that is hospitable to children as they're born into the world, and also that opens them up to the horizon of the other sex.
Now, the reason we celebrate marriage so much as our society or traditional society is because we recognize the importance of that particular thing.
It's more than about individual fellowship.
It's about our responsibilities and the claims that other people have upon us.
Now, within a society of individuality, that's difficult for us to understand because we all think of ourselves as individuals trying to self-fulfill.
But marriage is about one-flesh union.
It's about moving out beyond ourselves, transcending ourselves in a relationship where others make claims upon us.
And that's difficult.
We're bound up with other people in their lives, and we don't get to choose the terms on which this plays out.
We don't have a bespoke practice of marriage.
Everyone has to practice this particular form of marriage, which is designed to be hospitable to the various parties in it, not just to serve my individual self-fulfillment.
And so that question that you raise is an important one for our society, but it's also important to understand why that would not be raised in the same way in past societies.
Now, you've talked about the attempt to abolish the difference between the sexes, the abolition of male and female.
And I don't think anyone can question that there is a segment of our society that's working very hard on this, that wants to think that there's either that there's no difference between men and women or that you can transcend your physical presence in some weird way, two ideas which are mutually contradictory.
If there's no difference between men and women, I've never understood how you, if you were a man in a woman's body, how you would even know, how it would even occur to you.
But what interests me is why do you think this is going on?
Why do people want to abolish what for me is one of the chief goods and joys and graces of human life?
Where does that instinct come from to erase this?
Dignity In An Objectified World00:11:20
I think there are a number of causes.
We live in a very unusual society in that the natural sort of interaction between men and women has been changed considerably by modern life.
Whereas the family used to be a center and the home and the household used to be a center of gravity of human existence for millennia, it's no longer that anymore.
Many of the functions of the family have been outsourced to other things, whether that's household appliances, education systems, the government in certain forms of provision, and even work.
The family used to be the site where you'd used to do most of your labor.
Whereas now you do that in your business or some other place of work.
And so as a result, the family becomes very much a sort of sentimental reservation where you go and you enjoy your domesticity, your life together, and the sentimental attachments that you have.
And when it lacks that significance, I can understand why there's a threat, particularly for women, who feel that they are going to be trapped within that realm.
And so the realm of self-fulfillment, the realm of individual meaning, is a realm of, well, well, it has become a realm of individuality, not a realm of common labor towards a shared reality that we're forming around ourselves.
A male and female in relationship forming a home and a world that is their own.
Now it increasingly becomes a matter of going out to a job, earning money, and then bringing that back into the home as a site primarily of consumption.
And so I think that has shaped things considerably.
Further factors, things like contraception and the pill, it means that there is no longer a sense in which the relationship between men and women is naturally, sexual relationship is naturally ordered towards procreation.
And so increasingly, it does not have the weight that it has on that account.
That weight is resisted.
So whereas in the past, you talk about responsible sex being marital sex, sex that provides for the potential consequences of a relationship.
Now safe sex is sex that is contraceptive sex, sex that avoids any possibility of conception.
And so as a result of these, I think we have a situation where the dignity and the honor of men and women is increasingly seen as individuals within a society that is detached from their relationships, that's a realm of career, that sort of thing.
And so the need to cut yourself off from the distinctions that male and female naturally create in what it means to be human.
I think that's one that's pressing for us.
I've compared this to the situation where human beings as astronauts are shot into space and they experience seven dawns in a single day and it sets their sleep pattern awry.
We're not intended to live like that.
The circadian rhythm is balanced to the is related to the earth's pattern of day and night.
Then you have things like the disorientation of not knowing which way is up and which way is down.
And then also things like your muscles deteriorating because you do not have the earth's gravity to act under.
And as a result of all of this, as we have been propelled into this sort of zero gravity or microgravity realm of modern society, to find dignity, often we feel the need to resist the residual gravity of what it means to be male and female that pulls upon us and prevents us from achieving that equal outcomes within the realm of just autonomous power.
Let me ask you this, because it seems to me that this can only go further, whether you want to say it's worse or better.
There will come a time, I assume, when you can change a man into a woman.
Now that technology is so bad that you can protest that it's damaging to people.
But I'm sure there'll come a time when they can do that, when children can be had outside the, when wombs will be separate from human beings.
Is there a danger that arguments like this, arguments that attach values to matter, to material, is there a danger that at some point we begin to seem like the Amish, we begin to seem like we're just refusing the blessings of technology?
Or is there an argument for remaining human even in the face of technology that lifts us above humanity?
Yes, it's an important question.
I think it's one that a number of Christian thinkers have wrestled with.
One very helpful book on the subject is The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.
Another one, Begotten or Made by Oliver O'Donovan.
And both of these are exploring certain aspects of what it means to be human in the face of technological and scientific advances.
So for instance, Lewis's recognition that nature is what we have, we ascribe to nature, what we have technical control over.
And the more that we gain technical control over our nature, the more we kind of carve off elements of ourselves and assign them to this dead objective order.
Whereas in the past, we'd see them very much as things to be cultivated through the development of character.
Now we can have, we increasingly become victims of our instinctive whims because we've not cultivated a nature.
We're just gaining technical control over the world in which we live and increasingly over our being.
Now, I think in many of the debates that we're having at the moment about things like same-sex marriage, transgender issues, there is an incipient transhumanism at work, the belief that we can transcend humanity in various forms.
And so whereas you have the social change of something like same-sex marriage, there is behind that social change a series of technical changes that are on the horizon.
So the ability to have gametes from skin cells.
We'll be able to have a child formed of two fathers, for instance, egg formed from a male skin cell.
Then we'll be able to form children in an artificial womb, gestate in that sort of environment.
We'll be able to have genetic screening of an embryo and then decide whether to discard it or to pursue its all the way towards pregnancy, all the way to full course of pregnancy.
These are the sorts of things that are on the horizon that implicitly we have accepted as a result of that logic.
And so I think as Christians, one of the things that Oliver O'Donnell emphasizes is that as Christians, the dignity of the human being that we uphold is bound up with the fact that we are begotten, not just made.
We're not a project that has been formed through technical activity, but we believe that human beings have their dignity in part because they are begotten not through the, it's not as if parents get together and they engage in a scientific project to form their children.
Rather, their children are formed out of a personal love that they share.
And it's out of the love that they share that that child organically arises, is conceived out of the result as a result of something that's prior to any political arrangement, prior to any legal organization, prior to any technical intervention, prior to any medical procedure.
That reality of the bond of male and female bodies is something that gives dignity to us.
It means that my identity, for instance, is my origins are found not in some choice on behalf of my parents, but in a love that they shared, the bond that they shared between them.
And so that movement, I think, is one in which we can become untethered from our basic humanity if we end up pursuing it too far.
Human beings become their own creations.
I have to stop you there.
I'm out of time, but I really appreciate a fascinating conversation.
I hope you'll come back and we can continue with some more.
Really interesting, very thoughtful guy.
And I am going to read that book.
I'm going to put it in my list.
All right, stuff I like.
I got to hurry.
Stuff I like.
People have been sending in a new theme song, so we're going to start to go through some of the things you've sent in and choose one, I guess, versus the stuff I like theme.
You know, when I started Stuff I Like, I did it because I've been so shaped by the great works of Western literature that I wanted to share them.
And I started to realize that some people were not as committed to reading them as I was.
And so I've kind of broadened it to talk about all this kind of things that are on TV and in the movies and all that stuff.
But I want to go back to something, one of the great writers of American literature, and a guy who's kind of underread by people who aren't committed to literature because he's a little bit difficult, but not everything he writes is difficult.
There's a book that I love called After Virtue.
I've mentioned it several times, a book of philosophy by Alastair McIntyre.
And he talks about the end of the idea of morality and ethics.
And one of the quotes in it, he says, is, the difference between a human relationship uninformed by morality and one informed by morality is the difference between one in which each person treats the other as a means to his or her ends and one in which he treats the other as an end in himself, right?
To treat someone else as an end in himself is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons, right?
That's free speech.
If I take you as an end in yourself, I try to convince you, but I let you alone to make the decision, right?
But, but if you don't believe in a moral order, to treat someone else, you treat someone else as a means, it's to seek to make him or her an instrument of your purposes.
Okay, I'm going through this quickly, but the point is that manipulation is what you have left when you don't believe there's a moral order.
And that's what we've been talking about today, is the attempts to manipulate college students.
If you want to read a beautiful writer on this subject, on the subject of the way people manipulate each other, Henry James is one of the greatest of American novelists.
I should call him an Anglo-American because he later became a British subject and he writes very much like an Englishman.
Many of his later books are very difficult.
Many people like Portrait of a Lady, which is about this subject, and Alastair McIntyre mentions it in the book.
But if you want to read just something short, read the Aspirin Papers.
It's one of my favorite short stories.
It's kind of a novella, The Aspirin Papers by Henry James.
If you want to see what happens when people lose their moral sense and lose the sense that you are an end in yourself, deserving of your opinions, deserving to be convinced but not forced, deserving to be negotiated with and talked with and elevated in yourself, and when you become like the leftists who think you are just there to be manipulated, just there as a means to an end, to a higher end.
If you put anything above the soul, the spirit of a man, you just start to manipulate him.
And the Aspirin Papers is one of the most beautiful works about manipulation there is.
It is so imbued with both suspense and character and morality.
It's just a lovely, lovely piece of writing.
Henry James, the Aspirin Papers, try it.
And if you read it and you get a chance, drop me a line.
Let me know what you thought.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
That's it.
It's the Clavenless Weekend.
You're lost.
Sorry.
But survivors will gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
Manipulation And Morality00:01:34
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