Brad and Dan begin by discussing the shocking decision from the Alabama Supreme Court proclaiming embryos to be human beings. They dissect the legal, philosophical, theological, and political dynamics of the ruling - and breakdown the Christian nationalism baked into the opinion written by Chief Justice Tom Parker.
They then turn their attention to Oklahoma, where a non-binary teen died days after being attacked by a group of classmates in a school bathroom.
Finally, they look to Tennessee where a new bill proposes to let any civil servant refuse to solemnize a marriage they feel violates their religious beliefs - including same-sex marriages and, perhaps, interracial ones.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you as always, Brad, and good to know that you haven't, like, flooded away with the, you know, endless rain and things here getting in California.
Yeah, we're doing good.
I mean, everybody, this time of year, so much weird weather.
And this time of the Anthropocene, perhaps, so much weird weather.
So we'll just leave it there.
A couple things.
Friends, we got our bonus episode coming up.
Dan and I are going to record that in a couple days.
So we've got a bunch of AMAs in the Discord.
We've got a bunch over email.
But if you want to send in an AMA, Now's the time.
We've got everything, Dan, from what do you guys do for fun to like really big serious questions about Christian nationalism and schools and just everything in between.
So some really good questions, some fun questions.
So send those in if you are so inclined and we'll be releasing that episode late next week.
Today, some weeks, Dan, I think, you know, you and I discussed, like, what should we talk about?
We can only really fit in three or four stories.
Where do we want to go?
I think this week, to me at least, felt pretty obvious.
It's one of those weeks where We've been doing this five years and sometimes you're still dumbfounded.
I don't know how you feel, but there's still some weeks you're like, I still, I can't believe this is happening.
Even though we, this is like somehow happening.
And I'm of course referring to the Alabama ruling, Supreme Court ruling on embryos being people.
So we're going to just talk a lot about that today from all angles, from the jurisprudence angle, the philosophical angle, the theological angle.
So on and so forth.
We're also going to talk about some incredibly tragic news out of Oklahoma where a non-binary student lost their life and the details surrounding the bullying and the intimidation and the entire climate in that state coming from the school superintendent.
We'll finish up with a law in Tennessee, Dan, that proposes, and I believe, I actually just need to check here, I believe the governor signed it, that it will give civil servants the right to refuse to solemnize marriages, meaning Uh, at least from my reading that if you don't like the people getting married for any reason, perhaps they're gay or perhaps it's a black man and a white woman or a, uh, an Asian woman and a white man, then you don't have to do your duty as a civil servant.
So we'll talk all about that.
Not to mention a few highlights of CPAC, which is just getting.
Hard to overstate what has happened to CPAC.
A couple other things.
So there's just a lot happening.
I'm sure most of you are abreast of these things.
I'm going to stop, throw it to you, Dan.
Give us the basics on what happened in Alabama.
Yeah, so we got like this kind of red state roulette this week.
So in Alabama, and folks will have heard at least parts of this, I'm sure, but the big news this week was a Supreme Court decision.
The Supreme Court, and again, it's the Alabama Supreme Court, not SCOTUS, not the federal Supreme Court.
Rule that frozen embryos, so these are embryos that have been fertilized, well obviously been fertilized, they're viable embryos but they're outside of a human body and that's going to be a really key part of this.
That frozen embryos are children and that those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death.
The ruling came, just like, where, like, why did they rule?
Like, where did this come from?
There were two lawsuits that were filed by three sets of parents who were undergoing IVF treatments, and it was this weird thing, some, like, I don't know, disgruntled or mentally ill or something patient got Into the in vitro storage area through an unsecured entrance, I guess, and tried to pick up one of the in vitro thing, which are of course incredibly cold, and they like hurt their hand and dropped it and destroyed some of the in vitro fetuses.
So that's what happened, and so the people are suing the IVF center.
They sued, the parents did, for wrongful death, but a lower court dismissed this, and it dismissed it on the grounds that, quote, crypto-preserved in vitro embryos, end quote, are not children or persons for legal purposes.
That was the ruling.
Seemed to settle it until the Alabama Supreme Court reversed the ruling.
And they disagreed and they said that, quote, extra uterine children, that was the term that was used, located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed, end quote, are in fact children.
So that's what they ruled.
The issue then is that under the state's wrongful death of a minor act, that these fertilized embryos count as persons for legal purposes there, okay?
So that was the Alabama majority opinion.
And so part of this, I think that this is important, and I'm going to come back to this, but in 2018, Alabama residents voted to amend the Constitution, the Alabama Constitution, To include protections for unborn life.
So as I understand it, there is an amendment of the Alabama Constitution that protects unborn life.
And what the court ruled is that based on that, in the Alabama Constitution, whether that unborn life is physically in or out of a uterus should not matter.
That was the logic that was used.
It could, one could look at this and say, like, I don't agree with it, whatever, but if Alabama has this constitutional amendment that says that, maybe this is just about Alabama.
Maybe this is The Alabama Supreme Court saying, hey, based on our constitution and what we have and how it defines life, this fits the definition.
But, and you can tell us more about this in a minute, Brad, the Chief Justice's statement really goes beyond this and the language and the decision goes beyond this.
The Chief Justice in a concurring opinion wrote, quote, the people of Alabama have declared the public policy of this state to be that unborn human life is sacred.
goes on to say, we believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness.
So you get the theological language and a particular perception of the Bible and religion and all of that stuff making its way into this court decision.
For those who would want to say, well, this is just, you know, Alabama, their hands are tied.
They have this 2018 constitutional amendment.
You know, what are you going to do?
It went a lot beyond that, okay?
A couple other things here just sort of for context.
The attorneys for the couples, I think, tried to play down the scope of the decision.
This is one of those things where it's like you go to court and they choose to pursue it.
They choose to pursue this line of reasoning.
I have no doubt they go to what they view as a conservative, sympathetic Supreme Court in Alabama.
And make these arguments.
And then when they win, they kind of try to play it down and be like, hey, we weren't trying to do anything crazy or anything.
And so the attorney said, for example, told CNN, this is out of CNN, obviously, that the case is solely about accountability for the parents whose embryos weren't kept safe by the clinic.
And the state Supreme Court's ruling offers them a way forward for justice.
What they're trying to say is, hey, it's just about this.
It's just about our clients.
We weren't trying to do anything bigger and broader and so forth.
Well, here's why it comes up, right?
Sole dissenting opinion.
The only member of the Alabama Supreme Court who dissented against this ruling said what I think any intelligent observer could have recognized and would have recognized and wrote this, said, quote, no rational medical provider would continue to provide services for creating and maintaining frozen embryos knowing that they must continue To maintain such frozen embryos forever or risk the penalty of a wrongful death act claim.
And that was just as Greg Cook wrote in The Soul Descent.
He went on to say, there's no doubt that there are many Alabama citizens praying to be parents who will no longer have that opportunity.
And he's exactly right.
The fallout from this, since it happened, and this could have changed today, I don't know, but at least three Alabama fertility clinics have now suspended IVF treatments because the obvious implication of this is, for those who don't know, in IVF you almost always fertilize multiple eggs, create multiple embryos because they won't all be carried to viability and so forth.
So some of those embryos don't survive the process, and or if somebody, say, gets pregnant and they have the child or kids that they want or whatever, and you've got these excess embryos that are used, they're destroyed as medical waste, right, by the facility.
So that's the issue here.
But it turns out, Brad, I know this will surprise you, I know this will surprise everybody listening, it turns out that even Republicans are fond of IVF treatments.
They think IVF is a good thing.
So you have had this week, since this decision was made, people all over the GOP trying to roll this back, trying to step back from it, trying to minimize it, trying to take away the edge from this.
The governors Brian Kemp of Georgia, Bill Lee of Tennessee, and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, for example, they all affirm their support for IVF.
They wouldn't explicitly criticize this ruling, But they all said IVF is a good thing, we need to preserve this and so on and so forth.
Congressional Republicans that are running in 2024 have all sort of tripped all over themselves to try to find ways to say that they support IVF without having to say that they think the Alabama Supreme Court screwed up or that it's nuts to say that a few frozen cells in a dish are a person.
They don't want to have to say that, but that's what they're busy doing.
Nikki Haley initially sort of voiced support for this and then had to kind of roll that back and say that she supports people pursuing IVF.
The Biden administration, of course, is making hay out of this and like linking this to Trump and everything else and trying to saddle every Republican they can with like, here's the logic of your anti-abortion policies and politics.
And I agree that this is the logic of that.
We'll talk more about that.
And then I read today, and I don't know much about this, this is one of those things as I was putting together the materials, like it sort of came up in my news feed and I was like, oh.
The Alabama legislators in Alabama are preparing legislation to do what?
To try to protect IVF, to try to make it so that this ruling doesn't apply to IVF, which I'm just going to throw out there.
Whether or not that can work, I don't know, but if this is an issue of the Alabama Constitution, Not clear that you can just pass a law that says, oh, we were just kidding.
With IVF, it doesn't turn out that there are persons and that it starts at conception and so forth.
We're going to rant for just a couple more minutes here, takeaways that I have, and then I want to throw it to you.
We could spend, I think, three episodes on this.
The first is like, I was thinking about this, I'm like, which is worse?
And I honestly don't know.
And I don't know which of these is true, and I think maybe it varies.
Is it worse to think that all these people in the GOP are sort of feigning surprise at the consequences of this?
I don't know how the hell anybody doesn't see this coming.
From a million miles away, if you're arguing that life begins at conception and that a few cells in a dish are the moral equivalent of you or me or our children or whatever else, and critics of this have said for decades, If you argue that life begins at conception, you are going to rule out, among other things, lots of kinds of fertility treatments.
I remember debating this in, like, ethics classes in my Southern Baptist College and my Southern Baptist Seminary.
So, there's that, or that they really didn't see this coming.
Like, I don't know which is worse.
If they, like, legitimately, honestly did not figure out that this is the logical outcome of these arguments, Or if they're just pretending that they didn't know that and didn't see that.
There's that.
There's also some parallels that I see, this pattern that we've seen over and over and over.
I was reminded of, you know, a long time ago, some listeners will remember Scott Walker in Wisconsin, you know, running on a platform of doing away with collective bargaining and, you know, this kind of attack on big government and all of this.
And he wins and strips unions of all of their collective bargaining powers and so forth.
And I remember seeing some news story, and there was this teacher who's in tears because they had just lost their contract that they had had with their school district.
And this person was crying and talking about voting for Scott Walker and trusting Scott Walker.
And he said he was going to do all this, but I didn't think he meant me.
And I remember just being like, who did you think he meant?
Like, he told you he was going to do this.
Or we saw it with Obamacare, or every time Republicans want to repeal healthcare, and then people have this realization that like, oh, wait, all these Republicans that I've been jumping on board with, the culture wars I've been cheering on, oh, that's going to hurt me.
Oh, wow, like, who knew?
Or here you've got Lots of Republicans in red states, people who voted to put these folks in, people who support a conservative Supreme Court, people who voted for a constitutional amendment in Alabama in 2018 to say that life begins at conception, and so forth, who now are suddenly like, oh, wait, what?
This is going to make it so that we can't have kids?
These anti-abortion policies are actually going to make it harder for people to have children?
Who knew, right?
So there's that piece of it.
Just sort of on and on and on.
There's also the broader issue.
Lots of strategists will note that abortion or anti-abortion is the gift that keeps on giving for the Democrats politically.
Lots of strategists have said, you know, In an election cycle where Republicans continue to take a beating on abortion issues, this is only going to make that worse.
So on and on and on.
I am very worked up about this.
I know you are too.
So I'll throw it over to you for wherever you want to pick up on any of those or other issues related to the Alabama decision.
Well, I mean, I want to come back to the political fallout of this, because I do think this is one of those moments where if the Democrats have any sense, they would be running ads right now that are like, they're coming for IVF.
Do you not think that birth control is next?
I mean, come on.
I mean, that should be playing, if you're a Democratic strategist, that should be playing in every swing state, every hour, on the hour, you know, until the election.
So, I want to get into the philosophical and theological bits of this, and there's a lot of them.
Some of you are already aware of this.
I want to start, though, because I was thinking about this, Dan, and I was like, okay, so the state of Alabama, I don't know the answer to this.
How many embryos are there in the state of Alabama right now?
Is there 1,000?
Is there 10,000?
I don't know.
What does that do to the census?
Did certain counties just gain 1,000 people?
Are they going to have to redraw the maps?
Are they going to have to figure out that certain state legislature districts have more people now?
Can families claim benefits for all those kids?
Does it change taxes?
If you're like, I've got, I don't know, eight embryos at this IVF clinic, do I now get bigger child tax credits or other things like that?
Is that a piece of this?
I have eight dependents.
I have eight dependents.
They happen to be frozen clumps of cells in a facility over there.
But yeah, I have eight dependents, so I'm not paying taxes unless... Ellie Mistel thought about this too.
I saw this after I thought about my little census question, and he says at The Nation, The legal questions raised by embryonic anthropomorphization are legion and illustrate the moronic logic of the Alabama court.
Ellie Mistel, a wordsmith of the highest degree.
Do the icicle babies get a social security number?
Can their mothers count them as dependents on their taxes, as you just said, Dan?
Do their fathers have to pay child support?
Oh my God.
Are we all nine months older than we think?
I mean, that's a good question, because I don't really want to be nine months older at this point in my life.
Do 17-year-olds get to vote now?
Is Frosty the Cellular Snowman entitled to a public education like all the other kids before he melts away?
I mean, he's being funny, but this is all part of the equation legally.
Let's go to the concurring opinion by Chief Justice Tom Parker.
Some of you are getting acquainted with Tom Parker.
Let me give you just a little bit of background on Tom Parker.
Tom Parker is...
Roy Moore's protege.
So some of you are old enough to remember that Roy Moore was the Alabama Supreme Court Justice who ran for Senate.
He wanted to put Ten Commandments on federal buildings.
He got in a big sort of row about this all over Alabama.
He was also accused of sexual interactions with very young girls going back decades to like age 13.
And this led to being asked about like child Marriage and him saying there was nothing wrong with it and all kinds of stuff with Roy Moore.
Tom Parker was his protege.
Tom Parker has been described by Bill Stewart, a political scientist, this is at the Alabama Times, as more light, okay?
Tom Parker is a tried and true Christian nationalist, and on the same day that this ruling came out, he went on a radio show or a podcast, I can't remember which, and he declared that the United States is based in the Christian religion, that the laws should be according to the Bible, and that he is a proponent of the Seven Mountains Mandate.
The Seven Mountains Mandate is, of course, The idea that Christians should dominate and control every aspect of human society, all seven categories as they break them down, the economy and the arts and the government.
This is the Supreme Court Justice, this is the Chief Justice in Alabama, okay?
So that's a little bit about him and we could do a deep dive on him because he was somebody So, back in 2014, there was a 7-2 ruling denying a birther conspiracy effort that tried to keep Obama off Alabama's ballot.
This might just be something, I don't know, Dan, we were talking about recently?
Keeping people off the ballot for valid or invalid reasons?
One reason would be, I don't know, an insurrection you started.
Another might not be a conspiracy that you weren't born in the country.
So seven Alabama justices were like, that's BS.
There is no birth or conspiracy reality.
And we're not going to keep Barack Obama off the ballot.
I'm sorry.
Two people did vote for that.
Roy Moore, Tom Parker.
So that's who we're dealing with.
That's who we're dealing with.
Now, if you read his concurring opinion, he wrote a concurring opinion to this ruling.
He says, this is probably the like, this is the gut punch section.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic and that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country and meet some really interesting people and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
The theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the people of Alabama encompasses the following.
God made every person in his image.
Each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate.
Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.
Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing His glory.
Now, in the run-up to this passage, if you read his concurring opinion, What is the evidence for this whole conclusion that I just read?
The evidence he cites are the Bible, the Book of Genesis, he cites John Calvin, he cites Thomas Aquinas, he cites various Christian manifestos.
These are the basis for American legal jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Alabama.
I'm going to say one thing.
I have so much more to say to this, but I'm going to say one thing.
I'm going to throw it to you.
Here's what I wrote down when I read this.
With this ruling, we have a situation where a set of judges is calling on religious documents to justify their opinion.
They're in essence making a theological claim about public policy or law.
What this means is that we no longer have a situation where one is free to exercise their religion in public, but instead it goes further that one religious group is able to practice their religion and impose it on others in a way that makes it the law of the state or of the entire country.
This is the core aim of Christian nationalism.
Dan, I have been around scholars who have been like, why are we talking about Christian nationalism?
Why don't we have another term?
Why don't we say religious right, moral majority?
And that's fine.
Scholars, if you're listening, that's a good exercise.
Let's do that at the conferences.
But you know what?
Whatever you want to call it, I will just say that if you want to make a situation where your theological view of the human condition Is the law for every human being in your state the 14% of Alabamans who are not Christian?
The Christians in Alabama who do not agree with this theology?
Anyone else who doesn't see it this way?
Then this is not the freedom of religion.
This is the tyranny of one religion over everyone in a situation where we are supposed to all be equal and free from religious imposition and other forms of religious nationalism.
I got a lot more to say.
The word God appears 41 times in the concurring opinion.
He, yeah.
All right.
I'll throw it to you.
Thoughts on Parker, on this concurring opinion, more on Alabama as we go here.
What do you got?
Thoughts on a lot of this.
So like one, and this is something I don't pretend to solve, but if you sit around with folks and you have these geeky kind of conversations that academics have, But I think regular people think about these, too.
This word person is thrown around a lot.
I think everybody recognizes that in legal terms, what constitutes a person is sometimes different from, like, you know, how we use it in everyday language and stuff.
But if you just sort of play this game, like, one of the things that this highlights is it's really hard to define exactly what a person is.
Do persons need to have some kind of capacity or agency in the world?
Can I just say, sorry, my favorite class, my first semester at college, at a Christian college, was all about theories of the human condition.
And you know what we did?
We read ten authors who were Christian who couldn't decide what a human was because they all disagreed.
Yeah, and it is.
It's a complex philosophical question because if you start talking about, like, The sociology or psychology of it, like one of the things that often presupposes is like a nervous system, like that's so basic you would think it wouldn't go in there, but these embryos at this stage of development, they don't have nervous systems.
They don't have like internal organs.
They don't have any of that stuff.
And obviously we know a nervous system isn't enough, because all vertebrates and other creatures have nervous systems, and we don't call them persons, legally speaking.
But my point is, I mean, it does get into complex conversations about what does something have to be able to do to qualify as a person?
You get really complex discussions about ableism and abilities and people who have neurological damage, all different kinds of things like this.
The conversation I've had with students before, and a way to sort of progress when we're thinking about complex ethical things, or I think legal things like this, is usually to start with, like, let's start with, like, two ends of a spectrum that are easy to map.
I'm looking at Brad Onishi on my screen right now.
I'm pretty sure Brad Onishi, whatever else he is, he's a person.
He's not a high-functioning zombie.
He's not a robot.
He's not an alien.
He's a person.
Like, that's a pretty cut-and-dried thing.
We walk around in the world, we see that.
And we can say, okay, like, I think, okay, I think a newborn infant, maybe I'm willing to call that a person, but that's actually more complex than you would think, because they can't communicate, they can't perceive lots of things that regular people are.
We say that they survive outside the world, we understand that, but they need extreme amounts of care.
Human infants are one of the more helpless infants, you know, that mammals have.
But then you, like, go to the other stream, and most people would have thought, you would think, like, something that you can only see, say, under a microscope slide.
A few cells that are—you have no sort of strong specialization of cells and whatever.
A lot of people say, that's not.
Whatever a person is, that's something different.
And then let's figure out where in that continuum personhood starts.
Like, that's a valid discussion.
That's a real thing.
The point is, it sounds all intense for Christians—has for a long time—to say life begins at conception, but does personhood begin at conception?
Are life and personhood the same thing?
Just because it might be a biological organism of some kind.
Is it a person?
And what does that mean?
And so all of these things that people say that other people laugh off about, you know, dependence and all that, but you're like, those are all legal definitions of a person.
Those are all ethical elements of personhood.
It's not just a joke.
And as I say, I remember having these debates in Christian ethics classes.
And coming to the conclusion, like, whatever it is, a few cells simply, to me, cannot have the same moral standing, religious standing, theological standing as a newborn infant has.
Theologically.
Christian history, Jewish history, Islamic history, lots of other traditions.
It's not like humans have just started thinking about this.
They've been thinking about it for thousands of years, and in really complex ways.
And so you get theories of quickening.
The first time somebody can feel the infant move, that that's when life starts, or something like that.
Or complex accounts of, like, maybe a soul or something enters into a human fetus, and so forth.
Is that going to show up in Tom Parker's findings?
Probably not.
Just sort of on and on and on and on.
It's a really complex issue, and I think what some Christians are confronting now is when they're like, oh, it turns out that our rhetoric, like, It leads in crazy directions.
I've got real questions now for, and here's just another one, if I were talking with Uncle Ron, or in my series I've been talking, I've introduced Cousin Lonnie to folks, who's like Uncle Ron's son, who's in seminary.
You know, when somebody wants to say life begins at conception, and you're like, oh, okay, cool, but like, it kind of sounds like, you know, what is conception now?
Because it turns out that can happen in a lab.
Or, if you are now the Alabama legislators who want to say, what they said, they introduced a bill that would establish that fertilized human eggs stored outside of a uterus are not considered human beings under state law.
Well, wait a minute, now being a person is conception plus something else.
It now needs to be in a uterus.
Oh, but then that's going to violate the whole thing of, like, it begins at conception, full stop, because it turns out we had other presuppositions in there that being human was more than just being conceived, right?
The point is, you tease these out in a philosophical or theological direction, and it goes all different kind of ways.
I'm like you, I could go forever on this.
I'll throw it back to you for any additional thoughts, or wherever you want to go with any of that.
Just to hover one more second on the Life Begins at Conception bit.
So now conception is happening outside of the womb.
It's happening in a lab.
Could be happening outside of marriage too.
All kinds of stuff.
There's not even a physical union necessary for this.
I mean, is this really where you want to go, Christian, who's always arguing about God's design, natural theology, the way things were meant to be?
Like, are you serious that life beginning at conception includes a lab with millions of dollars of equipment?
And anyway, that's absurd.
I don't even want to talk about that anymore.
It's absolutely absurd.
There's one more thing, though.
Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove.
Tweeted out this idea of, like, Tom Parker's like, no being created in the image of God can be destroyed without incurring his wrath, and that every person, born or unborn, bears the image of God.
And Jonathan Wilson-Harker was like, you're using Genesis to justify this idea theologically, And yet in Genesis, Adam and Eve are not born.
So they bear the image of God without developing in the womb, without birth.
I mean, it's a very strange way to sort of get at this whole idea of the image of God.
So that's another thing.
All right.
Let's just real quick before, I mean, we're going to run out of time.
We've got some other things to talk about, but I'll just say a couple of things and then I'll throw it to you for final thoughts on this one.
We get asked all the time, do people actually believe this stuff or they just play acting?
And look, it's varied.
We're talking about thousands of people in this Christian nationalist cosmos.
We're talking about everybody from Charlie Kirk to Alex Jones to Kevin McCarthy to Lauren Boebert.
And we all saw, like, the way Kevin McCarthy handled himself as speaker and the way he's all about Kevin McCarthy.
Lauren Boebert went to Beetlejuice and did what she did at that whole thing.
Tom Parker believes this stuff, Dan.
I do think he does.
I don't think that this is for show.
I don't think he gains anything.
There are many people, Mike Johnson, Tom Parker, right, who actually, Mike Pence, they are true believers.
And we have to get past the idea that that's not true, that they're all just sort of make-believing it.
The second part, and this is really where I think it's worth us talking just a little bit further here, is about the political fallout.
There is no doubt in my mind that in a Trump second term, you will see more headlines like this one.
You will see people trying to rally legislatures around the country to ban contraception and birth control.
You will see And at CPAC, we've already had it.
And some of you are wondering about CPAC because it's happening right now.
We're going to get to it next week.
It's all unfolding right now.
But there have already been people at CPAC saying, let's overturn, overfill, and get rid of marriage equality.
So, the next iteration of these headlines is on the horizon.
This is not like, oh, we've reached the absurd.
We're looking around like, what are we doing?
This is ridiculous.
I can't believe we got here.
I feel stupid.
We went to Vegas.
Two days later.
Lost a whole bunch of money.
Not wearing a shirt.
Had like 18 margaritas.
Woke up in a drained swimming pool somehow.
Over in New Mexico.
What am I doing?
Alright, time to get a hold of myself.
Nope.
This is not that moment.
The political fallout should be Democrats.
That just as you have campaigned and won on reproductive rights for the last year and change, kick it into overdrive, people.
Like, just flex capacitor, get in the DeLorean, go 88 miles per hour.
I don't know where this metaphor is going.
I just, that, I don't know what happened.
Sorry.
I apologize to everybody for the Back to the Future reference.
But just step on the gas and I'll throw it to you because I just think, Dan, that the silver lining of this has got to be advertisements and emails and texts that are like, they want to get rid of IVF.
Birth control is next.
Are you ready to vote or not?
I mean, what do you think?
And then let's close this out.
So I agree with that because people will say, well, it's a slippery slope argument, except that it's happening, right?
Like it's happening and we're seeing it happen.
One more piece, and this brings us back to something that critics of anti-abortion movements have said for years, we've said for years on this podcast, but appeal to God's—you want to talk about a contested idea in Christian and Jewish thought, it's like, what the hell is God's image?
Like, what does that mean to say that humans are—and I'll just throw out there again, this is a really obvious point, it usually presupposes nervous systems, it's usually something like Human rationality, or a capacity for moral responsibility, or a capacity for entering into a relationship with God, or something like that.
Something that a few cells in a dish don't have.
I was going to say, how many damn people do the people on the right seem to not care about being created in God's image?
All the people in Gaza, Christian right, guess what?
They're created in God's image.
All the black activists you don't like on BLM?
They're all created in God's image.
All the kids who live in poor households and can't afford enough food or clothing or whatever, and you don't want to do anything to help them, guess what?
God's image.
So, like, it's just one of those that's right up there with hopes and prayers for me that I just have zero effing patience.
For anybody on the religious right who wants to come along and start touting God's image for a bunch of cells because, oh, it has the same genetic code.
It has a unique genetic code.
I'm like, viruses have a unique genetic code.
It doesn't make them created in God's image.
There are real flesh and blood humans all over the world, and you deny their status as people created in the image of God functionally through what you do all the time.
You've talked about this a million times, but just to throw that out there is yet another piece of this.
This is what I told Tim Alberta, though.
I was like, Tim Alberta, who was talking about Life Begins at Conception, you know, and if you haven't listened to my interviews with Tim Alberta, go listen, because one of the things I really wanted to challenge him on was like, The idea that life begins at conception is a Catholic idea that's been around a while.
Now, we can try to figure out how long.
We could point to Papal Edicts of 1869.
We can go back further.
There's a Catholic tradition that sort of has this built in for centuries.
That's there.
A lot of Protestants?
Not really.
Like, if we wanted to do a survey of influential Christians from the last 2,000 years who think life begins at conception, It's not unanimous, and it may not even be close to a majority.
Like, Gregory of Nazianzus?
Probably not.
Augustine?
Probably not.
Like, Aquinas?
An Aristotelian?
Like, when does he think that the human has been ensouled and received its sort of image of God?
Like, that's a whole question for all you Thomists out there, okay?
Like, we could talk about Trace of Avila.
We can talk about Mekhild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart.
Who do you want to talk about?
James Cone?
Like, we can just go down the line of whatever Christian influence, theologian, thinkers you can name.
And we could see if we can figure out if they think life begins at conception, most of them will not.
You know why?
Because this is a political mantra turned into theology.
It was a way to motivate white Southern Christians like Tom Parker.
And the result is this absurdity 60 years later.
I talk about it in my book.
Many other scholars and historians have talked about it.
I'm by no means the only one and I'm standing on their shoulders when I write about it.
But that is something that has to be said.
All right, let's take a break and come back and talk about someone Who is and was created in the image of God, at least according to many of the theologies we're mentioning here, and yet was not treated as such, and in fact lost their life as a result.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, once again, take us away, this time, to Oklahoma.
Yeah, so, tragic story out of Oklahoma.
A 16-year-old non-binary high school student named Nex, N-E-X, Benedict, use they, them pronouns, as I say, non-binary, did not identify as male or female, was attacked by three other girls, three girls, in the bathroom of Owasso High School in Oklahoma.
Details are sketchy, but according to their grandma and guardian—my understanding is that the grandmother's, the legal guardian, was attacked by these three older girls.
This was a pattern of bullying that they had been experiencing all of this academic year, at least.
And reportedly, I think this is going to prove significant.
They hit their head on the floor multiple times.
Somebody was banging their head on the floor of the bathroom.
The fight was broken up by a teacher and other students.
The students, in like a classic example of like, I don't know, high schools that are just kind of clueless and I don't understand why they do things like this.
The students were taken to the principal's office and the nurse's office.
According to the report, Next was unable to walk on their own power.
They needed to be helped to this.
The nurse contacted the parents and suggested that they be taken to a hospital.
So the school did not call an ambulance, did not transport the student to the hospital.
The school resource officer went to the hospital, but police were notified by the guardian at the hospital and have said that the school did not contact them, did not reach out to them, that they didn't know anything about this incident until they were contacted and came to the hospital.
All of that happens, and the next day, the next collapses.
First responders come, goes to the hospital where they are pronounced dead.
The parts we don't know.
Police say, at this point, the preliminary autopsy results say the cause was not trauma, but that's not official yet, and we don't know what that is.
It's a hell of a coincidence if somebody reports being hit in the head multiple times, can't walk on their own, and so forth, and then collapses and has medical distress the next day.
Pretty classic like severe concussive kind of stuff, but we'll see where that comes out.
So the final cause of death is yet to come.
But leaving all that out, the things I want to look at, so Oklahoma, obviously, is one of many states that has passed anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation in recent months and years.
There was a bathroom bill that was passed in 2022.
In 2023, Governor Stitt of Oklahoma issued an executive order requiring government agencies to identify people according to sex at birth.
Why does all that matter?
All that matters because what advocates for the queer community will say is what all of this does is creates a climate of fear, a climate of intimidation, a climate of not valuing trans and queer people, a climate in which effectively people are permitted to mistreat them.
It invites violence.
And so here was the statement that was issued by the governor of Oklahoma.
He said, quote, Sarah and I are saddened to learn of the death of Nex Benedict and our hearts go out to Nex's family, classmates, and the Owasso community.
The death of any child in an Oklahoma school is a tragedy and bullies must be held accountable.
As we await results of the investigation, I urge Owasso police and Owasso public schools to be forthcoming and transparent with the public.
You know what stands out to me?
It's like when the white person says that they're issuing a statement against racism, like an unarmed black man is shot and killed by a police officer or hunted down by white vigilantes or whatever, and they say, we oppose racism in all of its forms.
That's code.
That's code for, yeah, racism is bad, but we don't really want to call it racism.
We don't want to call it anti-black racism.
We want to make sure that But we're still sticking in there that we think anti-white racism is a real problem in this country.
So when it says, uh, the death of any child is a tragedy?
No, sorry Governor, Sid, this is the death of a trans child that was made more possible and more likely by your policies and the policies of the school district.
And the policies in Oklahoma and the policies duplicated in lots of other, because of course he can't bring himself to say the death of a member of the queer community is a tragedy.
No, it has to be any child.
It's that same mechanism that is used where we're not going to critique men for critiquing women because, you know, anytime anybody's mean, that's bad.
We shouldn't be mean at all.
We're not going to critique anti-queer bullying.
We're just going to say bullying is bad.
And it's that kind of mechanism that, to me, stands out as we look at the fallout of this.
It's tragic, and it's awful, and it's completely predictable, and it's going to happen more, and it happens all the time.
But you see the same political actors who virtually ensure—it's a virtual inevitability that these things will happen.
Just as the anti-abortion activists make an IVF ruling like Alabama virtually certain this is the logical outcome, And then somebody has the nerve to talk about, you know, how they value every child and so forth when it's their policies that made this more likely.
So, obviously, I get worked up about this.
As I say, it's tragic.
Your thoughts or additional perspectives on this?
So, the statement you just read from Governor Stitt is one of the lines in there, and you can correct me here if you have it in front of you, is that all bullies must be held accountable, I think is what he said.
Let's just keep that in our minds, everybody.
All bullies must be held accountable.
So, a couple of things.
Schools, Dan, are places where students, young people, We are learning what is possible and what is acceptable.
I don't know if you all remember this about being in school.
You could be eight or ten or twelve.
I'm going to give you two examples that I think are going to highlight my point.
I remember being in fourth or fifth grade when the Iraq War was happening, like the early 1990s Iraq War, the George H.W.
Bush Iraq War.
And I remember there was a new student at our school, and he wasn't in my class.
I only had one class.
It was elementary school, so I didn't know him very well.
And I remember after class, though, his name was Mustafa.
And after class one day, we were walking home.
I lived four or five blocks from school.
And one of the people that I walked home with said, oh, you're Mustafa.
And he said, yeah.
And then he said, oh, you just moved here.
You're new.
Like, where'd you come from?
And he said, Iraq.
And we all looked at him like, We didn't know what to say.
I don't remember anyone hurling sort of insults at him.
But what I will tell you, Dan, about that moment is that neither my parents nor anyone's parents I knew had really been able to sit us down and say, yes, the United States is involved in a conflict with Iraq.
Does not mean that all people from Iraq are bad people.
And that there's a new kid at your school whose name is Mustafa.
And we should really do our best to, like, make sure he feels, like, safe and welcome at this new school, because I'm sure it's hard to move across the world.
There's an 11-year-old way or 9-year-old way that that would have made sense, but we didn't ever hear that.
So I remember the feeling toward Mustafa on the playground was like, that guy's from Iraq.
We shouldn't be friends with him, because we're—Iraq is our enemy, right?
In our fourth—you see what I'm saying?
In our fourth grade, like, little line of thinking.
I'll give you one more.
I remember like in 5th or 6th, I actually think it was 6th grade, we had a health lesson, a science lesson that talked about how red meat was bad for you.
I remember this video.
It showed like somebody eating red meat all their life and then like a doctor doing an exam on a person who had died of heart disease and pulling out like a clogged part of their artery.
And I went home immediately that day.
And I told my dad, I am never eating meat again.
And he looked at me like, he's a single dad.
My parents are divorced.
I'm with my dad like three, four nights a week.
He's cooking dinner.
And he's like, what did you say?
And he's like, I'm not eating meat.
I'll never eat meat again.
And he just looked at me like, bro, what?
You don't even eat vegetables.
What are you going to eat?
And for like a year, like many of you out there, I was a vegetarian strictly and I wouldn't do it.
All because of things I learned at school and all that.
When you have a climate in Oklahoma and many other places in the country where the superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, is a vehemently anti-trans person who calls transition care and other forms of expression, queer expression by teenagers, dangerous.
When he's in the camp of people who thinks this is unnatural, It trickles down.
It trickles down to the superintendents, to the teachers, and then when you have parents who agree with this, it trickles down to the kids.
So what happens in their minds when they see someone like Nex?
They're like, yeah.
Dangerous.
Not okay.
Bad.
Against God.
There's an anti-trans law.
There's a banning of care in Oklahoma.
There's also a law passed in the state that is really trying to make sure that trans students don't have a place in schools.
And it's under new scrutiny right now.
This is from the New York Times.
And what it's led to, and I'm going to read now, is a policing of bathrooms in schools.
That policy and the messaging around it has led to a lot more policing of bathrooms by students, said Nicole McAfee, the executive director of Freedom Oklahoma.
There's a sense of, do you belong in here?
So the bathroom law in Oklahoma, the law about using the bathroom of your assigned sex or whatever, means students are policing the bathroom.
Now, I just want to add one more thing to this story and then I'll throw it to you.
Last month, Ryan Walter, the superintendent, appointed Chaya Raychik, who runs Libs of TikTok, to be part of an advisory committee for the state's education system.
Libs of TikTok, Dan, is the definition of a bully.
Libs of TikTok has led to so many incidents of doxing and violence and harassment, and they were appointed to a leadership position in Oklahoma.
So when the governor says bullies must be held accountable, it is taking everything inside of me right now not to explode with rage about the ways that the bully who is the superintendent of schools in that state has created a climate where someone like Nex is going to get bullied and hurt and lose their life
For absolutely no reason, except for cruelty and a desire for social control and order in a retrograde and myopic vision.
It's taking everything inside of me to not let this episode turn into an expletive-filled rage machine, because that is how I feel thinking about the way that Ryan Walters has run his education system in Oklahoma as its superintendent.
I'll stop here, throw it to you for final thoughts, and then we'll just spend one or two minutes on Tennessee.
Just a couple things.
So, like, there's more than theology at work here.
Like, we understand that.
Christian nationalism is about more than theology.
But one of the things I say all the time on It's in the Code is the bad theology hurts people.
And here it is, like literally.
And it's the question, where is the image of God language for next from people in Oklahoma who say that they're good Christians and this is what they're doing?
Their blood is on their hands, and this is just going to keep happening.
But I think people, they need to be confronted with this.
That if your theology leads to people dying, you own that.
That's on you, and that theology hurts people, and this is a real tragic example of that.
All right.
So, real quick today, before we close, I just want to get this in before we go to Reasons for Hope.
In Tennessee, new bill.
It's very vague in its wording, but it basically says that no one can be forced to solemnize a marriage in Tennessee.
And it doesn't just mean ministers.
So you might be thinking, well, what's the big deal?
If I'm a minister and I don't want to marry two gay folks or two men, two women, whatever, then you're already protected.
You don't have to do that under federal laws, state law, etc.
This bill seems to go further and say that civil servants don't have to solemnize a marriage.
So what that means is, we've all heard of the idea of going to the courthouse to get married, right?
So if I was going to go to the courthouse and get married, have the ceremony there, and have a civil servant do that ceremony, this bill seems to say That you could be refused.
And you think, well, I mean, I can, some of you think, well, big deal, go somewhere else.
But what if you, A, no, don't go somewhere else, because I'll come back to that in a second.
B, there may not be anywhere else to go except for 100 miles or 200 miles away, etc.
The Tennessee legislation would empower government employees, such as those who issue marriage licenses in courthouses, to discriminate against couples who offend their religious views.
Okay, so a civil servant refusing to perform functions of the government protected by law and the Constitution, Dan, that is not freedom of religion.
That is the imposition of religious privilege.
That I have the religious privilege not to do my duty as a civil servant.
I talked about this with the 303 Creative Case last year.
Here's the idea.
If you want to feel like your religion doesn't let you do things like perform functions that the government performs, such as marriages between two men, two women, etc.
That's fine.
No one's saying you can't practice your religion.
Your religion is not outlawed.
You don't have to be persecuted.
Guess what though?
You just may not be able to do that job for the government.
It just may not be something you can do.
Does that mean your religion is being persecuted?
Does that mean you're not allowed to practice your religion?
No.
It just means you might have to accept that you live in a situation where the Supreme Court has ruled and so on and so forth that people have rights, people have abilities, people have capacities as human beings to do things like get married.
That's what that means.
This bill, it gets worse because if you think about the implications, and this is, I'll close here because we're out of time, okay?
What if I'm a civil servant in rural Tennessee who's like, you know what I also don't think God wants?
I don't think God wants this black lady marrying this white dude over here.
I don't think God wants interracial marriages.
I don't think God wants mixed children.
So I'm not doing that either.
What about that?
As like a mixed race person, Dan, those histories are deep in this country.
The idea that interracial marriage is not part of God's plan.
You think that's not a theology that was popular in the 19th and 20th centuries?
You need to A, listen to the archives of this podcast, but B, there's a lot of books I can suggest for you because it is pretty easy to find.
So not only could it be I'm not marrying two men, it could also be I'm not marrying this Asian woman and this Puerto Rican man.
Not doing it.
It's not what God wants.
Especially not letting this nice white lady over here marry that black man, because we all know the histories of that, going back to...
The KKK and so on and so on and so on.
All right.
Any thoughts on this before we go to reason?
And then give us your reason for hope.
Yeah.
So, one of it is, again, this is another one of those things where those kind of thought experiments, I think, reveal the real purpose at work here.
So, I was thinking about, like, how are these people going to react when, I don't know, somebody who's a really progressive person is like, oh, you...
You're both conservative Christians.
I don't need you getting married.
We don't need any more conservative Christian families.
Are we going to rule that out?
Or a ridiculous example when somebody's like, no, I just don't think your kids are going to be cute enough.
I think the genetic pool is not good.
And we laugh because it's ridiculous.
But they're so broadly worded that it would allow that.
I get it, Dan.
And that's the point.
I'm short.
My wife is short.
Okay?
It's fine.
Okay?
Whatever, Dan.
But you have hair and I don't, so I guess we're both, you know, we'd both be in trouble.
So yeah, I mean, but people are like, that's absurd.
Of course it's absurd, but it seems like the way it's phrased, it would be allowed.
And it's in those discussions when people have to try to say, well, no, no, no, no, that's not what we mean.
You're like, okay, so tell us what you do mean.
It's the same strategy or the same mechanism when somebody makes that off-color joke or that racist joke or that misogynist joke and you're like, I don't get it.
Can you explain it to me?
And all of a sudden they have to come out and tell you the racist stuff that they were thinking.
It reveals what's really going on there.
So I think that's a piece of this.
That's going to bring me to my reason for hope, which is actually not the Alabama decision, but the way that, once again, watching people on the right have to tie themselves in knots To try to explain away this because they like IVF and they realize that, you know, millions of people try to have families and use IVF technologies to do so every year.
And watching this, I think what it does once again is it brings into view what's really going on.
People ask me all the time, if you say everything so much stuff's about desire and it's about emotion and it's about identity and it's not about reason and rationality, is there a point of having these kinds of rational discussions and highlighting the logic?
And one of the points that I make is that often we'll bring into view what's really going on And I see that and I think it's there and I think it ties into the politics and everything else of like, the GOP has nowhere left to hide about what it actually thinks about women and what values or what lives really matter and so forth.
So I actually take hope in that as dark an episode as it is.
Mine is similar because Trump's plan to ban abortion at 16 weeks was leaked this week and you're like, that's terrible.
How is that good news?
And it's like, well, I knew, I knew already that the next Trump term was going to include like, I already knew that was on the table.
So it's not like that's bad news to me because that's news I already knew and it's been bad for a while.
It's good that it leaked now?
Because once again, Democrats, go for it.
Let's get out there.
Reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, women and impregnable people being free and able to control their lives and their flesh and blood.
That seems pretty important.
So whether it's the Trump attempt to ban abortion, whether it's the IVF, embryos are people now, whether it's any of that, okay?
Let's, you know, see that as something that can be a way to reveal the absurdity of these positions and ask...
Why would you ever think about putting someone like him back in power, much less those that are following in step with him?
We also now, Dan, I'm just probably going to spend today thinking about merch, uh, where like embryos are riding bikes and like get it.
They're learning how to like ride without training wheels or like potty training.
I don't know.
We need some shirts with embryos on them that are like learning to read or, um, you know, Learn their ABCs?
I don't know.
If anyone has any ideas, maybe that would be some good merch for this show.
I don't know.
We'll have to see.
All right.
Next week, bonus episode coming your way.
As usual, you're going to have a good interview.
I have an interview with Steve Hassan, who's an expert on high control religions.
It's in the code, the weekly roundup, all of that coming at you.
We'll be back, but for now, we'll just say thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening.
As always, have a good day and a good weekend.
Thanks, Brad.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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