Point of View August 2, 2024 – Hour 2 : Weekend Edition

[00:00:00] JD Vance, and his childless cat lady's comment, only to perhaps get a little bit behind what the sentiment he was that was behind that statement, which has been so perverted. Larry Elder wrote a piece on it.

[00:00:51] He's a talk show host in California, but he also ran for governor. And president. And that's right. He ran for president too. And so he doesn't apparently have any children, but he's not a cat lady, he says. And you can read that piece at pointofview.net.

[00:01:10] But you know, there's one point, one thing that I thought about when the comment was made and all the hoopla after it. And that is when you have, and I wrote a piece about a year over a year ago called Single Woke Females.

[00:01:24] You do have, there is a phenomenon that single women demand more from government than probably other sectors of the population. And it's very true. And there are polls that show that. And when they're woke, it's even more true.

[00:01:41] And so, you know, I think that's, that's partly what was behind his comments. But what else, buddy? And there's also a trend that people are marrying later. In many cases, couples are deciding not to have children.

[00:01:53] The Wall Street Journal had an article on that a couple of weeks ago. Just the growing number of couples who said, we're happy. We enjoy ourselves. Both of us are working full time and we really don't have the time to do that.

[00:02:06] We want to be able to travel and other things. And it sort of raises the question, is this being selfish or is this just being somewhat independent? You don't, and you just don't want to have kids in your life.

[00:02:16] And I think he's sort of highlighting that sort of trend because the birth rate has been down in the United States. We're not, we're not reproducing at a rate that sort of replenishes the population.

[00:02:28] And there's just a sort of a growing sense among people who say, I've got so many things to do. I've got a career. And I think we saw this to some extent, and I don't mean this critically, but as women

[00:02:37] in the mid seventies started really going to work in large numbers. And now they have professional careers. More women go to medical school than men. If they're going into doctors, lawyers, other things, things that demand a lot of time.

[00:02:51] They oftentimes don't feel like they just have the freedom and time to be able to devote to kids. And so there's that trend going on. I'm not critical of it. It's just something that's happening.

[00:03:03] But I think you sometimes see people who are looking at more traditional families saying, you know, you ought to get married. You ought to have some kids. It's helpful to have kids. It's good to have kids. It actually teaches for those of us who've had children.

[00:03:16] You learn a lot about life having children around it. It's a, it's an a ennobling experience in some ways, also a struggle in some ways. But I think that's kind of what he was getting at.

[00:03:28] You know, it is a demographic reality that the independent adult female is a norm in society now. It's not like there's really maybe in the Christian world, in the church community, there's still

[00:03:39] a stigma if you don't have kids or maybe you're single and you haven't found a husband or, you know, why haven't you found one? There may be some of that. But really in the in the broader culture, I think it's coming to the point where women

[00:03:53] don't necessarily think a husband is necessary. I think it's sad. I think we were made with, you know, sort of an instinct for motherhood. Obviously we're built to have children. And you know, I think it's really a sad part of the culture and it's very damaging to the

[00:04:11] culture not to have most people in families and raising kids and, you know, adding more people and, you know, catechizing those kids in your faith and all of that. So, you know, I'm always encouraging people to get married. And there's a Wilcox. What's his first name? Brad.

[00:04:29] Brad Wilcox. He wrote a book called Get Married recently and, you know, with all the stats and why that's good. And I mean, I've been happy for the most part in a marriage, you know, of 45 years that will be this year and with nine grandchildren.

[00:04:45] And I think that's flourishing. I consider that to be flourishing. So I'm sad sometimes when I see people that aren't. Congratulations. That's wonderful. You know, I had a conversation. This is purely anecdotal, but I wonder if it's representative of something more.

[00:04:58] I had a conversation with a young man not too long ago, just graduated from college and dating his girlfriend for, you know, four or five years, I suppose now. And I said, well, when are you guys going to get married?

[00:05:09] And he said, well, you know, I don't know. And he said, I said, buddy, do it now. Get married and have a lot of babies. That is the zest of the thing of life, man. Go and do that thing.

[00:05:21] Your life is supposed to crescendo from this point and go forward. Don't just sit still and wait for something to happen. And I went on and on about like this for a long time. And oddly enough, he said, you know, you're the only one to have said that.

[00:05:36] All my professors, all my people in my life that are older than I am, are encouraging me to wait to make enough money to be prepared to be married. I said, buddy, you will never be ready to be married. You will never have enough money.

[00:05:52] You will never be ready to have children for sure. You'll never be able to afford children. So if you wait to be that point, you will have missed your opportunity in the first place. Take advantage of the moment now. No one has regretted that.

[00:06:04] I'm sure there's been regrets about marriages here and there, but for goodness sakes, the presumption has been in the past that the progress of life is get out of mom and dad's home, maybe go to college, get a job, get married.

[00:06:18] That's been the natural progression for almost all of life. When you hit that post pubescent time of your life, it is time to start turning your feet towards what will be your family and that the assumption has become we're going to live

[00:06:31] for myself and for however long I want to be. That has not paid good dividends for us as a society and we're feeling the effects of it now. Yeah, I think we are. Thank you, Jeremy, for saying that to him.

[00:06:45] And you know, that's I think we're a little bit reticent. We don't want to, for instance, with young women, I see young women who aren't married yet. They may be in the church. They may really want to be married.

[00:06:56] They just haven't gotten into that relationship and we can talk a lot about why they don't. Because I know of some women who would like to be married, but they haven't been able to find a man who's willing to make the commitment.

[00:07:08] And so it's not just women who are deciding to be single. You like your cat better. In many cases, they find the man who just doesn't want to make the commitment. And of course, we've had a welfare system in which many cases discourage people from

[00:07:25] getting married because if you got married, you lost some of the benefits there. And that created a whole world of its own problems. Well, the reality is today you don't have to get married to have many of those benefits, which is unfortunate.

[00:07:36] And again, we've placed the wrong emphasis at the wrong parts of life and in the wrong areas of relationship to the point where we have undermined the idea of marriage entirely, let alone having redefined it.

[00:07:47] But the benefits that have come through marriage have not been well taught to the generations that follow us. I'm trying to do my part with the kids that I've got, but that's where I'm supposed to be faithful. I want to know what you all think about this.

[00:08:00] Do you have any thoughts about this issue? 800-351-1212. Really, these single woke females are kind of a voting block and they're young. They're Gen Z and they're millennials mostly. You know, one other thing that we didn't mention and we're just about to come on a break, but

[00:08:18] that is speaking of welfare benefits, there's also the sexual benefits because the sexual revolution has made marriage is not necessarily the only venue for that. And so people don't get married for that reason too, I think. So do you have any thoughts on it? 800-351-1212.

[00:08:35] A little bit later in the program, we'll talk about the blast from me that took place at the Paris Olympics. So you want to stick with us for that. This is Viewpoints with Kirby. Yesterday I talked about robots and wanted to follow up with some perspective on how

[00:09:06] artificial intelligence represents independent thinking and autonomous actions. There are reasons to believe that AI and robots will be learning and thinking in ways we might not predict. Let me illustrate this with a game Go.

[00:09:18] Go is an ancient East Asian game placed on a 19 by 19 grid with black and white stones. The goal is to surround your opponent's stones with yours. Once you do that, you take them off the board. It is more complex than chess.

[00:09:32] After a few moves, there are 200 quadrillion possible configurations. When computers beat chess masters, they used a brute force method where they merely crunch through all sorts of possible moves. That is not possible with Go. Therefore engineers produced AlphaGo to learn by watching 150,000 games played by human

[00:09:52] experts, then it played against copies of itself. The engineers then organized a tournament in South Korea against the world champion of Go. AlphaGo won the first game, but it was the second game that had ever been talking. The machine made a series of moves that made no sense.

[00:10:10] Commentators explained to the people watching that it was a strange move and that AlphaGo had made a mistake. But the world champion knew something wasn't right. He took a very long time before he took his next move.

[00:10:21] Before long it was obvious that AlphaGo had won again and that Go's strategy had been rewritten right before everyone's eyes. Later versions essentially dispensed with human knowledge and developed their own strategies and thinking, and this illustrates the power and the peril of artificial intelligence.

[00:10:39] I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view. A free booklet on a biblical view of Patriot Preachers, go to viewpoints.info.com slash Patriot Preachers. Viewpoints.info.com slash Patriot Preachers. You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth.

[00:11:04] 800-351-1212 if you'd like to weigh in. Let me give you a couple more stats about single woke females and then we will move on to another issue. Joel Kotkin, who's kind of a demographer and he teaches at Chapman University in Orange, California.

[00:11:23] He also runs the Urban Reform Institute. And then there's this other guy, Samuel Abrams, and both of these have done a study and they say that the power in these single woke females is growing thanks to demographic wins.

[00:11:40] The number of never married women has grown from about 20% in 1950 to over 30% in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70% in 1950 to under 50% today and probably now by 2024 it's even lower.

[00:12:01] And you know, that is one thing that Jeremy mentioned, that when you talk to young people, I even have people in my own family, we're engaged to be married but we just never get around to getting married.

[00:12:14] Or you know, maybe we mentioned the issue of young people just not committing. And I think another part of this, I think COVID had something to do with it. And just this idea that a lot of relationships are conducted online now, either online dating

[00:12:32] or you just don't go out as much, or you have teenagers that don't want to drive and don't socialize as much, but they kind of do everything through social media. So there are a lot of trends mitigating, I think, against the family formation of the family.

[00:12:48] And so, you know, that affects elections. It affects the culture and the society because we're much more independent and free if our families are strong. But I think it also affects the electorate and who we elect. So that's why I'm a little nervous for this election.

[00:13:04] Let's go to the phones now. Joyce is waiting in Illinois. Hi, Joyce, you're on Point of View. Thanks for calling. Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate Point of View. Thanks for all you do.

[00:13:16] I was listening to your comments about people waiting to get married or not getting married. And my husband and I have often wondered why even people in the church aren't getting married sooner than they are.

[00:13:27] And sometimes I think we're all waiting for the hallmark man or woman to walk into our life. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, you expect this perfect person and you're like, come on, you're not the perfect person. Let's be who we should be.

[00:13:43] And then I believe the Lord will bring the right person. Yeah, I wonder why are we so picky? Or why are some people so picky? That's a great question. I think we've been a little bit primed because of what we see on movies, social media, whatever.

[00:14:03] I don't know. And it's like, no, there is not that perfect person out there. You're not perfect, right? So I don't know. Good point. Yeah, if my wife hadn't been that picky, I might have never been married. I think she was pretty picky.

[00:14:19] I like to point people to my wife and just point out how persuasive I am. It's very clear once you see the two of us next to each other that I'm very persuasive and good at my job.

[00:14:29] Look, I think the caller is exactly right on this whole thing. We've had our notion of what marriage means taken more from movies and Hollywood than it is from what Scripture teaches us and what Grandma would have taught to us before anyway.

[00:14:42] We tend to want to fall in love. We don't choose to love. And that's a significant difference between those two things. It is not some sort of fairy tale ending, albeit that I think all the marriages represented

[00:14:56] at least at this table and many more that are listening to us would say that we're living pretty close to a fairy tale, even though it's not exactly glitter and sunshine all the time.

[00:15:06] We live in a different level of fairy tale because of the choice we've made to love someone rather than to just have the lovey-dovey butterfly feelings in our tummy to get married. No, marriage is an intentional commitment. My late mother said it so very well.

[00:15:21] Before marriage, keep your eyes wide open and afterwards keep them half shut. There's a lot that my wife is squinting most days just to barely keep around, but I thankfully get to keep my eyes wide open even in marriage now.

[00:15:33] So it's a delight to be able to have found that person. But the caller's right. If we're looking for an ideal, what we're actually looking for is me. We're looking for the perfect person. We're looking for me. And we think we are the perfect person.

[00:15:45] We are the catch. Well, probably not. We've got a significant number of flaws. The question mark is, can I choose to love this person and be a part of their lives, rightfully submitting ourselves to one another out of deference for Christ and all the things

[00:15:59] that go with it as we're told in Ephesians to do? But we buy into the lie of the culture that marriage is supposed to be this happy-go-lucky experience that we sort of fall backwards into and live happily ever after in. That's not how that works.

[00:16:18] I think the Christian life is a lot of hard choices. You make choices to react to things certain ways, and you make choices to forgive or not to forgive. And so those choices all along the way in the marriage, you can say that you're living

[00:16:30] this great marriage now after the years that you've been married, Jeremy, or you've been married, buddy, or I've been married. But I think the choices that both partners make all along the way to perhaps forgive each other, to perhaps give up something for the other one.

[00:16:44] Someday one of my dear friends just buried her husband. You're going to maybe take care of them at the end of their life, or they'll take care of you. So that's true love.

[00:16:56] And yeah, I think the Lord gave us beautiful people to fall in love with when we're at one point in our life, but then we can make that life more beautiful with the choices we make.

[00:17:07] And I'm just wondering if people are just not willing to commit as much as, in the general term of commit to things long-term as they were in the past. So a society which is, I don't want to buy things, I want to rent things.

[00:17:21] I don't want to buy a house, I want to rent an apartment. I don't want to buy a car, I'll just take Uber someplace. There may be sort of this lack of commitment out there to people, younger people who just don't want to make long-term commitments.

[00:17:39] That may be part of the culture, it may be just a trend. I don't know, but I see that happening. Yeah, in one sense I do think that over the years the instant gratification sort of phenomenon becomes something we get used to.

[00:17:55] Even when I was younger people thought I want to get out of school, whether it's high school or college, and I want to get a job. They would plan to sort of, I'll be at that job for several years, I want to find a good

[00:18:04] job and I'll be there, maybe I'll move up in the job. Even there I see people saying, yeah, I may take this job for a little while, but I may move on.

[00:18:14] They don't seem to have that long-term commitment or sense of I need to make a long-term commitment to things. What you're saying is that this is a transactional generation. This job works for me for now, but I could get another one.

[00:18:25] This car works for me for now, but I think I'll get another one in three years or less. It's all very, very transactional. I might live here, I might live there, I might live anywhere. A lifelong commitment, as you say, requires doing something more than getting something

[00:18:38] out of it. It actually flips that entirely on its head and says, what can I give to this? What can I do to serve this person? If marriage is and ought to be the ideal reflection of Christ's relationship with His church,

[00:18:50] let us remember what those two roles look like. The head of the church has not thought equality with God something to be grasped, but would give up all of those things to humble himself and become the form of a servant, even serving to death on the cross.

[00:19:04] Well, guys, that's your call. If the church is to submit to Christ or the wives are to submit to their husbands as the church does to Christ, I'll get it out eventually, then there have significant implications for that as well.

[00:19:19] But if we're going to simply treat these as transactional, what can I get out of my husband? What can I get out of my wife? That's going to be a very, very restless way to live your life.

[00:19:31] It's set up for utter failure because it is something we have to give for the rest of our lives. We have to serve one another forever. Well, that reticence may also be behind the reticence to have children because that's one area where you can't be transactional.

[00:19:45] Once you have a kid, you've got a kid and they're needy and helpless and need to be cared for. So I do think that whole idea of not wanting to commit, wanting to be very independent and make decisions just based on you and your selfish needs.

[00:20:05] Some lot more people, I guess, live that way today. I don't recommend it. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are still taking your calls. We like hearing from you on these kinds of issues because you live in this world too and you've seen these people.

[00:20:19] So we're at 800-351-1212. I'll send you to pointofyou.net to one other article that we've posted that we all thought was kind of interesting called Prince vs. Party written by a man named Christopher Ruffo

[00:20:35] who thinks about some things somewhat deeply, writes about them and even makes movies about them. He does some filmmaking. He's a journalist. But this one's called Prince vs. Party and it talks about how this election is perhaps different than others that have taken place in our past.

[00:20:57] And is that a permanent difference or are things just really changing in this culture, in our society, in our politics? Changing just in time for a very important election. Well, we'll talk about it right after this.

[00:21:10] We hope you'll stick with us for more of Point of View on Pentadexter. It's your weekend edition and with us, Buddy Matthews and also Jeremy Dyes will be back after these messages.

[00:23:35] But here's a question. Is the Harris hype for real or is it just a thank goodness it's not Biden bump? In other words, just a couple of weeks ago when Kamala Harris became the not I don't

[00:23:51] even want to call it nominee, the presumptive nominee for president and Joe Biden stepped out of the race. There's been a bump for her. There's been some reasons for that, partly because she doesn't answer a lot of questions about her far left positions.

[00:24:12] And so she's trying to pull back from them and perhaps a lot of people don't really know where she stands on some of these things. But Dr. Matthews, what are the numbers telling us? Because we're hearing that she's gaining on Trump and that she's practically even with

[00:24:28] him, is she? Well, if you had looked at the real clear polling a few weeks ago, you would have seen that Trump was ahead in just about every state, including almost all the swing states.

[00:24:38] I think there was one he was basically tied with that has changed in the real clear polling. Now you'll see Harris ahead in some Trump ahead and some others. Numbers have them generally about even Nate Silver, who is a liberal, does 538, but he

[00:24:52] does polling and he also has a model where he predicts these things. And he says it's true that Harris has improved. Trump has slipped a little bit, but he still has in his model prediction, he has Harris earns 46 percent compared to Trump's 54.9 percent.

[00:25:13] So they have they've moved a little more towards 50-50 as to who might win. But he still has Trump up a fair amount over Harris and it's but it's moving in that her direction a little bit. But she's had a few good weeks.

[00:25:25] You had the announcement, you have her getting in record amounts of money coming in, especially from small donors. You had the vibe about what's who's going to be your vice presidential pick. So she sort of dominated the airways for. There's going to be a convention. Yeah.

[00:25:40] The last couple of weeks and you've got the convention coming up in a couple of weeks now. So she's going to dominate the airways for some for some three or four weeks after that.

[00:25:49] My guess is we'll see what happens with that if she'll be she'll get a balance, if that she managed to maintain that balance. I also think Trump and the campaign were knocked off their feet a little bit about the popularity because and I was this way as well.

[00:26:04] Who would be who would be picking Harris if they had an actual a real primary where Harris had been a candidate? Would they have been against other candidates? Would they have picked her? I don't think they would have. But now they sort of coalesced around her.

[00:26:19] You know, it was really a coronation. And really, I don't think that people a couple of days. Yeah. People didn't really expect that that would happen because that really was not good. I mean, there was never any kind of a vote. She never earned a vote.

[00:26:37] She never ran. So for for Joe, I mean, I guess he can legally do it, but it just seemed really out there. Not very democratic for especially for a party that wants to say they're trying to protect democracy. Yes. So they ended up essentially coordinating her.

[00:26:54] And now she's apparently the likely nominee. She'll have a we'll understand by next Tuesday, she'll have a vice presidential candidate with her. And we're looking to see who that might be. Some had discussed Josh Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania. He's fairly popular in Pennsylvania as a Democrat.

[00:27:12] They need Pennsylvania, especially with her previous anti fracking position, which I think she now has flipped on that. But they've also talked about a couple of other governors and Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. She needs Arizona as well. But there's pushback against Josh Shapiro because he's Jewish.

[00:27:32] And there is a significant anti Semitic element in the Democratic Party these days. Mark Kelly has been critical of some of the Democratic policies. He's he tends to try to play portray himself as a bit more moderate that gets pushed back

[00:27:46] from the progressives in the in the party. So we'll see who she goes with. It's being vetted right now. It's being vetted. The governor of Minnesota is another one. Tim Walz. Tim Walz. And he's the one who started the weird statement.

[00:28:01] He started the weird and, you know, so in a sense, he he sort of looked moderate when he was elected governor and he's governed from the far left. So if she picks him or she's then picking, you know, she's probably ensuring Minnesota

[00:28:18] who was Minnesota was moving toward Trump a little bit, a little bit. She was likely going to win Minnesota, but it could change. The interesting thing about that is the vice presidential candidate typically doesn't really bring a lot to the to the presidential ticket in terms of votes.

[00:28:33] But that in 1960, it did when John F. Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson and got Texas for Kennedy. He would not have won apart from that. And if you Pennsylvania might very well go Trump, as might Arizona.

[00:28:48] And so the notion that she if she picks somebody from Pennsylvania or somebody from Arizona, if that brings that state in her on her side in the election, that actually helps her a little bit.

[00:29:00] OK, well, speaking about elections, we're looking at it, I think, with the way we even talk about it. We're used to talking about elections a certain way. You know, what positions do the candidates hold? But things are kind of changing in the way we do elections.

[00:29:12] And we posted another piece by Chris Rufo, who I mentioned earlier, and it's called Prince versus Party. He says that in most elections, American voters choose between two candidates who represent a pair of alternatives within the same political model.

[00:29:28] The candidates bundled together a set of policies, pitch themselves as the nation's most plausible leader. But the upcoming election presents a different choice. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Republican Democratic candidates, respectively represent not only two alternatives on policy, but also two entirely different models.

[00:29:49] And he calls them the prince and the party. Trump is the prince, the politics of the man. In a sense, you're voting for the man. He's got a bare bones platform that he put forward at the Republican Convention. Harris represents the party or the politics of the machine.

[00:30:07] Each model has something to be said for and against it. So you know, it's a little bit different. And I don't know if this is a permanent change in politics or just a change for this time.

[00:30:18] But you could so quickly on either of you can make a comment on this. But it was really quick that there was a switch out from Joe Biden to candidate Harris. It happened so quickly. It didn't seem right to me. It still doesn't cognitive dissonance.

[00:30:34] But that's what we're seeing in this election. And I thought Christopher Ruvo's piece was just brilliant because he laid it out in terms we sort of recognize this, but he laid out in terms that make it easy to sort of

[00:30:44] understand because Trump is the head of the party. When you ask Republicans have long been for free markets, free trade and other things. That's not the case anymore. And so when you ask the question, what do Republicans stand for now?

[00:30:57] You have to ask, well, what does Donald Trump say? He is the Republican Party and from the from the policies and so forth. And it sort of comes from his gut, what he thinks today. Republicans have never supported a 10 percent tariff across the board on all imports.

[00:31:14] Donald Trump says that that becomes the Republican Party. Alternatively, Kamala Harris is very much of the left, a representative of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which is where all the energy in the Democratic Party is now.

[00:31:28] And when I was looking at this, I thought it's almost a reverse of the 2008 and 2012 election where Obama is sort of the Democratic Party. He's generally more traditional Democratic than Trump is Republican. But he was sort of the prince then.

[00:31:43] And whether you took John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012, you could have changed him out. You could have put just about anybody else in there. It didn't make a lot of difference. They were not real stars of the party.

[00:31:57] The party was sort of stayed and going along traditional ideas and so forth. And Christopher Ruffo points this out when Trump came along, he sort of just changed the whole dynamics of this, including policies and the and the personality and so forth.

[00:32:12] And so I would argue in a in a little bit less sense, we had that in reverse in 2008, 2012. And now we've got it here in for the Republican and the Democrat in 2000 and 20. Well, a disadvantage of that is that if a bullet had hit Trump in a different

[00:32:32] spot in the head, the Republican Party wouldn't know what to do. I mean, it's Donald Trump or nothing. So then you have the other party party, the prince in the party, so you have the party and the party is more of a machine.

[00:32:47] The party is more of perhaps a set of principles, although Kamala Harris is trying her best to either hide some of the far left principles or run away from them. But it is a machine, machines and gear now.

[00:33:05] Yeah. So this party, says Chris Ruffo, is durable, decentralized and adaptable. If God forbid something were to happen to Vice President Harris, the party could readily find a substitute and seek to manufacture enthusiasm through its media apparatus as they did for her.

[00:33:21] Absolutely. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren could be anybody. OK, well, we recommend this piece to you. It's very interesting food for thought. It's actually I think it's spot on in his analysis. Well, next step, we'll listen to if you can listen online, listen to my commentary and

[00:33:41] we will discuss it after this. What a role played by drag queens in the opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympics was created to display France's inclusivity and showcase the French LGBTQ plus community. James Le Perlier, president of a group called Inter LGBT, says the transgender

[00:34:10] community, quote, has difficulty being heard. He told ABC News, We are far from what the ceremony showed. There's much progress to do in society regarding transgender people. Is it progress to offend Christians all over the world who are watching the Olympics?

[00:34:25] The program's parody of the Last Supper featured 18 drag queens and dancers posing behind a long table with the Seine and Eiffel Tower in the background. It mocks a central event of Christianity. The Last Supper was Christ's final meal with his 12 disciples when he instituted Holy

[00:34:41] Communion. The ceremony's director, Thomas Jolly, previewed the opening in an interview with British Vogue. Mr. Jolly, who is gay, says his measure for the production's success is if everyone feels represented by it. Everyone? Not according to bestselling author and cultural commentator Rod Rear. Right, he responded.

[00:35:00] Except for Christians whose most sacred moments must be mocked for the sake of queer inclusion. American Catholic Bishop Robert Baron, founder of Word on Fire Ministries, has lived in Paris. He wonders, would they ever have dared mock Islam in a similar way?

[00:35:15] Arsonists are burning down churches all over France. As Rod Rear points out, mosques are going up in France at the same rate that churches are coming down. And yet, he writes, the contemptible elites who rule France stage this

[00:35:28] kind of blasphemous spectacle, attacking the ancestral faith of France and what Christians still remain there. Christianity is declining in the West. Normally when LGBT interests are elevated, Christianity loses. It's becoming apparent that Christians are no longer welcome in this culture.

[00:35:44] Rod Rear concludes the enemy knows what time it is. Do we? For Point of View, I'm Penna Dexter. You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth. Welcome back to Point of View.

[00:36:03] And I don't know that I have to describe the blasphemy that took place in Paris a week ago at the opening ceremony for the Olympics. And, you know, I was excited because I thought it was a great idea the way all the venues

[00:36:17] are out in the city of Paris. And it would just be so beautiful. But I had no idea that this producer would come up with something. His name is Jolly, Mr. David Jolly, I believe. And Thomas Jolly.

[00:36:34] And he came up with this tableau with the Seine in the background and the Eiffel Tower and all of that. And then you have all these drag queens that are supposed to. Well, they're in formation so that they are Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper.

[00:36:50] That's what it looks like. And then, of course, Paris came after there was so much outrage against this. Paris came out the spokesperson for the Olympics and said, we wouldn't do that. This is about Olympus. This is about that.

[00:37:03] And then the the headlady at the at the table did something had had a tweet out there. We said, no, this is I can't remember. It's something like this is this is our new interpretation of the New Testament or something like that. The reinterpretation of the New Testament.

[00:37:17] And it looked like, in fact, some of the people who participated actually did think it was a sort of a mocking of the Last Supper. So I sort of it was called the Last Supper on the Seine. I mean, yeah, you know, people call it that.

[00:37:34] And I just missed I'm mystified as to why the producers didn't look at this. And I say, would this be offensive to an awful lot of people who are who might watch this otherwise? I think that was the point.

[00:37:48] Yeah. You know, you've had people say it was never our intention to show disrespect to a religious group. Yes, it was. Yes, absolutely was. I think, you know, we Christians need to be to shockingly sort of absorb the fact that

[00:38:05] a lot of the world hates us with either dismisses or hate us. And yes, there were I was actually very happy to see people in France demonstrating against this thing. And I wasn't sure that was going to happen because thousands of Christians came out, I think they did.

[00:38:20] They did. And I was I was glad to see that Dennis Prager, who's got a talk show and sometimes I like the way he thinks about things. And he's a Jew. He's not a Christian.

[00:38:33] But he said, indeed, if only Christians were offended by this, it was only Christians that were offended. There's little hope for civilization because we live in this age of groupthink where only members of targeted groups are expected to be offended.

[00:38:49] But actually, Christianity is so much a part of the DNA of of all the countries in the West and their development, their prosperity, their flourishing. In other words, we've used before in this show. So it should be the offense to this should go well beyond just Christians.

[00:39:10] The world should be offended by this. I'm not sure they are. Yeah. And, you know, we're not Muslim, but if they had taken this venue to do something to mock Mohammed, I would have thought that was totally inappropriate. It's just you've got a venue that is international.

[00:39:28] People all over the world are going to watch this and doing something that mocks a major religion. And this just seems completely out of place. And why? Macron, I mean, I assume he has in some sense knows what's going on here.

[00:39:42] You wouldn't would you mock this and not let the president of France know? I just don't know. I'm surprised somebody higher up didn't say, no, no, we're not going to do that. That's not a good idea.

[00:39:54] I have a slightly different take or a tweak on this take anyway, which is that, yeah, of course, it's offensive and annoying. And I was probably if it was intentional, it's despicable. If it was ignorant, then that's ignorant.

[00:40:05] But the the response to it, I thought, was very interesting here. You're right. Had this been something to do with Islam or the prophet Mohammed as a religious liberty attorney and a purist on that point, I would have been very offended and

[00:40:19] spoken up in front and on behalf of that issue very clearly. But there would have been worldwide unrest on that point. There have been riots. There would have been violence more than likely if there was any other people group, probably the same thing.

[00:40:34] How actually forgiving the Christian community has been about this is, I think, rather remarkable and is reflective of the turning of the other cheek that Christ commands of the Christian community. There was there was there was upsetness. Right. There were there were points that were raised and made.

[00:40:50] And rightly so. And I think some higher officials were making those points and making them well. But there was no civil unrest. Right. There was there was no protest at best. There's a soft boycott, mostly limited to the games.

[00:41:04] I was very grateful that Twitter X told me about it before the evening. Our family had planned to sit down and watch the opening ceremonies as we typically would. But I saw that say, well, I guess we're going to do something else tonight.

[00:41:15] That's not what we're going to be watching tonight, but have enjoyed the game since then. So which is something I think is perfectly fair. But there were no major protests, no major boycotts. Some advertisers withdrew their advertising, which I think was a smart and good thing for

[00:41:31] them to do. But largely this has passed with a little bit of a bump in the road, a little bit of sheepishness from those who planned the thing, slight embarrassment by the IOC. But but truly, they're not terribly embarrassed by it.

[00:41:46] They're a little annoyed that it's caused distraction is more than anything else here. So I think it actually reflects fairly well on the Christian community that we're told all the time are what unforgiving, unkind and always with the persecution complex.

[00:41:59] Well, here we are actually having some of our most sacred things flaunted by some of the most disgusting things on the planet. And we simply go, that's inappropriate. We don't like that. But we understand that you guys don't get that.

[00:42:12] It's just wrong for it to be displayed in this way. And it says a lot more about you than it does about us. Move that out of the way. You've now distracted from the people who have God given

[00:42:20] gifts and abilities that are on display that we wanted to watch. Yeah, I do think I mean, for instance, for people who boycotted the Olympics, that's really sad. That's sad for the athletes. It's sad for the people that missed a good performance.

[00:42:34] So I I think that the reaction by Christians, if you have a strong reaction, just remember what time it is, because right now Christians are marginalized and we don't live in a Christian culture anymore.

[00:42:46] We can try our best to make one for the area that we live in, but we don't. We don't have anybody to to really, I guess, referee between the gay agenda that's being portrayed out there and what the real painting was or what that real Last

[00:43:05] Supper event was. So, you know, I think it's really sad. And I think that the more we speak about it, the better. No, we shouldn't be violent about it. We shouldn't hurt other people about it. But it is something despicable. It's despicable.

[00:43:19] And, you know, there was I don't remember her name, but she was head of the EEOC for a while and she had a famous phrase when they were having some kind of a controversy, gays win, Christians lose.

[00:43:31] And it seems like when the LGBT agenda advances as they were trying to do in this situation, then Christians lose. And I think we did. Mm hmm. Well, the influence of Judeo-Christianity has been on the day crescendo for many

[00:43:46] years anyway, and we've just come to this point where it's in full view for us to see. I hope it reminds folks to get back and remind everybody, hey, our worldview is worth something, is worthy of something.

[00:43:59] And it is it is it is standing sort of arms akimbo to the decadence of culture writ large around us that we just simply won't go softly into that good night without saying that's bad and gross and disgusting and should not be on full display.

[00:44:13] And so I'm glad that there's still at least a little bit of an ability for people worldwide to have a minute to blush about something. Perhaps we ought not to be so celebratory of, you know, Bacchus dancing around half

[00:44:27] naked on top of the Lord's Supper where people are dressed in drag and nastiness. That still is something that has gone a little bit too far. You know, we've had a lot of talk about the party that's, quote, weird.

[00:44:39] Well, I just want to put it to submit to you that those who support what was displayed on the scene a week ago, that's weird. And it's more than weird. It's repugnant. And we ought to call it such.

[00:44:52] Well, ladies and gentlemen, on that note, thank you so much for joining us. I guess it's an encouragement to take our faith seriously. And we will attempt with the Lord's help to do that. Jeremy, thanks so much for being here. And you too, buddy. Megan, thank you.

[00:45:08] Steve, thank you. And everybody have a nice weekend. In 19th century London, two towering historical figures did battle not with guns and bombs, but words and ideas. London was home to Karl Marx, the father of communism and legendary Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon.

[00:45:28] London was in many ways the center of the world economically, militarily and intellectually. Marx sought to destroy religion, the family and everything the Bible supports. Spurgeon stood against him, warning of socialism's dangers. Spurgeon understood Christianity is not just religious truth. It is truth for all of life.

[00:45:51] Where do you find men with that kind of wisdom to stand against darkness today? Get the light you need on today's most pressing issues delivered to your inbox when you sign up for the Viewpoints Commentary at PointofView.net slash sign up every weekday in less than two minutes.

[00:46:10] You'll learn how to be a person of light to stand against darkness in our time. It's free. So visit PointofView.net slash sign up right now. PointofView.net slash sign up. Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.