The Life Challenges Podcast
Modern-day issues from a Biblical perspective.
The Life Challenges Podcast
What's Trending? Oldest Embryo to Result in a Live Birth, James Dobson, Mark Surrogacy, and Endorsing Candidates from the Pulpit
This episode examines recent events through a Christian perspective.
• Discussion of the Minnesota church shooting, warning against using tragedy to vilify entire groups
• The "world's oldest IVF baby" - embryo adoption giving life to a 30-year frozen embryo
• Remembering James Dobson's significant impact on pro-life and family values movements
• Examination of the Mark Surrogacy case reveals exploitation in unregulated reproductive technology
• Analysis of church-state separation after a Lutheran pastor resigned for planning political endorsements
The ministry of Christian Life Resources promotes the sanctity of life and reaches hearts with the Gospel. We invite you to learn more about the work we're doing: https://christianliferesources.com/
On today's episode….
Speaker 2:It really, I think, solidified the role of focusing on a family in a culture, the American culture that was drifting apart, maybe still is drifting away from the traditional family. And Dobson really kind of like agitated and stirred the mix, the epoxy and everything to get that glue back in there, to mix the epoxy and everything to get that glue back in there.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. Our world today presents people with complicated issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. It can be a struggle to understand or deal with them. We're here to help by bringing good information and a fresh biblical perspective to these matters and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.
Speaker 1:Hi and welcome back. I'm Krista Potratz and I'm here today with Pastors Bob Fleischman and Jeff Samuelson, and today we're going to talk about our September current events. We have a bunch of current events to get through today, but we did want to just start by talking about a very recent event that has happened just, I believe, a day since we are recording this, and that is the shooting in Minnesota.
Speaker 2:We know that by the time that people are listening to this, more information will probably have come out about it too, but we did want to touch on this subject today. Abundance of more of these kinds of shootings going on. There just seems to be a decline in human life, and that's rooted in a lack of understanding about being made in the image of God the unique characteristic that humans have and that once you begin to start reducing mankind down to the status of just an evolved animal, then there just seems to be people on the fringe see it as more expendable. The second thing I wanted to point out is this came out later in the day of the shooting was that the shooter the alleged shooter he was in 2019 changed his name from a male name to a female name and wanted to be identified as a female, and the only reason I mentioned that right now is because they were reporting last night that there's been this barrage of hate commentary on there about see how dangerous these transsexuals are and this whole kind of gender matter. Okay, now we've done episodes on gender and so forth and talking about it in light of God's Word, but I want everyone to remember this Years ago, when a white Caucasian heterosexual male went in and shot an abortionist. The other side was characterizing as all pro-life people of dangerous ideology. See how dangerous they are. To me it's an irrelevant matter how they saw themselves and so forth.
Speaker 2:In time, and maybe even by the time you folks are listening to this podcast, some of this information has come out and there's more clarity. But let it be said that Scripture teaches us every inclination to the human heart is evil. So the fact that this happens on occasion is indicative of what exists in all of us, this evil inclination. And the fact that it shows up in other ways in the lives of different people and in different ways it shows up, just tells you how bad it is and terribly sad, terribly terribly sad for these families to again lose children during a worship service in a Catholic church. Very sad. The last I'd heard is there were two fatalities, 17 injuries and we'll have to see. But I want to mention that because it just was like deja vu all over again, you know, when some people were making a big deal about the whole gender matter and to me that's a distraction about the whole gender matter.
Speaker 3:And to me that's a distraction. Just to that matter of how to respond on a logical, practical level, it's just like there are plenty of things to criticize and point out to whether you're talking about. You know, the ideology of transgenderism you don't need to attach. Oh yes, and they're the kind of people who shoot up schools or kill children. You stick to the real issues. There are plenty of those and of course, when you're talking about shooting children, that's enough of an issue right there.
Speaker 3:But then on the other side, just as Christians the character we're supposed to have we are new creations in Christ the instinct or the impulse to just latch onto this is like oh, these people are so evil and everything about them is evil, and that's not the way that we are made as God's children. That's not the way we're supposed to respond. We're supposed to be humble, we're supposed to be understanding, we're supposed to be quick to listen and slow to anger. We need to remember that when somebody else that we were listening to or whatever, comes along and says, aha, see, this shows how bad all these people are, comes along and says, aha, see, this shows how bad all these people are, that we have an obligation as God's people to dial it down for ourselves, stick to the facts that they are and respond in love, in a desire to learn and a desire to communicate, a desire to repair things that are wrong, instead of feeling so good about how righteous it makes me feel to be on the right side of this Sounds so farcical yeah.
Speaker 1:No, I mean as a mom too. It is just such a sad story to hear that, and anytime with such a loss of life, but also just in that manner to yeah, I mean I know myself, but all of us our hearts go out to those families and all involved, and I'm sure there'll be more information, too, on that story as well. But so we'll move into some of these other topics that we wanted to talk about today, and the first was a story that I think I feel like came out a few weeks ago about the world's oldest IVF baby being born Bob. Can you share with us a little bit about that story and everything that came out with that?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, just everyone has to remember that IVF is a process which typically involves fertilizing a number of eggs, developing the embryos, and then they oftentimes discard embryos that they feel might be questionable, and then parents will oftentimes opt to just have a certain number and plant it and throw away the others, and sometimes they have them what's called cryopreserved, or frozen in a state of kind of suspended animation.
Speaker 2:And so the crux of this story was that this embryo, this child in embryonic stage, was rescued through embryo adoption and has life. And the irony is, chronologically, this child starting off at about 30 years old as an infant. And that's really the crux of the story. And you know, I used to sit back and kind of marvel over how long we've been around with New Beginnings. It's possible for us we've been around so long that we could actually be seeing not only the children but maybe even the grandchildren of our first resident, because it's been over 30 years and we deal with a clientele that oftentimes gets pregnant young. But this is really, you know, it's mind-boggling, and you're going to be hearing more and more of this as society embraces this kind of alternate form of caring for children.
Speaker 3:And one of the interesting things about this article kind of brings it to the fore a little bit is that you've got the personal information on both ends, both the, the mother who originated the embryo, so to speak, and the family that's taking the embryo and and and bringing, bringing it to a full gestation and and have a baby boy. Normally we just hear one side of things and this is the whole thing, and the article you linked was pretty good in terms of it was fairly balanced.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this one struck me kind of odd almost.
Speaker 3:But you know it reaffirmed things we've talked about here. We're not real happy with IVF and what it usually means for the destruction of embryos. But we are happy with snowflake programs and things like that that lead to the embryo adoption, because this is a way of where people can take a bad situation and do something to make it better, bring blessing from it. That's a happiness out of this. But you know I can't help but think of this boy.
Speaker 3:You know, when he reaches about age 18, saying you know, why can't I get my ID now to show exactly how old I really am, you know? Because then I can drink. I can do all these different things, you know.
Speaker 2:The only middle school child Rent a car. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I mean, I think that is a really great point too that you brought up about seeing both sides of the family too, or both sides of, yeah, I guess, the family, yeah, and because, yeah, I think it was was it the mother too, the original mother, who said that the baby boy like, looked like some of her other children? And I just thought that that was really fascinating too. And you're right, we oftentimes don't get both sides of the story with that.
Speaker 2:Well, that's also valuable because sometimes health issues come up and it's good to have kind of the genetic link you know for it, because that's always been kind of one of these. It comes up in a lot of the ethical discussions around IVF and surrogacy and that is, if you lose connection even with just a regular natural adoption, if you lose connection with your genetic link, you lose kind of a valuable chapter in tending to your health issues. All of us who have gone to the doctor have faced the laundry list of questions in which they ask you know, is there a history of cancer in the family, is there a history of heart issues and so forth? And there's getting to be a bigger swath of people who, if they don't have that connection with their biological roots, can't answer that and that just comes into play with your health care.
Speaker 1:Well, another topic that we wanted to talk about and discuss was the death of James Dobson. I believe that happened maybe just a couple weeks ago, not too long ago and, as many of our listeners might know, um, james Dobson was very influential, um, with focus on the family. I don't know if he started it, but yeah, okay and uh, and so we did just want to discuss some of that as well.
Speaker 3:It was one of those things, when I saw the obituary or really it's more of a, it was a full article in the Washington Post that it struck me that I hadn't heard from him in a long time, otherwise I would have been thinking is he still around? But he died. It was August 21st and he was 89. So we'll live to a ripe old age there. But as I read I realized that there's an entire generation or two of people who have grown up particularly like on the pro-life side who don't know the kind of influence that he had. He was really fundamental in building a lot of the movement that became both the pro-life and the pro-family movement. He had a Focus on. The Family radio program attracted an estimated 7 million weekly listeners.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of influence. It's almost as big as the Life Challenges podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just he wasn't a Wells Lutheran. But we can say God really used him in a big way for good things here in the United States and, by extension, throughout the world.
Speaker 2:A long time ago, early in our CLR history, the board had wanted to invite Dobson to come and speak and it had to have been well if he died at 89, probably at about 28 years ago. We reached out to him and we were told that when he turned the age of 60, that he was going to kind of give up travel. Didn't want to, and of course I get that. You know I never was a big fan of travel, but I remember we just felt like we just missed him and Jeff's right. Those of us in our conservative Lutheran circles weren't always happy with everything Dobson did. But personally I previous generation raised their children on Dr Spock, not to be confused with Star Trek, but we used Dare to Discipline, where he just talked about dealing with discipline.
Speaker 2:But I remember touring the Focus of the Family building and two things that stood out.
Speaker 2:One was a fellow came in there and shot up the place a little bit and so part of the tour was they would always show you it was a big, beautiful building.
Speaker 2:It's still there, focus on the family. It's still very active. But part of the tour is they would show you the bullet marks on the ceiling where this guy had shot, because that was the kind of knee-jerk reaction Dobson brought with his conservative, pro-family, pro-life position, brought with his conservative, pro-family, pro-life position. The second thing that struck me is there was a room where they would have just rows and rows of people sitting at computers. This was kind of before the internet, and what they had done is they had taken all of Dobson's writings, plugged them into a database and if you wrote to them and said you know, we're having trouble because our kid is wetting the bed or we're having trouble because our child is not obeying the teacher, whoever got that letter, when it came to focus on the family, they would tap into the people, would tap into all of Dobson's writings and then they would send this personalized response back.
Speaker 1:Now what AI does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, to me it was a 30-person AI organization, but it was pretty impressive and it really, I think, solidified the role of focusing on a family in a culture the American culture that was drifting apart and maybe still is drifting away from the traditional family, and Dobson really kind of like agitated and stirred the mix, the epoxy and everything to get that clue back in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think being able to speak up on those issues and things too and how you said, jeff, like that, it really was so powerful to the pro-life movement as well, and sometimes you do just need that voice to kind of get things going a little bit. And yeah, wow, 7 million listeners a week, that's a lot.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is Especially back then. I mean, it was like a radio show.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I think I'm. I can't remember the name of the book, but I read a book on the one of the first likeake babies too.
Speaker 2:And that family was saying I think that they actually contacted Dobson and that he was the one that really helped get to their journey going into having a baby through the snowflake adoption. Yeah, dobson's tentacles reached deep into many different agencies. He carried a lot of influence in his day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, moving on. So one of the things we wanted to talk about was the Mark surrogacy case, and this is a case on surrogacy, but also I mean it particularly pertains to an organization that was not really an organization and it just shows the corruption of surrogacy or the possibility of how corrupt these things can be certain doors, you no longer have any control over things and once you open the door and say, oh, okay, well, yeah, we think it's a good idea to make it possible for women to carry to term babies that other people have conceived and this is a good thing for profit.
Speaker 3:Basically, this was a case. They discovered it eventually, but a woman from Texas became a surrogate for two Chinese citizens and she didn't realize what was going on. She thought this was just a case of, oh well, you know, I'm doing this really nice thing for these people. This company, mark Surrogacy, has set this up, and what was discovered was that this couple had used all sorts of different surrogates to have all sorts of different home address and facilitated the birth of 21 known children, all of whom are the legal children of the Chinese couple and I think it was like 17 of them were like under the age of five or something like that, yeah, and they had a house full of nannies basically taking care of these kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I read that like six nannies in different rooms with the kids.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the reason it came to light was because there was apparently a child welfare complaint related to one of the nannies or something like that, and people said this is not just weird, this is bad. But the problem they're having is like, okay, what laws have actually been broken here? Because it's the wild west as far as all this stuff goes and again, surrogacy is well, it's just not something that is good. But because those laws aren't there, people take advantage of them, as is to be expected with human nature. And as much as we might say, why would anyone do that? It's always a good idea with the laws to think, okay, well, somebody's going to do theacing our ability to not only regulate it, but you can do it, you should be able to do it, and so it was really the Wild West.
Speaker 2:They do IVF and by the time they started working on some regulations, enough people thought, oh well, it's working, and so if you could define away the destruction of embryos, then we're making a lot of people happy, and so forth. What was interesting in the article, too, is it talked about how you know that whole issue of we don't know what laws are broken, because if you paid the surrogate mother, she got paid. The fact that maybe it was under false pretenses she thought she was bearing a child for a couple that really needed it and the Chinese couples probably argue well, we really needed it. Who says wanting 21 children is wrong With IVF? There's stories out there too, of they found that all of these children were fathered. Like 300 children were fathered with the sperm of one person, and the one person happened to be the IVF doctor. But you get stories like that out there. But that shows you how lack of monitoring is going on, how unregulated the industry is, and that is a cause for concern.
Speaker 1:And I think too, wasn't it in the article that one of the women is still pregnant? With one of the children I guess from this couple, and I don't exactly know all of her thoughts and feelings on it.
Speaker 1:But that would also be something to just kind of consider that angle of the story as well, because I think I mean, one of the things with surrogacy too is and I know we have touched on this in other episodes, but there are is a group of people, I think, that do feel that they are really helping out. We know they're getting paid too, so there definitely is that aspect.
Speaker 1:But you know this kind of like oh, I really do want to help out a couple that can't have kids. It comes maybe from a place that is that we could consider to be thoughtful and humane and that type of thing. So then you have these people that have abused the system. Then it leaves somebody who maybe feels like, oh, I did this really nice thing for somebody who has just abused it. It's just so complicated.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it doesn't need to be so complicated. Yeah, and it doesn't need to be yeah.
Speaker 1:A lot of feelings, a lot of people, I guess a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Well, another article that we wanted to talk about was actually a local article. It came out, if you're in the Milwaukee area, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and that was on a Lutheran pastor, liberal church body and just speaking out, I guess, endorsing a political candidate from the pulpit and the aftermath of that.
Speaker 3:You mentioned the local aspect of it.
Speaker 3:One of the interesting things the article revealed is it's an outspoken guy who's a pastor, or was a pastor, of a small Lutheran church in Kenosha who basically, from what I can tell from the article, his full-time job was being an activist and he just saw being a pastor as really just a part of that activism and he was planning to use the pulpit to endorse a particular candidate for the presidency.
Speaker 3:The interesting thing is that this is someone who's not even a declared candidate. He was hoping that his voice would help push this along and when his bishop found out about that, he said no, we can't do that. That is you know, even though the IRS had recently made some changes that suggest that maybe they'd be okay with it. So we don't know that yet and you can't do that without losing your thing. So, basically, the pastor felt he had to resign and because he was determined still to go ahead with this and that meant that the church was momentarily without a pastor, but that was replaced very quickly. But it is a very small church, which is one of the many that is okay. We don't know if this is going to survive very long, which is why he was only a part-time pastor there in the first place.
Speaker 2:And what precipitated this was that the IRS recently surprised everyone in permitting a church, a congregation, as was a case, to do endorsements of political candidates, with the idea that depriving them of that privilege was a freedom of speech issue. Now I'm in the middle of writing a very lengthy paper on this and we're going to make it—I'm going to do excerpts out of it for Clearly Caring the one that's coming out here in a couple of months. But the idea behind it was that when nonprofits are granted a tax-exempt status, which means you can donate your money to a nonprofit and you can write it off on your taxes, they were permitted at one time to endorse candidates up until 1954. And it was called the Johnson Amendment, which LBJ clearly, according to multiple sources, was frustrated that churches were speaking out against him, you know and so forth, when he was a senator in Texas. So he pushed for this that they can't have tax-exempt status and endorse candidates.
Speaker 2:Now the way that it often worked was that you know because at CLR we've always been getting pressured, especially every general election cycle, to come out very candidly endorsing a candidate. And you know I was always able to invoke IRS statute for 501c3 organizations that says you can't do that, you can't do it in politics and actually you can't devote I believe the wording is something on the order of any more than an insubstantial amount of resources in advocacy for legislation. So we could talk about being pro-life but we couldn't speak with any type of heavy endorsement for pro-life candidates and pro-life legislation. And now the court suggests in this one case well, that was an overstep and this kind of fulfills a Trump administration from his first term of trying to grant that. But of course it's going to open up doors and there's going to be people who feel that their pastor should be endorsing and pastors who feel that they should be endorsing and so forth, not wholly comfortable with that. And you know, maybe we'll make that a focused discussion.
Speaker 2:But this was the first big test. You know the fact that the New York Times was going to cover it. That shows you first of all, how fresh the ruling is. And I think the ELCA, which was the church body that he was part of ELCA fellow was basically saying we don't see that this applies to everybody yet. Let a couple other people test it. But then you know, mark my words once they feel it applies you. When I did a deep dive in some of my research on this is that my perception always had been that liberal churches were far more leaning towards doing this. The liberals feel that the conservative churches are going to embrace this more and the thing that's interesting is there was a 1,500 signatory petition to not allow this to happen and it is mostly liberals but not all, but mostly liberals signing it. So they see it as a threat. But you know, every presidential campaign in my memory always had a Democratic candidate speaking in churches on a Sunday, and I don't recall it ever happening in a conservative church.
Speaker 3:That was one of the ironies that really struck me when reading this article.
Speaker 3:And it says this pastor is 41, otherwise a pretty good age, but at least based on the 41-year-old people we know Right right, he probably just doesn't know the history, but he was saying that he wanted to act as a counterweight to a group of potentially thousands of conservative pastors who are gearing up to endorse Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections. And as Bob was talking about, I mean the perception always before was that, OK, we on the right we can't do anything with our churches and candidates, but on the left they can get away with everything. And there was actually some truth to that because, yeah, as Bob said, you could always have these images of the Democratic candidates in churches of certain sorts and it would be clear who that church supported. They'd be careful not to come right out and say we think everybody should be voting for this candidate, but they'd make it clear, Whereas on the right you stepped anywhere close to that line, you started seeing trouble and part of that had to do with the nature of who was running the various bureaucracies and such in the federal government.
Speaker 3:But yeah, things have started to reverse, at least in perception, and it is. It's an interesting moment and I'm with Bob. I think it's actually better when there is no endorsement from nonprofits and particularly from churches, because I really don't think that that's a proper respect for the division between the two kingdoms, the church and the state, but it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out and I would not be surprised if our current events, episodes in the future, are coming back to discuss this stuff.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah, you know one thing for people to keep in mind too. You know we got a lot of pressure I can't remember, but it was. It was a couple of election cycles ago or maybe three or four ago from pastors. We were being contacted by pastors, some of which were in high places, saying, well, maybe CLR ought to give up their tax-exempt status so that they could provide guidance in this regard.
Speaker 2:You have to remember that when you lose tax-exempt status as Bob Jones University found out and others it isn't just like from this day forward, your gifts to us will not be tax-exempt. They require you to go back. You have to contact past donors. You have to notify them that tax-exempt status has been lost by an IRS ruling for the last three years. If you included those donations in your tax returns, you have to recast. I mean, it's a PR nightmare, it's everything, and it basically would destroy a lot of organizations, especially smaller ones. And Jeff's right, it's going to be a thorny issue and when I get done writing on it, maybe it'll be even thornier. So we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, we'll definitely be here to talk about it in the future. Thank you, Bob and Jeff, for everything, and we thank all of our listeners. Oh yeah, and we just wanted to let everyone know, too, that the Life Challenges podcast is now four years old. We started it in September of 2021 and have reached the four-year anniversary, so very excited about that. And we did want to mention that there is the upcoming National Conference from Christian Life Resources National Conference from Christian Life Resources and just wanted to invite everybody to join us for that event. You can connect with us either online or in person. There's more information on the event at christianliferesourcescom.
Speaker 2:It's going to be on Saturday, september 13th, and you can participate directly in person, which is our preference because of the fellowship, but there's also an option to go in through the internet if distance is a problem, and it's going to be at Kettle Moraine Lutheran High School in Jackson, wisconsin. We've been having these things for years and it's a good lineup, so I encourage people to be there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's always a great way to connect with other people too, and yeah, and I'll be there as well, so I'm excited about that.
Speaker 3:Thank you for joining us for the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it and sharing it with friends. We're here to help, so if you have questions on today's topic or other life issues, you can submit them, as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes, at lifechallengesus or email us at podcast at christianliferesourcescom. You can find past episodes and other valuable information at LifeChallengesus, so please check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit ChristianLifeResourcescom. May God give you wisdom, love, strength and peace in Christ for every life challenge.
