John Stonestreet – Page 3

Guest Column: Dying with Dignity vs. “Death with Dignity”

May 19, 2026John StonestreetLifeAssisted Suicide, Euthanasia, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

In a recent episode of “60 Minutes,” interviewer Scott Pelley said to his guest, “You don’t have much time. Why are you spending time doing this?” His guest, former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, who received a fatal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in December, replied with a laugh, “You invited me, so I assume you needed to fill some time.”

Short of a miracle, Sasse won’t see his 14-year-old son grow up. He won’t walk his daughters down the aisle. And yet, he is teaching the nation a stunning lesson on dying with dignity. Sasse warns against the allure and the limits of political power and proclaims what matters more. Committed to free markets, he warns against the illusion that “more consumption can make you happier.” He’s at the same time optimistic about what technologies can provide and concerned about what has happened to our sense of self and happiness, especially young people.

Sasse is not being stoic, as though death is not a big deal. He mourns what the loss means to his family and regrets what he missed traveling for work instead of being at home. He regrets the pain that cancer has brought to him. But how he is dying is making a rare statement to the world, and it is being heard. As Dr. James Wood described in a recent World article:

In a culture that kills to avoid hardship and hides death to avoid reckoning, a man dying well on high-profile platforms is a subtly radical act. He is, without quite saying so, making an argument for life—for its dignity, its giftedness, its meaning even at the last.

His voice is especially powerful in a world that continues to accept various forms of euthanasia and doctor-assisted death. Across Europe, Canada, and a number of American states, advocates of what is often called “medical assistance in dying” or MAiD, market the promise of “death with dignity.” Unspoken in that terminology is the assumption that we need “death with dignity” because there is no such thing as “dying with dignity.” There is no value to be found in facing suffering or enduring pain to honor life until its God-given end. So many speak as if giving up on life takes courage and compassion.

Within the godless and hopeless framework of a naturalistic worldview, life is, as Shakespeare put into the mouth of Macbeth, “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Why suffer to preserve such a meaningless existence when no higher purpose or value is available to be found? To die is to escape from such a life. Once pleasure or plenty is no longer available to us, there is no dignity to be found in how we die.

The Christian view is centered on Christ’s death, which restored the dignity with which God created us. Because death is transformed, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, there is dying with dignity. There is meaning and significance in the courage to face life’s end and the pain that so often accompanies it. In the Christian worldview, death in all its pain and suffering, is redeemable in the life of Christ, who defeated death.

That sort of courage is undeniable when witnessed in real life. As President Clinton, after being soundly critiqued by Mother Theresa on the issue of abortion, put it, “It’s difficult to argue with a life so well lived.” In the same way, what we are hearing and witnessing in these final days of Ben Sasse, is that it is difficult to argue with one dying so well.

Indeed, as a wise pastor once observed, our children will remember all sorts of things about us, but the way in which we die is what they will most remember about our faith. “Death with dignity” is a farce, a damnable idea that dehumanizes us individually and collectively. But dying with dignity, even as we pray for grace and peace for him and his family, is a profound gift that God is giving all of us right now through Ben Sasse.

Guest Column: “There Is No Mama”

May 12, 2026John StonestreetLGBTCommercial Surrogacy, LGBT, Same-Sex Marriage, Surrogacy

A recent video exposed the injustice at the heart of same-sex marriage and commercial surrogacy. In it, a man bouncing a baby on his lap asks, “Who do you want? Dada or Pop?” The baby answered, “Mama!” To which, both the man and his unseen partner behind the camera laughed and said, “There is no Mama.” They continue to badger the child, who then begins to cry.

The most obvious evil portrayed in the video is the relentless teasing of a baby. The deeper evil, however, is not that the men were mean. In fact, being mean was only the insult added to the injury of forcing their farcical arrangement on a baby and calling it a family.

Because, and everyone knows this including these two men suppressing the truth by their wickedness, there is a mama. She is not included in the video, nor is she in the life of the baby she carried and who needs her, but she exists. She’s been cut out of her child’s life, presumably by her own choice. The baby, however, did not make a choice. And now two men who have appropriated the title of “parents” are badgering the baby into affirming their lifestyle choice.

Perhaps, the infant is only doing what infants often do, babbling out those syllables that are often among the first learned by young ones across times and places and culture. But of course, these syllables always refer to the same person. They are, in the end, a primal cry of children for a particular someone who should always be there for them.

Anyone who has spent time around babies understands what is playing out in this scene. For little ones, mama is the world. In fact, according to childhood policy expert Dr. Dan Wuori, kids often say “Dada” before “Mama” not because the mom doesn’t matter as much but because she matters so much more. In their tiny, growing minds, they recognize “Dad” as a distinct person before they realize that “Mom” isn’t part of themselves. This innate and beautiful bond is intentionally broken when we pretend that a man can replace a mom, or whenever a child is acquired through surrogacy.

Just as tragic is the embrace of same-sex “marriage” or such reproductive technologies by individuals, governments, medical authorities, and Christians, while failing to even take a cursory glance to consider what is best for the child. Any ethical concerns around in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been deferred in order to protect the feelings and desires of adults. In fact, both in policy and in public discourse, we’ve lost the ability to even discern the difference between couples who suffer with infertility and same-sex couples who have chosen inherently sterile relationships but then demand children. As a result, what children need is tossed aside in the name of adult desires. Children become commodities in the marketplace of consumer-driven reproductive technologies.

As Katy Faust, founder of the children’s rights group Them Before Us and the Greater Than campaign, said to the Colson Center:

We’ve been sounding the alarm about surrogacy for years. The mother loss, the commodification, the fact that children often go home with unrelated adults, increasing risk of abuse and neglect. But videos like this do something that arguments and studies never can. They spark righteous rage that leads people to come out of the closet as defenders of the natural family. It is more and more clear that gay marriage didn’t just have to do with what takes place “in the privacy of the bedroom.” It impacts children. And when we see those children cry on camera, it motivates us to action.

It should, at least. The word “natural” is accurate. Having chosen unnatural relationships, to quote Paul, these two dads now demand that even a baby must affirm what is unnatural. Even if they had not made that demand in such a cruel way in a video shared for social media clicks, great harm has been done to this child. And a culture that affirms their choice is complicit in that harm.

Babies need their mamas. There are few things more obvious than that. Denying that reality is a tragedy. Harming children should be a crime.

The Crumbling Sham of Trans Medicine

Apr 29, 2026John StonestreetTransgenderTransgender

Trans activists loudly claim that medicalizing gender confused youth is “settled science” and saves lives. This is meant to shut down any doubt or debate on this critically important topic.

Thankfully, a few undeterred scholars are asking important questions and demonstrating just how false trans activists’ claims really are.

An impressive new Finnish study, published in the Swedish academic journal Acta Paediatrica, is extending the damning conclusions of the UK’s 2024 Cass Review. The report was unequivocal in concluding that the so-called “settled science” of trans medicine “is an area of remarkably weak evidence” and the “reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”

The new Finnish study provides the “good evidence.” Its findings on long-term outcomes, based on extremely strong data sets, don’t bode well for trans activists’ overconfident claims. Finland’s government-run medical system has an extremely rigorous tracking system containing detailed medical and psychiatric records on all citizens dating back to 1994. Drawing from this, the study conducted an analysis of every patient under 23 who attended Finnish gender identity clinics from 1996 to 2019 and compared them with a matched control group.

This means their study population is uniquely comprehensive—it analyzed the entire gender treatment patient population in the country for years and years. Other studies have only included those who chose to take part, seriously undermining the validity of their claims. The Finnish school system also regularly screens students for mental health disorders. It consists of two timeframes: 1996 to 2010, and 2011 to 2019, the time when those “trans identity” numbers started exploding in many countries, likely from social contagion.

So, what did this comprehensive Finnish study find? It’s a pretty direct conclusion: The whole basis of transgender ideology and practice is wrong. As the study revealed, “Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls,” and severe psychiatric morbidity increased substantially in two-plus year clinical follow-ups. Those who sought gender services in the second, larger cohort “had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts.”

In fact, these medical researchers state,

Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminizing gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinizing gender reassignment.

They add,

After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

These findings directly challenge the assumption that gender transition is a natural, harmless occurrence and that taking sex-rejecting hormones and cutting off healthy body parts benefits patients. In fact, the researchers bluntly confess, “This does not support the suggested improvement in mental health after medical GR [gender reassignment].”

Thus, this research supports previous conclusions that those struggling with gender confusion suffer from other serious parallel psychological comorbidities. A group of Austrian scholars explained in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2025 that “gender dysphoric adolescents presenting to specialized gender identity services experience varying degrees of co-occurring mental health problems.”

They note that 71% of such patients suffer from moderate- to high-distress psychopathology (48% and 23% respectively) while only 29% suffer at low-distress levels. Most of these patients (77%) enjoyed high levels of social support in the midst of their struggles, belying another tired line of gay/trans rhetoric.

This Finnish study confirms that gender confused patients aren’t otherwise healthy people simply born in the wrong body, and if we just give them what they say they need, all will be well. Doing so actually appears to make things worse.
The Finnish research team, working from the same stellar population sample, also reported two years ago in the British Medical Journal that the “Main predictor of mortality in this population is psychiatric morbidity, and medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk.” The Cass Review came to the same conclusion: “Tragically deaths by suicide in trans people of all ages continue to be above the national average, but there is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce this.”

The manipulative claims of trans activists continue to crumble, thanks to carefully done science by honest researchers.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Glenn Stanton.