Phil Vischer Compares Florida's Anti-Grooming Bill To Segregation, Then Takes It Back (Kinda)

On a March 2022 episode of the Holy Post podcast, VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer compares the concerns behind Florida's "Parental Rights In Education" anti-grooming bill to segregationists. Less than 10 minutes later when he hears his co-host Skye Jethani make the same analogy, Vischer appears to second-guess the comparison, but in his walkback, he can't explain why the two situations are different. Christian thought leader extraordinaire right here!

—TRANSCRIPT HIGHLIGHTS—

SKYE JETHANI: The issue isn't that third graders are going to be taught anything like Sex Ed. I think the problem is, from kindergarten through third grade, as children are encountering just the curriculum and reading story books and things like that, if there are depictions of same-sex couples or transgender people or something, that what you're effectively doing is normalizing those identities.

And for some people, that's seen as offensive. And they don't want their kids to think that two men or two women married with children, having a family, is okay. So that's what's being concerned with here.

PHIL VISCHER: The only thing that would compare to this, again, goes back to race, when you had people honestly arguing in some parts of the South that my religion teaches the races must be kept separate, and now the government is wanting to put the races together. This is a huge impasse.

...

JETHANI: I fear what's going to happen here is similar to what happened with racial integration many generations ago, or back in the 1960s in the South, is a bunch of Christians decided we're not on board with this. And they're going to pull their kids out and create their, back then, it was segregation academies. Now it's going to be, I don't know, traditional marriage academies or something.

And the side effect of that will be a whole nother generation of Christians will be withdrawn from the public square, ill-equipped to deal with how to live out their faith in a pluralistic society that doesn't entirely agree with them...It also wouldn't give Christians the opportunity to practice humility and graciousness and learning and a lot of the common grace that could come from remaining engaged with people who disagree with you.

VISCHER: Yeah. I think we do have to be able to argue, on some level, that this is not exactly analog to the race debate of 50 years ago, because the state of Mississippi would not air Sesame Street for the first year that it was on. And their response was, "The people of Mississippi are not ready to see black and white Americans living together on the same street."

JETHANI: Or birds and monsters.

VISCHER: As they do on Sesame Street. [laughter] And then, by the second year, they decided, no, okay, we think maybe we're okay with it now.

But this, if this is that, then it's, I mean, how can you stand against it? You have to say this is different, because it's, because it is different. And that's all I have to say about that.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgRW0OEguDU