When Allie Beth Stuckey took on 20 liberal Christians for a recent Jubilee debate, one question stuck with the BlazeTV host of “Relatable.”

“This might seem a little silly, but a lot of people actually have this question: Is our spirit gendered?” Stuckey says.

“No. Nothing in Scripture points to this idea of our soul and spirit possibly having a separate gender from our biological sex,” she explains, recalling her response in the debate.

“I said, ‘Oh I don’t think that we see that in Scripture at all. That’s not a Christian belief.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.’ And so, I don’t know if this is a tenet of Mormonism,” she says.

“There is definitely a different belief about the spirit and what it is. Different belief about eternity, different belief about Jesus, different belief about time past, different belief about heaven, all different kinds of things that are so far out of the orthodoxy of any denomination of Christianity,” she continues.

“I thought that that was an interesting assertion that I have not heard other Mormons, by the way, believe,” she adds, noting that those who have New Age beliefs or secular people often make points like this to justify transgenderism.

“We see in Genesis 1 that God made us male and female. Sex is a biological reality,” Stuckey responds.

Stuckey explains that in a book titled “Love Thy Body,” author Nancy Pearcey homes in on the philosophy of dualism and how it’s led many people astray in order to separate the spirit from the body and to say the spirit has authority over the body.

“That’s not true. God cares about the body. It’s a temple of the Holy Spirit,” Stuckey adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Free, Video phone, Upload, Sharing, Video, Camera phone, Youtube.com, Relatable, Relatable with allie beth stuckey, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Stuckey, Transgenderism, Jubilee debate, Gendered souls, Christianity, Debate, Christianity debate 

In the days following a brutal street beating by Antifa members outside a left-wing event, the incident has taken a tragic turn.

On February 12, a 23-year-old man, identified as Quentin, was involved in a violent clash outside an event connected to the French left-wing party La France Insoumise’s MEP Rima Hassan at Sciences Po Lyon, the European Conservative reported.

‘To the unfathomable pain of losing a child must not follow the unbearable impunity of the barbarians responsible for this lynching.’

The incident occurred between anti-fascist groups and the right-wing feminist group Némésis, according to the collective’s director, Alice Cordier.

RELATED: Antifa, women’s clothing, and Church of Satan: Thug who allegedly threatened ICE agents is a proud degenerate

Photo by Henrique Campos / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

The clash began when members of the Némésis group unfurled a banner criticizing “Islamo-fascists,” after which they were physically confronted by antifascist members.

One 19-year-old woman was reportedly strangled and dragged prior to Quentin’s serious beating.

Quentin, who was serving as an informal security detail for Némésis, attempted to protect the female members of the group during the incident. However, he was subsequently ambushed and beaten unconscious as he and a friend were leaving the scene of the incident.

He was later taken to the local hospital in Lyons.

Quentin remained in a coma with a critical brain hemorrhage until Saturday in a condition his family described as “between life and death.”

The European Conservative reported on Saturday that Quentin succumbed to his injuries.

French president Emmanuel Macron declared Quentin “the victim of an unprecedented outburst of violence,” adding that he was sending his “thoughts,” to his family and loved ones.

“In the Republic, no cause, no ideology will ever justify killing. On the contrary, the very purpose of our institutions is to civilize debates and protect the free expression of arguments. Pursuing, bringing to justice and convicting the perpetrators of this infamy is essential. The hatred that kills has no place among us. I call for calm, restraint and respect,” Macron added.

French conservative leader Marine Le Pen also issued a statement upon news of Quentin’s death: “After clinging to life, Quentin breathed his last. To his family and loved ones shattered by this terrible ordeal, I send my heartfelt thoughts and my deepest compassion. To the unfathomable pain of losing a child must not follow the unbearable impunity of the barbarians responsible for this lynching. It will be for justice to judge and condemn with the utmost severity this criminal act of unprecedented violence.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Politics, Quentin, Lyons, Sciences po lyons, Emmanuel macron, Marine le pen, European conservative, Antifa, Nemesis, France, French, Rima hassan 

One year ago, President Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to develop policy recommendations to protect access to in-vitro fertilization, expand its availability, and lower its cost to patients.

In October, the administration announced additional measures to lower costs for IVF and common fertility drugs and explore pathways like expanded employer benefits or excepted benefit categories for assisted reproductive technologies. While this included joint efforts across federal agencies to make this costly intervention more affordable, the administration stopped short of imposing broad new federal mandates for insurance coverage or direct government funding of IVF.

The more than $20,000 invested in each IVF cycle, only to achieve a 25%-30% success rate, would be better spent on other economic incentives to encourage family formation.

The problem of below-replacement fertility rates in the United States — which poses serious demographic, social, and economic challenges — has gained some political attention since the last election.

As of 2024, the fertility rate in the U.S. stands at a record low of 1.6 births per woman of childbearing age, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. This drop continues a downward trend that began in the early 2000s and accelerated after the 2008 recession.

Trump frames his support for IVF as a way for the government to support couples who desire to start or grow families. While this administration has not yet enacted universal “free” IVF, the policies show clear support for making IVF accessible to more Americans.

Why IVF won’t fix the birth dearth

The notion that expanding access to IVF will measurably alleviate our fertility crisis is pure fantasy.

First, the goal of achieving a significant number of additional births using government-supported IVF will prove cost-prohibitive. The procedure typically runs $15,000 per cycle plus $5,000 for medications.

Second, the success rates tend to be low. A typical IVF cycle achieves pregnancy in about 20%-35% of cases for women under 35, and that number drops further with age.

IVF is usually employed for infertile women who have been unable to conceive naturally. But infertility, while far from a trivial issue, is not a significant driver of our low birth rates.

A 2013 Gallup poll found that, on average, American adults want to have between two and three children, a statistic that has remained unchanged since the 1970s. The 5% of adults who do not want to have children has not changed much since 1990.

RELATED: Who really controls behavioral health care — and why it matters now

Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

For the most part, medical problems do not explain why so many Americans are not realizing their desire for children. The main source of our birth dearth is not biological but economic. More than three-quarters of those who want more children but do not have them cite financial considerations as the main reason.

If that’s the problem, then the more than $20,000 invested in each IVF cycle, only to achieve a 25%-30% success rate, would be better spent on other economic incentives to encourage family formation for those who believe they cannot afford children.

We can and should argue over the details of specific proposals — whether child tax credits, support for stay-at-home moms, or other measures — but these approaches promise to deliver far more per dollar than IVF.

If you want more babies, simply creating them in a petri dish will not do. We need to make it more affordable for Americans to raise these children after they are born.

The ethical costs IVF can’t escape

Even when it helps couples to have a child, IVF comes with serious ethical costs.

Clinics compete in the market based on success rates. Because egg harvesting is an invasive and sometimes risky procedure, IVF cycles typically aim to create as many embryos as possible — usually more than the couple intends to bring to birth.

Unused embryos go into frozen storage but can later be thawed and implanted. In one 2022 experiment, run by its very nature without consent, twins were born after 30 years in cold storage. Their adoptive father was five years old when they were first conceived.

No one knows precisely how many embryos now sit in cryopreservation, because clinics are not required to report these numbers. Estimates range from 500,000 to millions.

Research supports the common-sense notion that, whenever possible, it would be preferable to make babies in the bedroom rather than the laboratory.

Many end up abandoned by parents who stop paying the $500-$1,000 yearly storage fees and fail to respond to repeated outreach from clinics. Most parents remain reluctant to allow clinics to destroy their spare embryos, suggesting at least moral ambivalence.

Other options exist, but they rarely satisfy. Parents can adopt out embryos to another infertile couple or donate them to embryo-destructive research. Parents rarely consent to either, likely out of similar moral reticence.

These parents know well what happens when those “clumps of cells” are placed in a mother’s womb.

Thus, parents who do not want to raise additional children are stuck in an insoluble ethical conundrum; their embryos are left in a cryogenic nursery limbo.

It’s hard to entirely blame IVF clients for this when all available choices seem morally problematic. Even when informed of these options before starting IVF, most couples admit they were singularly focused on achieving a pregnancy and rarely considered what would happen to excess embryos until later.

In creating countless human embryos that will never be placed in a uterus — the only conducive environment for embryonic life — we have created a problem for which there is no morally just solution. This should invite us to re-evaluate the practice that created this insoluble quandary in the first place.

RELATED: Women’s infertility is Big Pharma’s cash cow

miodrag ignjatovic via iStock/Getty Images

Better answers for infertility

We need to acknowledge the anguish of infertility for couples trying unsuccessfully to conceive. There are better solutions than IVF to offer them, however.

The egg-harvesting phase of IVF introduces nontrivial medical risks. Although we need more longitudinal data, current evidence suggests significant risks also for the child conceived by this procedure.

Those risks include elevated risks for birth defects and chronic illness later in life, such as cardiovascular problems and metabolic dysregulation, cognitive impairment, and perhaps even cancer, possibly due to epigenetic changes introduced by the procedure.

This research supports the common-sense notion that, whenever possible, it would be preferable to make babies in the bedroom rather than the laboratory.

Nevertheless, the focus on IVF as the solution to infertility — and often the first solution offered to infertile couples — has dampened research and clinical efforts aimed at treating the underlying causes of infertility.

Instead of focusing on IVF, the Trump administration should support medical interventions that help previously infertile couples to conceive a child in the womb.

As in many other areas of contemporary medicine, we reach immediately for medically invasive, lab-based procedures. We offer couples a work-around, instead of assessing and attempting to correct the underlying cause.

Interventions under the umbrella of restorative reproductive medicine range from dietary changes or hormone balancing to, in some cases, medications or surgery.

This approach accords with the push to “Make America Healthy Again” by addressing root causes of our epidemic of chronic illness, rather than applying superficial, expensive, and suboptimal quick fixes.

RELATED: IVF CEO says conceiving naturally is for those with ‘genetic privilege’

Rasi Bhadramani via iStock/Getty Images

What policy can do

Several challenges stand in the way of making these interventions available and accessible to more couples, which sensible policies can begin to address.

Research is inadequately funded. We also currently lack sufficient training for physicians in assessing and treating the root causes of infertility.

Among the most common causes of infertility is endometriosis — a condition that not only makes it difficult or impossible to maintain a pregnancy but also, if uncorrected, causes intense pain and other troublesome symptoms.

However, many physician specialists are not trained in the complex surgical approach required to adequately treat endometriosis to allow for pregnancy. Other such examples abound.

A better path forward

We should applaud the administration’s laudable goal of helping infertile couples to bear children. But IVF is not the right solution.

Instead of putting all our eggs in one basket, we need a capacious approach to supporting fertility that does more to address the root causes of infertility and, whenever possible, restores reproductive function the way nature intended.

This strategy respects human life at all stages and avoids insoluble ethical quandaries. It also offers a recipe for happier parents and healthier children.

Surely this is a proposal for addressing our fertility crisis that all Americans can endorse.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.

​Opinion 

Recently, on my internet travels, I have come across numerous mentions of a magazine called Evie. Because of the name, I assumed it was for women.

But I also noticed that Evie has generated a fair amount of pushback since it was founded in 2019. Woman on both sides of the political spectrum seem to have a problem with it. Whenever it comes up, they roll their eyes and snort with contempt.

Now I really wanted to uncover the truth about Evie. Was it a boring trad-life women’s magazine? Or a fascist, male supremacist call to arms?

For this reason, I assumed the worst. It must be a cringe lifestyle magazine. Or maybe a New Age yoga blog. Or something like Gwyneth Paltrow’s famously weird lifestyle platform GOOP.

Just yesterday, I heard someone mention it again, this time on a right-leaning podcast. The female host, in a sneering, exasperated voice, said: “Don’t get me started on Evie!” As if Evie were the most awkward, annoying, embarrassing development in contemporary female culture.

Buy-curious

Because of this, I decided to look at Evie. And here’s what I found.

First off, Evie looks exactly like an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine circa 2005. Or Mademoiselle. Or Elle. Or any of those semi-trashy glossy women’s mags I remember from my youth.

I actually used to like those magazines. Especially when they indulged in classic “listicle”-style pieces like: “7 Sex Tips to Drive Your Man Wild!” “5 Ways to Seduce that Hot Guy at the Gym.” “6 Signs Your Boss Wants to Sleep with your Husband.”

I loved the dumbness of these articles. And how you felt compelled to read them anyway. And how funny they could be, if the writer struck the right tongue-in-cheek tone.

RELATED: HBO’s ‘Euphoria’ pushes child exploitation as art — and America’s sickest critics agree

Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

Marital embrace

My curiosity aroused, I decided to read a full article in Evie. I found one that caught my eye: “How to Plan a Date That Actually Leads to Sex.”

Wow, I thought. Evie really is like a modern-day Cosmopolitan! (The old Cosmo being extremely “pro-sex.”)

But as I read through the article, it didn’t make sense. Why was the writer talking about her husband?

So then I went back and read the title again, and saw that it actually said: “How to Plan a Date Night That Actually Leads to Sex.”

That was a lot different. A “date night” is, of course, a date between a husband and wife. So what this article was actually about was how to get married couples to have sex with each other.

This would suggest that Evie is trad. And conservative. And pro-marriage. But then why are conservative women so embarrassed by it?

Maybe because it’s conservative in a boring way? Was it too trad?

Sex and the single girl

So then I Googled Evie, to see what other people thought (and why nobody liked it). It turns out Evie openly calls itself “a conservative version of Cosmopolitan magazine.”

So Evie was definitely doing the trad thing. But it was doing it in a very wholesome, 1950s way. It was more for women in the Midwest, women who were not super in touch with their bodies. Which was why it had a lot of articles about baking pies. And homemaking. And dealing with your husband’s sleep apnea.

That’s probably why sophisticated, younger women didn’t like it, even if they agreed with its politics. It was too corny. It was sexually repressed. It wasn’t “smart” enough.

Fun fascism?

So then I looked up Evie on Wikipedia. And I was wrong again! It turns out that Evie is not boring at all. It’s the ADVANCE GUARD of a FASCIST TAKEOVER OF AMERICA!

According to Wikipedia:

Evie published conspiracy theories, pseudoscientific content, and anti-vaccine misinformation. … Evie is an antifeminist publication. It has been characterized as alt-right and far-right. In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified Evie as a preeminent publication supporting the male supremacist politics of the hard right. In 2025, The New York Times described Evie’s content as promoting “positions that are fringe even within conservative circles — criticisms of no-fault divorce and I.V.F., for example — packaged in a fun and approachable format.

Wow. So Evie was actually radical caveman conservatism! Like men hitting women over the head with clubs. And then dragging them back to their cave!

But Evie was apparently even worse than that. According to Futurism magazine, as quoted by Wikipedia, Evie is full of:

harmful content including … a bevy of wildly unscientific assertions about women’s health, anti-trans fearmongering, unsupported “psyop” conspiracies, and pro-life messaging that often includes false claims about safe and effective abortion drugs …

Boob noob

Now I really wanted to uncover the truth about Evie. Was it a boring trad-life women’s magazine? Or a fascist, male supremacist call to arms?

I resolved to read deeper into Evie. I began to explore the archives. Some of the articles I read:

5 Reasons I Regret My Boob JobI Taped My Mouth Shut Every Night for 2 Years — Here’s How It Changed My LifeMen’s Favorite Types of Dresses on Women: Does the sundress really live up to the hype?Why So Many Women Feel Worse after TherapyThe Wife’s Guide to the Morning Quickie He’ll Think About All Day

All of these articles were pretty fluffy and insubstantial, as you would expect. But they weren’t exactly “far-right male supremacy” either.

I’ll Tumblr for ya

Then I read an article called “The Resurrection of the Tumblr Girl.” This piece stood out from the rest. It was longer and more thoughtful.

This article discussed the pre-2014 Tumblr era, when young people (mostly young women) shared their “aesthetics” on Tumblr. “Aesthetics” meaning their favorite music, art, fashion, poetry, etc.

This sharing and intermingling of people’s individual tastes was the exact opposite of the environment young people live in now. Where everything is politicized, all thinking is black and white, and people are required to yell, scream, and assault one another over the manufactured controversies of the day.

This article made the great point that Tumblr‘s “aesthetics” culture was a far healthier and more organic youth movement than the political hysteria we see today. Especially for young women.

“Resurrection of the Tumblr Girl” was calling for a revival of the aesthetics movement and signs that it was coming back. It actually gave me hope.

So that’s my take on Evie. It’s a chatty, somewhat superficial, Cosmopolitan-style women’s magazine, with a clearly conservative perspective.

But also, like the original Cosmopolitan, there is some intelligent, insightful writing hidden in there as well. So I would warn against dismissing it.

Also, if you enjoy a good “morning quickie” article — and who doesn’t? — there are plenty of those too.

​Lifestyle, Culture, Evie magazine, Cosmopolitan, Women’s media, Entertainment, Blake’s progress 

Lying in politics has changed. Politicians used to lie in hopes of getting away with it. Now they don’t care. If you throw enough mud on the windshield, some of it will stick.

Case in point: Illinois Democrat Senator Dick Durbin’s use on the Senate floor of an obviously doctored image of immigration agents pointing a gun at the back of Alex Pretti’s head. One of the agents in the image is even missing a head. The picture is still circulating. Nothing dies on the internet.

Lying could not make way so easily were it not for the fact that we are passing through a pandemic of lunacy.

If you want to provide an instance of a lie on the other side of the aisle, feel free. My point isn’t partisan.

Decades ago, one of my grad school teachers asked me, “Why do you think there is so much lying in politics today?” Too young for a real sense of history, I thought the question silly. Don’t people always think things were better in the old days?

But sometimes, some things do get worse. Truthfulness is taking it on the nose, and the virtue is even more endangered today than when my teacher quizzed me all those years ago. Ordinary people lie too, but the great masters of lying today are politicians — with this difference. A true master of a craft understands what he is doing. Habitual liars find it harder and harder to keep track of when they are lying and when they aren’t.

Some reasons for the increase in lying are pretty obvious. There are fewer consequences for lying. It is harder to bring them to bear. Honesty isn’t drilled into children as once it was. AI and social media have made it much easier not only to lie but also to organize in doing so.

Less obvious reasons involve advances in lying’s technique. Adolf Hitler promulgated the Big Lie: one so enormous that no one can believe you would tell such a whopper. Our version works not by size but by numbers: If you lie about everything, nobody can believe you would lie so much. Politicians who lie about everything also lie that everything their opponents say is a lie.

RELATED: From ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ to ‘drive, baby, drive’

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

The sun is shining? There you go again. I’m lying? You’re just trying to distract attention.

New techniques of lying get a boost from new technologies for making elites irresponsible to those whom they supposedly serve. The political organization of deviance. The whetting of tribal hatreds. The cultivation of a permanent crisis. The development of addictive social media.

Beyond advances in techniques are changes in the motives for using them. We are in a slow-burning constitutional crisis. Older politicians lied mostly to cover up things like graft, but newer ones lie to cover up attempts to subvert the political system itself. Once someone has lied on a grand enough scale, he acquires a motive to lie even more grandly, just to keep from being exposed. With enough lying, the very act of exposing lies is discredited.

Lying could not make way so easily were it not for the fact that we are passing through a pandemic of lunacy, in which huge numbers of people, on both sides of the spectrum, hold beliefs that are not just loopy, but harmful and contagious. In a recent book, I detail 30 of these delusions, but for the moment, let me focus on two that are especially relevant to political lying.

RELATED: Debate is always welcome, but violence is never acceptable

Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

One concerns the nature of right and wrong: Sometimes we just have to do the wrong thing. We think that to make things come out right, we may lie.

More and more of the things that pass under the name of making things better make them inexpressibly worse. We justify burning down neighborhoods “to advance racial justice.” We lie about political opponents “because they want to do bad things.” We give false testimony “because we just know” the accused person must deserve something bad. We unjustly penalize honest people “just to give others a chance.” We “solve the problem” of unwanted children by killing them all, telling ourselves that they aren’t really children unless we choose to believe that they are. We slaughter countless numbers so that no one will have a “poorer quality of life.”

We lie about all of it.

The other concerns the nature of reality: Things are whatever we say they are. It’s easy to be indifferent to the facts if you think saying something makes it true. One day in a university course I teach, we were discussing the nature of marriage. Some students were puzzled: How could marriage have a nature? As one said, “We can define things however we want.”

Many of their teachers would have agreed because “truth is whatever works.” Presumably, a belief “works” if it brings about what we desire. But a lie might easily do that, and by this pragmatist theory, a lie that works isn’t actually a lie. If you live in an echo chamber in which everyone says the same thing, it’s easier still to think it is true. And our echo chambers are very well organized.

There is only one real antidote to all these lies and delusions, without which no other reform can succeed: thinking clearly. The hard thing is that we may not want to think clearly. May God grant us the grace to start wanting to.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Opinion 

Much lore surrounds scripture’s mysterious “Antichrist” — the false messiah prophesied to come in the End Times as a supreme and final embodiment of rebellion against God prior to Christ’s Second Coming.

For centuries, Bible scholars have debated this climactic future figure; Christians have theorized about who it might be (often pointing to corrupt elites); and Hollywood has used the sinister being as horror movie fuel.

But this hyper-fixation on the capital-A Antichrist, says BlazeTV host Jase Robertson, can distract from another part of scripture perhaps even more worthy of our attention: There are already antichrists living among us.

No place in scripture is this more evident than in 1 John.

In 1 John 2:18, he warns that “many antichrists have come.” Two chapters later, he lays bare what an antichrist is: “every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus” (4:3). This kind of spirit, he says, is “not from God” and is “already in the world.”

In other words, the denial of Jesus’ deity is the spirit of the antichrist, and it’s lurking everywhere.

John’s words remain strikingly relevant today. The spreading of darkness, erosion of truth, and deterioration of morality are evidence that the spirit of the antichrist is alive and well.

It’s this reality — not a future singular villain, the Robertsons warn — that impacts our daily lives, and yet many Christians, perhaps to their detriment, obsess over who the Antichrist is or will be.

“Look, I’ve got a guy who I love dearly. He’s one of my best friends in the world, and he got to 2 Thessalonians 2 in his Bible study, and he’s never gone forward or backwards,” says Jase. “He wants to know who the ‘man of sin’ is, and he wants a detailed account.”

Second Thessalonians 2:3 mentions a “man of sin” proclaiming himself God, who many Christians and scholars interpret as a direct reference to the final Antichrist.

Jase believes his friend, and others who get hung up on pinpointing the Antichrist, is missing the bigger point.

“The one in us is greater,” says Jase, referencing 1 John 4:4.

“The ‘man of sin’ — I don’t need to know exactly if that’s one person. I see that in men everywhere,” he continues.

The question it ultimately comes down to, says Jase, is: “Are you in Jesus or are you anti-Jesus?”

“I think [antichrists] are people who are intentionally trying to persuade people and deceive people away from Christ,” adds co-host Zach Dasher, “and the reason why I say that is because in [1 John 2] verse 26, he says, ‘The reason why I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.”’

Even though John was writing in the late first century, his words hold just as true in our time.

Zach points to a story he heard recently about a young Christian whose faith was badly “damaged” after he watched a series of social media videos from a professor who was making “incredibly compelling cases of why the Bible’s not real, why Jesus isn’t who He said He was.”

Eventually, however, it was exposed that this professor’s arguments were “blatant lies.”

“I think that’s more the spirit of the Antichrist,” says Zach.

To hear more of the panel’s discussion, watch the full episode above.

Want more from the Robertsons?

To enjoy more on God, guns, ducks, and inspiring stories of faith and family, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Unashamed, Unashamed with phil robertson, Jase robertsons, Robertson family, Blazetv, Blaze media, 2 thessalonians, Books of john, Antichrist