WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Collegian Week in Review: February 6, 2025

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Luke Miller joins the show to discuss President Trump's executive order to define two genders. Christina Lewis reports on Hillsdale College's recent Curate conference, Olivia Pero highlights the system for lost and stray dogs in Hillsdale County.

Welcome to The Collegian Week in Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Here are your hosts, Moorgleason, Thomas McKenna, and Caroline Kurt. Welcome to Collegian Week in Review, where we give you an inside look into Michigan's oldest college newspaper. We're your hosts, Caroline Kurt, Coleman Rowan, and Thomas McKenna. And today we'll be talking to sophomore Luke Miller about his opinion on Trump's executive order defining that there are only two genders for U.S. government policy purposes. Then we'll talk to Christina Lewis about the Curate Conference at Hillsdale, a women's conference. And finally, we'll talk with Olivia Perro on her piece in city news about lost and stray dogs in Hillsdale County

and how our way of dealing with them may expire in two years. Before we get to any of that, Caroline, tell us about what's on the opinion page. Had some great stuff, as usual. We'll be talking later to Luke Miller, as Thomas said, about his piece. But some other notable ones where assistant editor, Tatea, Christensen wrote a great piece on why First Lady Melania Trump's fashion is more than meets the eye. Collegian reporter Gemma Flores examined Daily Wire and former host Brett Cooper's dramatic exit. And design editor Ali Hall wrote about why we still need doctors in the medical establishment even when it is not perfect.

Coleman, anything notable on culture this week? Yeah, other than Christina's piece on Curate, we have an article. from Ty Ruddy and assistant editor talking about an original composition that a senior Amelia Smick is getting ready to perform that honors the victims of a controlled famine by the Soviet Union imposed upon Ukraine. We have a story that talks about a film exploring interdenominational dating and we have a review of Brett Cooper's new show by our assistant editor, Jay Christensen. Back on the front page, we have coverage of the CCA that was on artificial intelligence, as well as a stat that Hillsdale ranks top five in CLT scores, the classical learning test. And then also coverage of radio students who are finalists for awards from the Michigan Association of Broadcasting.

Now, over on City News, I wrote a piece on Hillsdale grad, who is the Senate Minority Leader in the Michigan State House. He announced his run for governor last month, and that makes him the first. Republican to enter a race where voters won't go to the polls for the general election until November of 2026. So this is super early for a candidate to get in the race. We'll be talking to Luke Miller in just a second about his piece on President Trump's executive order regarding gender identity and sex. You're listening to Collegian Weekend Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.1.7 FM. Radio Free Hillsdale's The Collegian Weekend Review continues. This is CLEGEN Weekend Review, and we are here with sophomore Luke Miller, who wrote

Defending Truth Projects Churches, an opinion this week on a recent executive order that is not just a cultural win, but a political and religious freedom win. So, Luke, go into that piece. Unpack it for us. Hi, guys. Thank you for having me. So I wrote this piece this week and about an executive order signed by President Trump on January 20th was one of the first things he did after his inauguration. A lot of Republicans right now are celebrating the fact that, It defines federal policy for defining a man and woman and male and female. It removes a lot of the gender identity language from federal policy. But I wanted to point out that there's one more very important thing that was in this executive order.

So the executive order gives the federal government guidelines for how to apply a 2020 Supreme Court case called Bostock v. Clayton County. And what the Supreme Court case did was give the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. it gave them the power to rule discrimination under gender identity as part of the Title VII discriminations for employers. And that applies to private employers. So this means that if the government were to rule that a private employer were discriminating based off of gender identity, meaning they would not allow a biological man to go in a female bathroom if that was his gender identity, then they could be sued for that. So here's why this matters. So in 2019, in a town hall, presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke ran on something that was, that kind of seems outrageous today, but it was a very popular opinion at the time among his party, which is that churches, religious institutions, schools that oppose same-sex marriage should have their 501c3 tax exempt status removed.

If that were to happen, those institutions, those religious institutions would count as private employment. employers and they would fall under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. So the danger of that is when the tide shifts back inevitably, right now a lot of the gender identity language is unpopular in public sentiment. But whenever that language shifts back, there's a very real possibility that if churches were ever to be removed, if religious colleges were ever to be removed from their tax-exempt status, that they could be sued by the government for what they call viewpoint discrimination. Now, that hasn't really happened before. The thing that has happened before is discriminatory action. That's what they ruled is illegal under that. But there's a lot of

candidates like Beta Orrk at the time who were saying that viewpoint discrimination should count in that as well and that's why they should have their tax exempt status removed. So viewpoint discrimination being like teaching that same-sex marriage is wrong as opposed to like you're not allowed in here because of your gender kind of thing. So one of the things that you mentioned in your piece towards the end is that this is just a executive order. and it has that power for this administration. But if a new administration were to come in and want a different point of view to go through executive agencies, they could sign an executive order that basically reverses what President Trump and his administration have done so far. Tell us about the impact of that and how that affects how we should look at this executive order.

Yeah, so you have to look at all executive orders with a grain of salt because they are kind of fleeting. As we've seen in the last few weeks, President Trump has overturned a massive number of the Biden administration's executive orders. They don't last, but what does last is legislation. And so a big part of this executive order is it requires the legislative affairs office to have a bill on the president's desk that puts all this into law within 30 days. So that's a huge part of this bill that would utilize the Republican majority in the House and the Senate, hopefully, to pass these definitions of man, woman, male, female, and these protections for religious institutions into law. And that's so much harder to overturn. It's really hard to get stuff done, especially in Congress.

But right now we have the Republican majority, all three, the House, the Senate, and the presidency, making now the most likely time for something like this to ever happen. So like I said at the end of my piece, we might really think that this is kind of an outrageous thing to plan for now. But the tide of public opinion is going to swing back and the more protections that we can put in place. and the stronger those protections are for those religious institutions and churches, the better. So in other words, Congress could clarify what it is trying to do in Civil Rights Act when it's preventing discrimination based on sex when it comes to employment opportunities and then prevent an administration that we're less friendly to religious freedom from coming in and trying to use the Bowstock decision and a Civil Rights Act to crack down on religious freedom and churches and parochial schools, for example.

Yes, exactly. Now, you outline the benefits of the executive order, but would you be concerned that the president signing executive order now that clarifies that there are two genders and that's the way that American executive agencies are going to enforce the law, that doing that is kind of taking away from the momentum that could be behind a piece of legislation in Congress? In other words, is he solving the problem too early to prevent a more permanent solution from being put in place by Congress? It's certainly true that some of this is for show. The fact that it's an executive order means that Trump gets his name put behind it and it gets out there very quickly because it's an executive order. Legislation takes much longer to go through. But the fact that the bill has to be on the desk within 30 days could mean that this executive order could really build momentum for legislation to come in the future because we really see the headlines and the momentum coming through from the executive order and that carry over into support for the legislation once it's introduced. What do you think the chances are that a Republican Congress would pass that kind of legislation, especially with such slim margins in the House and in the Senate? I think that there's a good chance, particularly because public sentiment is so against the gender ideology crowd right now. That is the, in the house, I think there's a really good shot because you don't have to worry about the filibuster.

When you get to the Senate, that's where it's going to be difficult. It's going to take a long time. They're going to have to work on the wording of this. It probably won't be quite as strong as the executive order because they're going to be. They do have to get some Democrat votes in order to pass it through the Senate. But I think that's something that has a good likelihood of happening. There's also a possibility that if they found it important enough, which with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expiring, they'll probably use this as a priority for that. But they can use the appropriations clause because a lot of spending goes into these gender-related things in the different departments.

They could try to pass it as a spending bill, which would bypass the filibuster. I don't think that they will do that because there's probably more important appropriations bills that they're going to want to do. But if they found it important enough and they were having enough difficulty passing it through the Senate with the filibuster, then that's another option that you could potentially see them using as well. So one of the questions is how much of a priority is this for Senate Republicans? Are they willing to use workarounds to try to get around the filibuster in order to put something like this bill through? Yes. And it's very popular right now. People's Republican senators, Republican House members, their constituents really want this kind of thing down. happen. It's a huge cultural issue and it looks good for them if they push it politically. It is a

really, really high priority amongst the common man. And so seeing it be a high priority to your Congresspeople is something that will win votes. So I think you are likely to see it be a high priority for Congress members. It's just a matter of whether they can flip those few Democrat votes in the Senate or whether they'll need to use the appropriations clause to get it done. Well, wonderful stuff, Luke. This is very timely and we enjoyed your analysis. So thank you so much for coming on. Thank you guys for having me. You were listening to Collegian Weekend Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM. This is the Collegian Weekend Review.

You are listening to Collegian Weekend Review, Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. We are here with Christina Lewis, assistant editor for the Collegian, who wrote on the conference over the weekend Curate, which is a women's conference. Christina, can you tell us about that? Yeah, so I had the privilege of attending this women's conference put on by Mrs. Bolin, who is the Dean of Women at Hillsdale, along with some other staff. And basically, the event is geared toward providing mentorship for girls at Hillsdale. What were some of the speakers? What sort of things did they talk about? How did they achieve the goal of mentorship, I suppose? Yeah. So this year's theme was...

horizons. So the idea was that as college students, sometimes we get locked down and just focus on the day to day and we forget to look up. Christina, I take it you've been to this conference before in prior years. Yes. What struck you as being new or different this year than previous curates? Yeah, so I think that there were a lot more panels in different discussions. I know there was a session on the philosophy of dress, which I thought was interesting. Mrs. Bowlin's sister actually led that one. They also had some different book giveaways at the beginning. So yeah. What talk that you heard was the most impactful to you? Did you have the most takeaways about? Yeah, so I really like Dr. Wincenzi's talk. She just spoke about her life, how she fell in love with

history and how she decided to move to the United States to pursue a career as a professor. I was just really inspired by that because I'm also studying history and I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with it. But it was good to hear from her and hear her story. Christina, one of the things about the curate conference is that there are no men there. And so for us men, like Coleman and I, we have no idea what's going on there unless we read your coverage in the Collegiate. I was happy to see that one of the panels was called How to Not Be a Man Hater. Yeah, that helps Thomas and I out a lot.

It does. And it's something that's, you know, really important to us. Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about what was in this panel and what you gained from it? Let's see. I would say one of the biggest takeaways is that we need to place our identity in Christ and know who God says we are. Yeah, so Hediah Mabri said,

I think that the biggest problem with hating men is often coming from a place of not knowing what it means to be a woman. And that really speaks to our society today. Lots of people don't know what it means to be a woman. And that's why it's important to really have that firm foundation before we try to enter into a relationship with other people because we shouldn't fall into the trap of equating our worth. with other people and we need to know where our, like, true worth comes from. Okay, Christina, say the, like, 10 years down the road, you've graduated, you've gained some wisdom, you're doing cool things, you get invited to come back and speak a curate.

What is your talk about? Let's see. I think my talk would just be about trusting God and knowing that he's going to be faithful, because a lot of the times I just forget what God has done in my life and I need to remember that, you know, God has helped me in the past and he doesn't change. So he's going to keep helping me and he's going to be with me every step of the way. Wonderful. All right. Thanks for talking with us, Christina.

Before we go, I got one last question for you. So it's Saturday morning, right? And curates going on. You wake up and you think, I'm going to go to curate. Why? I want to go to curate because I know that I will get lots of free books. And I'll get to make a dried flower bouquet and spend time with my friends. That's great. Thank you.

You're listening to Collegian Weekend Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. We'll be back in a minute. You're listening to the Collegian Week and Review. Review. You're listening to Collegian Weekend Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 1-1.1.7 FM. We're here with Olivia Perro. She's the outreach director for the Collegian and still writes and reports for us. And this week in the city news pages, she had a story on the county's collaboration with Branch County and their animal shelter there and how that might be coming to an end soon and what that means for lost and stray dogs in this area. Olivia, tell us about your article. Yeah, so I went last Friday to

First, I went to the Humane Society of Branch County and talked with Jan, who works there and runs the shelter. So she showed me some of the dogs back in the kennel area. Some of them are from Branch County, and a lot of them were from Hillsdale County. So then after I met with her, I went over to the animal shelter where Deputy Baker runs that. And he showed me, they only had two dogs in the kennel that day, and both were from Jonesville. And so he explained to me the arrangement that Hillsdale has with Branch County where McKenzie James, who's the animal control person here in Hillsdale, she'll bring any dogs that are lost or stray over to Branch County where they keep them. And then Branch County, they work to find the owners. But if no one comes to pick the dog up within four days, then they go to the Humane Society of Branch County.

So I kind of learned all about how that this connection, this network works between Hillsdale and Branch. So how did this partnership get started? You said it started back in 2015. Tell us more about that. Yeah, so there was a fire that burned down the old kennel that the Branch County Animal Shelter used. So they couldn't afford to finish it. So they created some arrangement with Hillsdale where I believe Hillsdale helped contribute to finishing with paying off the kennel. And in return, Branch County said they would take in any of the dogs that are from Hillsdale that are lost and keep them over there. because Hillsdale does not have a place to keep lost dogs. So that's how the arrangement started. But at this point, Deputy Baker was explaining to me that there's two years left on the contract and they're not looking to continue it because Branch County doesn't need Hillsdale's money anymore. And it's a lot of effort for Branch County to be taking care of another county's lost dogs.

So this contract expires when? Two years. So I'm not sure the exact date, but within the next two years. In the next two years, Hillsdale County is going to need to find a way to keep lost in stray dogs that they find because we don't have a way right now. Yes. And I talked to McKenzie James over here in Hillsdale, who's the animal control person. And I asked her if Hillsdale has a plan yet for what they're going to do with their own dogs. And she said that she and the sheriff have talked about it, but they haven't really come to any conclusions yet. And she said they have two years to figure it out and they're not worried about it yet. as it is right now does Branch County have so people self turn in dogs

or do people come there's their service that comes and gets the dogs I suppose yeah Deputy Baker will go get the dogs in Branch County so if people are calling in and say this dog's been like wandering around and I don't think anyone owns it

he can go pick that dog up and that's what McKenzie James does here in Hillsdale people call her they got some like stray dogs running around or they lost or some dog seems to be lost she'll go pick it up and take it to Branch County. So they, the deputies will pick the dogs up themselves. It doesn't sound like people usually bring the dogs in because usually people don't know the dogs.

Did you get any sense as you were reporting how many dogs a month, for example, are coming in? They, both Deputy Baker and James said it can fluctuate. They said a good average is three to five dogs a week, but sometimes it can be less than that, but that's a good average, they said. That's about three to five per week. And what percentage of people can get their dogs back? What percentage of dogs go back to their owners? Yeah. So Deputy Baker gave me a whole spreadsheet of the information ranging from, it was 2017 to 2024, but he had even more data from back in 2007. And I can't remember the exact percentages, but the amount of dogs returned to their owners has increased since 2007 to now. So they've gotten better at getting dogs back with their owners.

Yeah, I know you were mentioning in the latter half of your article that microchip technology has really helped in that regard. Can you explain to people who perhaps aren't unfamiliar with that? Yeah. So Deputy James explained to me about microchips, and it's basically just a small little gizmo. They put into the dog between their shoulders and that contains information about its owners on there,

like their address and their phone number so that if the dog does turn up lost, Deputy Baker, Deputy James could scan the back of their neck. If the dog is a microchip, they get the information. But the one problem is that sometimes when dogs are rehomed, the information is never updated on the microchips, so that if the dog ends up running away, it's the wrong information. So Deputy James said just to remember to update information on your dog's microchips if you get a new one or rehome it.

So, yeah. Well, this is a story we'll keep following as Hillsdale. County needs to find a way to deal with lost and stray dogs when this contract expires. So thanks so much for doing the reporting. Of course, thanks for having me on. You're listening to Collegian Week in Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. We'll be back in a minute. You've been listening to the Collegian Week in Review on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. I'm Caroline Kurt. I'm Coleman Rowan. And I'm Thomas McKenna. You can find the Collegian Weekend Review online at cWIR.transister.fm. You can find more news at Hillsdale Collegion.com,

and you can see us on Instagram at Hillsdale Collegion. We'll see you next week.