Episode 102: The Empathy Deficit: Why Religious Conservative Lawmakers Are Failing Their Constituents
We look into the pressing issues of compassion and empathy in political discourse, particularly among conservative politicians, and the importance of humanism in addressing these challenges. We discuss the alarming trend of lawmakers advocating for cuts to essential social safety nets, such as Medicare and Medicaid, which provide critical support to those struggling to meet basic living standards. We lay bare the injustices inherent in proposals that prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy over the welfare of those in need.
Our exploration of a particular incident with US Senator Joni Ernst showcases the stark contrast between privilege and empathy, underscoring the disconnect many politicians have with the realities of their constituents’ struggles.
We comment on the recent attempts to erase LGBTQ+ history and contributions from public life, notably the controversial decision to remove Milk’s name from a Navy ship. We stress the importance of recognizing and honoring figures like Milk, who has become emblematic of the fight for civil rights, while also reflecting on the persistence of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments in political circles. Harvey Milk will be known in history far longer than the current Secretary of Defense and President Trump.
Finally we look at recent study commissioned by the state of Utah regarding gender-affirming care for transgender youth, which illuminates the significant psychological benefits that such treatments can provide. Despite overwhelming evidence supporting the efficacy and safety of gender-affirming care, we lament the ongoing legislative efforts to restrict access to these vital services, showcasing how ignorance and prejudice often overshadow scientific inquiry. Drawing parallels to Douglas’ family story, we highlight the hypocrisy in how society treats different marginalized groups, particularly in terms of medical autonomy.
Extras:
Ernst Laughs Off Medicaid Cuts: ‘Well, We All Are Going To Die’
A False Claim About Illegal Immigration and Medicaid
5 Key Facts About Medicaid Program Integrity – Fraud, Waste, Abuse and Improper Payments
Utah Study on Trans Youth Care Extremely Inconvenient for Politicians Who Ordered It
Systematic Medical Evidence Review of Hormonal Transgender Treatment Report (05/2025)
New German, Swiss, And Austrian Guidelines Recommend Trans Youth Care, Slam Cass Review
Kegsbreath Orders Navy To Strip Name Of Prominent Gay Rights Activist From Ship
Transcript:
Click Here to Read Full Transcript
[0:00] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. In this episode, we look at the lack of compassion and empathy in some conservative politicians and find out that humanism is the better way. Then, after talking about why Harvey Milk was back in the news recently, we look at a study commissioned by the state of Utah all that proves gender-affirming care is a good idea for trans kids. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.
[0:42] Music.
[1:00] Conservative politicians have been taking some heat lately from constituents and other people because they want to shred the social safety net. And for those who don’t know, the social safety net in the United States is like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, Those things that help people that are struggling to maintain some basic living, you know, so they’re not living in a shack. Because remember, for those historians in the crowd, the social security system was developed and created because too many people didn’t like the fact that grandma and grandpa were living in a shack underneath a railroad trestle somewhere. Because they had nothing to fall back on. They had no family for help. The state and the community couldn’t help. And so they created this social security system to give elderly people, people that are retired, no longer working, a basic income so that they can be full, productive members of society still. Still.
[2:22] And so conservative politicians have had this plan ever since, really, since the Social Security system was developed in the 1930s to do away with it and do away with Medicaid or cut it severely. And they would take those, quote, cost savings, unquote, and give tax breaks to wealthy individuals. And as we know from the John Rawls principles of fairness and justice, that’s not fair and that’s not justice. When you take from people who have little to give, take from them and give it to people who have much more to give. That is not fair. That’s not a fair distribution. Now, of course, we live in a country where we have the Bill of Rights and we have an economy that’s kind of based on some regulated capitalism. So, you know, you can’t just take money from someplace and put it somewhere. You all have to come to an agreement. You have to vote on elected officials who create these laws and policies. So that’s where we’re at now.
[3:38] And so they’re trying to get this big federal budget passed that has the weird moniker, Big Beautiful Bill.
[3:48] And as one late night comedian said, it sounds like somebody at a low rent strip joint. You know, ladies, let’s give it up for Big Beautiful Bill. You know, that’s a, I think it was Stephen Colbert. Anyway, so these conservative politicians, Republicans mostly, they’re mostly Republicans, have been having, the ones that do have been having town halls. That’s where you go back and talk to your constituents, and they’ve been getting an earful about some of the stuff that’s been happening in Washington, including the attempts to cut Medicaid and Medicare. And one of the U.S. Senators, Jody Ernst from Iowa, had a particular bad interaction with some constituents when she was trying to defend voting for Medicaid cuts. Now, her premise was entirely false. She claims that people who aren’t eligible are getting Medicaid, and that is simply not the case. The fraud rate for Medicare and Medicaid is lower than the fraud rate that we see with like cryptocurrencies and banks and things like that. And most of the fraud that happens, let’s say, in Medicare comes from providers submitting false claims.
[5:14] That’s the majority of the waste and fraud that supposedly exists. It’s not individuals. You know, most people don’t realize how hard it is to get your social safety net when you need it. You have to, so many hoops you have to step on. You have to basically expose your entire personal life, your bank accounts, everything to get it. And so there are very few people that are actually getting it that shouldn’t be getting it. You know, you might hear anecdotal evidence like somebody’s getting arrested because they’ve been cashing grandma’s checks and she’s been dead for five years. But that’s an outlier. That’s like those are anecdotal. That’s not systemic. That doesn’t tell you what the system is. So she starts off by that.
[6:09] Then she’s saying, you know, that we need to rein in these costs and eliminate this fraud by cutting this stuff. And somebody shouts out, people are going to die. You know, people that lose their health insurance are going to die. And it’s true. And she flippantly, and I’m sure she just did it flippantly because she was being berated the whole time and just was sick of it. And she said that we all die. And here, let me play a clip of when she says that. So when we are talking about the corrections in this reconciliation bill, again, it’s corrections of overpayments and people that have not been eligible for these programs by law as it is currently written. So when you are arguing, when you are arguing about illegals that are receiving Medicaid benefits, 1.4 million, 1.4, they’re not, they are not eligible. So they will be coming off.
[7:19] So we, people are not, well, we all are going to die.
[7:33] But what you don’t want to do is listen to me when I say that we are going to focus on those that are most vulnerable. Those that meet the eligibility requirements for Medicaid, we will protect. So, of course, that was not the way to answer that question. That was not the way to respond to that shout out that we all die, even though as a humanist.
[8:00] I agree with her because we do all die eventually. That’s the biological cycle. You’re born, you live, you die. That’s just simple biology. All right. The problem comes, though, that the context and the intent, she said it in a hurtful manner. She’s like, well, you don’t need these services because you’re just going to die anyway. You know, why should we spend tax dollars on keeping you alive and keeping you fed and housed? You’re just going to die anyway.
[8:38] And you can see how nihilistic of an attitude that is. And that’s the attitude many conservative politicians have. And the reason why many conservative politicians have these views is because they are privileged. They don’t have to worry about struggling for housing, struggling for food, struggling for medical care. They have it all. They don’t have to pick and choose whether or not they pay the rent or that they get their prescription. They don’t have to decide, you know, are they going to get this particular cut of meat, even though it’s half fat because it’s the cheapest cut at the store. You know, they’re privileged. It’s very easy for somebody who’s privileged to say you don’t need help or you don’t deserve help if you yourself do not deserve help.
[9:33] And that is why I like being a humanist, because we don’t think that way. We think of the classic, you know, walking in somebody’s shoes. You know, what would you do if it was you? You know, if somebody is hungry or somebody doesn’t have a home or doesn’t have adequate medical care, how can you help them? Because generally people are good. As you know, there’s news stories constantly of people helping out. There was just one I saw. It was a repeat of that On the Road series from CBS News where he was covering this woman, this older lady. Her husband had a medical issue, and she called the fire department to come and assist, and he eventually passed away, unfortunately. But when they were at her house, they realized that it was uninhabitable, that some hoarding was going on, maintenance wasn’t being taken care of, there were some structural issues with the house. And so basically, she was in an unsafe condition, and they condemned the house. She had no family to fall back on. Now, most of the time what would happen is probably the state would put her up in a nursing home somewhere.
[11:01] But there was a neighbor that lived across the street.
[11:05] She was a Hispanic family. It’s a Hispanic ethnic family. They already had, you know, a small house with like eight kids in it or something like that. And they offered to take her in. She wasn’t family. And they offered to take her in because she needed a place to stay. And she is, you know, a pseudo grandma for the family now. You know, that’s that is the good in people. And that happens more often than not. Trust me. You know, these these conservative politicians that are so callous and lack empathy. Those are the outliers. Those are the people that aren’t common in this country and in the world. But unfortunately, those are the people that have run for election and been elected, and now they are putting into place their views as policy. And I always say that we should not be legislating through lack of empathy. We should be legislating through compassion.
[12:20] You know, everybody has a basic worth and dignity as a human. Everybody does. So, you know, undocumented immigrants, they are, they deserve, just because they’re human, they deserve due process. The foreign college students that are getting kicked out, they deserve free speech because they’re in this country. And people that are struggling for housing and food and shelter and medical care, they need to have these provided for them if they can’t provide them themselves. That’s just basic decency. And that’s what’s wrong with a lot of these conservative politicians. They lack decency. They lack compassion. They lack empathy. And that is a wrong way to be an elected official in the United States, because we don’t have a history of that.
[13:22] Like I said, you know, that Senator Ernst in Iowa, she was correct. We all die. But it’s the implications of that that I disagree with and is wrong for us to support.
[13:37] Music.
[13:46] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. I’ll see you next time.
[13:55] Music.
[14:06] I wanted to add just a quick takeaway or quick bit here, because I don’t need to do a whole segment on this, but it just came out in the last week or two. I think it was last week, where the Department of Defense and Pete Hedges-Death, I forget how to pronounce his name. It doesn’t really matter.
[14:34] Ordered the, well, Secretary of Navy at the direction of Pete Hedges-Death, ordered the Navy to remove the name Harvey Milk from a Navy ship that had been named in his honor. For those that don’t know, Harvey Milk was a gay rights activist in San Francisco. He was one of the first openly gay politicians to be elected to the Board of Supervisors, which is the San Francisco City Council. And he was assassinated by a heterosexual man who was upset that he had a feud with Milk and that he didn’t get some politic stuff. And he ended up assassinating Harvey Milk and the mayor of San Francisco in 1978. And side trivia note, when the mayor of San Francisco was assassinated along with Harvey.
[15:37] The next person in line of succession was Dianne Feinstein. She was the president of the Board of Supervisors and she became mayor of San Francisco. And that started her whole entire political career, unfortunately, for that. The Trump administration has been actively trying to erase the LGBTQA plus community from government websites and government information and everything, along with other marginalized groups like blacks and women, trying to diminish their contributions to history, because of some white supremacist patriarchal grievance that they have.
[16:20] So they did that. They ordered that. And what I wanted to add, I just want to add a comment because it’s probably going to happen anyway. They’re probably going to remove the name. But Harvey Milk served in the Navy. He was discharged because he was homosexual. And Harvey Milk has had more military experience than the current Secretary of Defense and President Trump combined. And if anybody deserves to have a ship named after them, it’s Harvey Milk.
[16:57] And like I said, a lot of these conservative politicians lack compassion and they lack empathy. And that’s just a prime example and a very sad example.
[17:07] Music.
[17:27] Back in early 2023, the Utah legislature got their governor, Spencer Cox, to sign a bill that placed an indefinite moratorium on doctors providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to trans kids with gender dysphoria. Which we’ve seen across the board in all these religiously conservative legislatures, Ohio included, although the Ohio law is still in the courts, even though they set aside the injunction. So it’s still illegal to get gender-affirming care in Ohio, but it is in court right now. And so in Utah, they actually decided to do a moratorium and order the Utah Health Department to commission a systematic review of medical evidence around the treatments, with the goal of producing recommendations for the legislature on whether to lift the moratorium.
[18:34] And Governor Cox said, at the time, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures.
[18:47] Now, before I get into what they found, research on transgender gender affirming care is not, there’s not a lot of it. That is one of the things I mean it’s been studied there’s been periodic papers published there was even one paper that had to be retracted because it was wrong the methodology was wrong, there was I just learned recently that there was a German scientific study where they actually did some, regular scientific work on it that agreed that gender-affirming care was needed. And I’ll have a link to that article. I think it was Erin in the Morning, her Substack newsletter talked about it. And I’ll have a link in to it. So the state of Utah got together a panel of people to review all of whatever data they could find. And it was compiled over a two-year period by the Drug Regimen Review Center at the University of Utah.
[20:02] Now, there was a recent report within the last few weeks of the federal government releasing a report on the same subject, but it was bought and paid for by the Manhattan Institute, which is an anti-trans group. They basically just cut and pasted the Manhattan Institute report. So we’re not going to accept that, but this is a different one. It says…
[20:27] It says the names of the Utah Report’s contributors are actually disclosed on a more than 1,000-page document. And it also says that they have any conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. And it says the authors write, The consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body changes consistent with the affirmed gender and pediatric gender dysphoria patients. The evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer. It is our expert opinion that policies to prevent access to and use of gender-affirming hormone therapy for treatment of gender dysphoria in pediatric patients cannot be justified based on the quantity or quality of medical science findings or concerns about potential regret in the future, and that high-quality guidelines are available to guide qualified providers in treating pediatric patients who meet diagnostic criteria.
[21:38] And it says, in the second part of the review, the authors looked specifically at long-term outcomes of patients who started treatment for gender dysphoria as minors. It said, overall, there were positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes, while gender-affirming treatment showed a possibly protective effect in prostate cancer in transgender men and breast cancer in transgender women. There was an increase in some specific types of benign brain tumors. These are increased mortality risk in both transgender men and women treated with hormonal therapy, but more so in transgender women. Increased risk of mortality was consistently due to increase in suicide, non-natural causes, and HIV AIDS. Patients that were seen at the gender clinic before the age of 18 had a lower risk of suicide compared to those referred to as an adult. So let me repeat that. All right. They looked at all of the studies that are available, all the scientific literature that’s available, and they found that although there was increased mortality risks in both transgender men and transgender women, that increased risk was consistently due to increase in suicide, non-natural causes, and HIV AIDS. Not from the puberty blockers, not from the treatment itself.
[23:03] And submitted with the review was a set of recommendations compiled by advisors from the state’s medical and professional licensing boards, University of Utah, and the Utah nonprofit hospital system on steps the state legislature could take to ensure proper training among gender-affirming care providers in the event it decides to lift the moratorium.
[23:25] But you know the story. You know how this is going to go. The legislators behind the ban are already dismissing the findings that they asked for. In response to the questions from the Salt Lake City Tribune, Representative Katie Hall, who co-sponsored the 2023 ban, issued a joint statement with fellow Republican state Bridger Bolender, the chair of the legislature’s Health and Human Services Interim Committee, that dismissed the study’s findings. We intend to keep the moratorium in place, they told the Tribune. Young kids and teenagers should not be making life-altering medical decisions based on weak evidence. So, you know, that was going to go that way. You know it was going to go that way. And what I want to say about this, okay, is adding a little personal story.
[24:16] I had a sister. Her name was Lisa. She unfortunately died when she was 40 years old, oh, almost 22 years ago in 2003 from cancer. She had cervical cancer, as a matter of fact. But she was mentally disabled. She wasn’t mentally disabled, like non-functioning. She could function. She just couldn’t, like, read very well. I remember growing up trying to get her, she wanted to get her driver’s license because she wanted to drive and she could never get past the written test. And so she never got her driver’s license and that really, really hurt her. She was really upset about that. And I bring her up. She’s mentally disabled. She received disability payments from Social Security. She had a child.
[25:19] And the thing is that my sister, who is mentally disabled or was mentally disabled, had more rights to make medical decisions for herself than these religious bigots allow for transgender kids in consultation with their family and their doctor. Let that sink in. My sister was mentally disabled. Disabled. And she could decide whether or not to go to a doctor, whether or not to take any medication. And we could never force her to do any of it. In fact, it was against the law. It was against the law for her family to force her to go to the doctors. We would have had to go to the courts and rule her incompetent and become her guardian in order for her to get medical treatment that we thought that she deserved. The same with having her baby. There was many people in her family that didn’t want her to have a child. We couldn’t force her to get an abortion. That was her decision. She wanted to keep the baby.
[26:39] So, you know, again, let that sink in. A woman with a mental disability has far more health treatment rights than transgender kids. And I think that that is disgusting. That it is that way. You know, these religious zealots, these religious bigots, ignore reality in order to push their religious bigotry agenda. And these are people that claim to be Christians. You know, I think that they need to go back to divinity school and learn about the teachings of Jesus. I’m an atheist, and I know more about the teachings of Jesus than some of these holier-than-thou people. Including a certain state legislator who likes to make fun of transgender people on Twitter.
[27:38] That is gross and disgusting. And all it is is these kids, they want to be who they want to be. They want to love who they want to love. They just want love and support. And that is too much for these religious zealots to do. So I am going to send this article and this report to that particular state legislator, and I’m going to ask him, and he happens to be, he claims to be a minister of a church. And I don’t know about his other members of his church, but I wouldn’t accept any religious teachings from him. Because he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t subscribe to it. He doesn’t follow it.
[28:30] And there’s a lot of people that are going to get hurt, you know, and I get you want to, I get regulating it and this Utah study, they had some really good recommendations that are just common sense, like making sure people are certified and other things like that. But a lot of these doctors that provide these gender-affirming care, they are good people and they follow general medical ethics. And so if it’s a medical treatment that’s found to be beneficial, the state should just butt out of it. And they don’t because they’re bigots.
[29:16] And that needs to change.
[29:20] Thank you for listening.
[29:20] Music. For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.
[29:35] Music. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content.
[29:41] SHoWLE can be reached at humanistswle.org.
[29:59] Music.
Transcript is machine generated, lightly edited, and approximate to what was recorded. If you would like perfect transcripts, please donate to the show.
Credits
Written, produced, and edited by Douglas Berger and he is entirely responsible for the content. Incidental voice overs by Sasha C.
The GCH theme is “Glass City Jam” composed using Ampify Studio
This episode by Glass City Humanist is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.