68 Percent Of Americans Are Less Likely To Support Disney And More – A recent poll shows that 68 percent of Americans are less likely to support Disney after their push for LGBT content. The Governor of Alabama signs a bill criminalizing transgender health care for minors and more!

Air Date: 04/29/2022

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

 

Rick:

Welcome to WallBuilders Live, we’re the intersection of faith and the culture; always looking at the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective.

My name is Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. And I’m here with David Barton. David is America’s premier historian. He’s our founder at WallBuilders, a mentor of mine and a great teacher to millions of people who have been able to learn so much about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and the Declaration from him. Tim Barton as well, if you haven’t had Tim speak at your church or event in your community, you ought to do that, you ought to wallbuilders.com today and book him. Absolutely amazing stuff you’ve never heard before, the truth about so much that happened in American history and he brings it, oh my goodness, with fire, good stuff. Anyway, Tim’s our national speaker and pastor, he’s president of WallBuilders.

And all three of us just want to thank you for listening today. We appreciate you being a part of the WallBuilders Live family, for not only listening, but sharing the program, for donating at wallbuilderslive.com. Help us get that truth out there. Help us share good news with folks. I love Good News Fridays. That’s what today’s all about, is just getting to as many good news stories as we possibly can. So thanks so much for what you’re doing out there as a listener to share the program and educate and equip and inspire as many people in your community as possible to help us save this constitutional republic.

Alright, guys, let’s jump into some of that good news, see how much we can squeeze into today’s program. David, first piece of good news for today.

David:

Okay, Rick, I’m starting with something that I think is a good sign. It’s a push back against all the woke stuff that’s been going on for the last several years. This really kind of caught fire, maybe five, six years ago, and people really felt emboldened and empowered. And we’ve seen polling in recent years that say that 77% of traditional value, conservative Americans self-censor rather than take on some of the woke stuff. Because they just don’t want to get beat up, they want to get attacked, which makes the people on the woke side think that they’ve got the majority. If 77% are going to shut up and not say anything and the other side is a loudmouth, then they’re going to think we’ve got a super majority on this. And that may not be exactly the way that it really is.

And I think what Disney did may be a perfect example. You know, Disney has come out and they’ve got to be more woke and more LGBTQI+, they’ve got to be even more aggressive than they were. Now, they went through this about 20 years ago, Michael Eisner headed up Disney at the time and he really pushed them in a pro-gay direction and they got beat up at the, you can, say Box Office, they got beat up by dollars: things stopped selling for Disney, Disney stock plummeted in value over the years. And finally they chased Eisner out of there. And then they came out with movies that reverse that direction. They were a lot more profamily and they were a lot more traditional values. And people rewarded that. And stock went back up and Disney started making money.

And now in the last five years, you hear everybody climbing on the woke bandwagon and people are being silent. And so here, Disney announces down at Disney World that they’re really going to go LGBTQI+. And it was interesting that there was a lot of pushback even from gay Disney employees who said wait a minute, this is crazy. Disney has always been good to gays but pushing this openly, that’s not a good business plan.

Tim:

Well, and it’s worth noting, initially, they were out, they didn’t come out promoting us to the public. They weren’t in public meetings saying, hey, we are going to try to turn kids gay. It was in private meetings but it was with executives. And executives said, look, this is our goal. We want 50% of all the stars by the end of this year to be either minority or the LGBTIA+, whatever the alphabet soup, we want them to be from that genre. You had other people saying that we are working for the “gayification” of children. I mean, this is their executives.

And so when this footage was released, this is what didn’t sit well with the vast majority of Americans who have seen this. In some conservative circles, there’s been a lot of conversation about this. And so really, the good news for Americans is to realize that most of the nation is not quite as woke as the position Disney’s taking. But it’s also worth noting that there’s somebody on the inside and there’s actually a lot more than somebody on the inside, there’s actually some other sorts we can probably get into after this.

But there’s people on the inside who wanted to let the general public know about this. Somebody leaked that information out. And actually probably more than one, somebody’s got this information out to expose this position to the public recognizing this was a bad position. Nonetheless, once this information is exposed and people begin seeing that Disney is intentionally aggressively trying to turn children gay, didn’t sit well with most Americans.

David:

Yeah, this is where it’s very significant to measure votes. And when people vote with their feet or vote with their dollars, that really gets the attention of business. So the poll that’s out right now says that 69% of Americans say they’re going for a family friendly alternative to Disney. They’re leaving Disney. They want something else. Disney is not where they want to go. So you have the poll that says 68% of American voters are not going to do business with Disney. They’re looking for alternatives to do business with.

Tim:

And specifically, these would be people who are aware of what Disney did. Because even though we can say you’ve been living under a rock if you haven’t heard some of this. Well, in fairness, the way that there is big tech censorship, the way that the media covers things, there’s probably the vast majority of Americans have no idea what Disney is being exposed for promoting what their agenda is. But so I would say probably in the survey, they’re asking, hey, do you guys know what Disney did? Well, how do you feel about what Disney did?

So they’re asking people who are, at least, have heard of what Disney did or they just became familiar with what Disney did. So when people know that this is the position Disney is taking, do you support that position, this is where those numbers will be reflective, that when people know what Disney did, the vast majority do not support what Disney is doing.

David:

Yeah. And so 68% say they’re less likely to do business with Disney and 69% say they’re looking for family friendly alternatives; we want to go somewhere else. And what surprised me in this was when you did the demographic breakdown, it was 59% of Democrats agreed with that, 72% of Independents and 78% of Republicans. So even Democrats, the majority of Democrats, 59% say they’re looking for alternatives, they want to go somewhere else. They don’t like the “gayification” that Disney is pushing.

And this is really strikes me how that corporate world and corporate boards and corporate leaders can get so far out of touch with where people are. And I think we’re seeing that with Twitter. You know, the news was that Elon Musk bought that 9.2%, perhaps up as much as 14% of Twitter, and then was on the board and then doesn’t want to be on the board and now they don’t want him to take over and he’s made this really lucrative offer to take all of Twitter. And they’re going to use what they call the “poison pill” to keep him from taking over Twitter. And “poison pill” just means they’re going to let all of the shareholders vote on whether he should be able to take it over.

Now, this is where I think it gets real interesting. Because when you look at the Twitter board, the Twitter board before Jack Dorsey left, and Dorsey is the guy who founded Twitter, the Twitter board, all of the board members together held 2.7% of Twitter stock. Dorsey held 2.4%. He’s not on the board anymore. He left Twitter. The entire board of Twitter holds point 0.3% of the stock. They don’t really represent the whole view that’s out there.

And so when you get a guy like Elon Musk has gotten anywhere from 9-14%, and you throw it open to all the other Twitter stockholders, and you have a lucrative offer like he gave, I think this could backfire on Twitter. So it’s really interesting to me that that very much now the corporate boardroom seems to be out of touch with where a lot of America is moving and going. And you’re finding even Dorsey who’s no longer on the board of Twitter, but even he is supportive of what Elon Musk and what Musk is trying to do.

But Disney is a good example. And I think it’s good news that the American people are voting with their feet and with their dollars, and are not wanting to move into this woke stuff that a lot of the corporate world is trying to get us into.

Rick:

Alright, well, that’s our first piece of good news. Tim, what’s our next piece of good news?

Tim:

All right, guys, this is coming from Alabama. And Governor Kay Ivey signed a pair of laws and made Alabama the third state in the country to pass restrictions on, this is ridiculous, this is a quote on gender affirming care for minors. And it’s the very first one to do that, including criminal penalties. But also they banned classroom discussions of LGBTQ identities for young students. And here’s some of the breakdown.

So in this, it makes it a felony for medical professionals to provide and again, I’m using air quotes here, “gender affirming medical care for people under 19, which means if there’s a 8-year-old, an 11-year-old, a 12-year-old, a 14-year-old, and they’re a biological male, they’re biological boy, and they want to be a female, for a doctor to go in, and to do a surgical removal of the physical anatomy God gave them, and whatever else might be with that or there’s pills, you know, the medical castration kind of stuff, the pill castration, there’s a whole litany of stuff we could talk about with different things they’re using in these transitions.

Nonetheless, it actually makes it a felony. And this is significant because there already made that already passed laws making it illegal for doctors to do these gender transition surgeries. But this is the first day that actually has a criminal penalty; in other states said you can’t do that, which if you’re telling somebody they can’t do it and there’s no penalty associated with it, then it makes it a little harder to enforce that. So for Alabama, to say that there’s actually a felony associated with anybody doing this, that’s a really positive position.

One of the things that Kay Ivey said in the press conference, or I guess in a statement that was released. She said “If the good Lord made you a boy, you’re a boy. If He made you a girl, you’re a girl.” And it really should be that simple. She continued, “We should especially protect our children from these radical life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life.” And this was part of the statement she realized.

She’s absolutely right, is that kids should be protected this age, not encouraged to follow how they feel in a moment knowing that feelings change. And there’s a lot of things we can add along the lines in the equation. Nonetheless, that was one of the things that was signed in Alabama.

The second thing that she signed in Alabama, another bill, it would prohibit classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K -5. Now, this is a big deal, because Florida got a lot of pushback and blowback. We mentioned Disney a minute ago. Disney was the one who were saying we’re so ashamed that we didn’t stand up more strongly against this. It was a parental rights bill is what it was in Florida. It was parents being able to say, hey, we don’t want our kids, kindergarten through third grade, being sexually awakened on some level, being ultimately kind of groomed, being pulled to a side of this definitely having stuff shoved down their throat. And in Florida, it only went from kindergarten through third grade. This one is kindergarten through fifth grade.

Now the reason it has not received the same level of attention is because Disney World is not an Alabama. However, this is a really, really positive thing. And there’s even been many Democrats who have come out recognizing some of the craziness and danger of what we are doing with over-sexualizing or sexualizing sin general, little children 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 year olds, Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat who we probably would disagree on the vast majority of issues, but she is logical enough on multiple issues, even on this one.

When Disney was saying, hey, we want to make sure that kindergarten through third grade kids are still learning about these different sexual orientations and sexual gender ideology, whatever else, she came out and said that I don’t know why they’re upset that is banned, K-3, she said, really, this shouldn’t be taught K-12 by schools at all. This should be something only left between parents and children. That’s exactly the right attitude.

And the good news is, dad, even as you mentioned with some of these numbers with people that are not supporting the kind of “gayification”, the wokeness that Disney is taking, trying to promote this. The vast majority of Americans are not in favor of children in schools having this kind of stuff forced down their throats, even though we’re seeing this more and more.

And guys, this is another example. Yet again, we have said multiple times in this program, that when you look at what’s happening in public schools across the nation, and again, I know there’s a lot of public school teachers, there’s administrators, we have political teachers and administrators in our own family, there’s really good people in the public school, the system itself is very broken.

The federal government what they’re doing with their dollars, what they’re encouraging and so many of the people who are teachers in so many of these schools do not have the right worldview, they don’t have the right ideology. And all you have to do is take a basic walk through social media and see some of these teachers what they’re posting on the social media sites, what they’re trying to encourage in children, what they brag about teaching kids. It’s, again, you don’t have to look very hard and you will find this.

The public school system is not the same public school system that it was back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Although there were problems with the public school system back then. It is so woke right now. So it is, first of all, really good news that we are seeing people get involved, like this governor Kay Ivey and certainly looking at the Senate, looking at their state house for what they did getting these bills before the governor getting them passed, certainly, some champions along the way in their state as well.

This is really good news that this is being stopped K-5. Like Tulsi Gabbard said it probably shouldn’t be K-12 anywhere. It should be something between parents and kids only. The good news is there are parents taking actions. One of the reasons we encourage parents, really across the nation, get involved in your school board, show up, have a voice. Even if you’re a homeschool parent, you can go to the public school board meetings. If you live in the school district, if you pay taxes, it gives you standing to go to the school board meeting, get involved. Run for school board. Help those kids who maybe are not in your family and maybe you’re a grandparent, maybe your kids are in college, you’re a parent, but your kids aren’t in that public school anymore, you can still get involved and make a difference.

This is one piece of good news that there are people recognizing some of the wokeness and they are fighting against it. But I’m going to tell you as parents, you need to be very careful to not leave your kids in a situation where they’re going to have such indoctrination forced down on them that they end up going a very different direction than what you would pray and hope for them. I definitely consider what’s going on the public school system. But this is good news from Kay Ivey signing these two pieces of legislation.

David:

You know, Tim, I’m really struck with how well the Left has coopt language and made It mean the opposite of what it means, maybe this is going back to Animal Farm and the books back in 1984, and those Orwell books. But one of the things they keep using is gender affirming care. And I say I’m all for it. Let’s get blood tests. Let’s get DNA test done. And let’s see what your gender is. Is it XX or XY? And then let’s affirm what your gender is. And what they mean by gender affirming care is we want to affirm the opposite of what your physical gender is, we want to affirm whatever you think in your mind, however demented, however crazy, however twisted that may be, we’re going to affirm anti-reality here.

Tim:

Yeah, we want to affirm how you feel. And we’ve talked about this before, how crazy it is that if you look at someone that thinks they are something they are not, that is called a mental disorder, right. And that doesn’t mean that person is a bad person necessarily, it doesn’t mean that they have all kinds of drama and issues with it. It means they have a psychological disorder. And this would be no different from someone who deals with anorexia or bulimia, because they might be 95 pounds, but they feel like they’re 400 pounds.

And if they have a mental disorder, it is not loving for you to reaffirm their mental disorder position, to say that we want to affirm these kids and how they feel. And so if they are a biological boy, a biological male and feel like a girl, we want to affirm them, and we’re going to help them have the surgery to change how their body is. And by the way, the data is out there that people that have the surgery it has not helped them. Their depression rates, their suicide rates are astronomical. There are so many people after the surgery that have come out saying, man, I wish I never would have done that.

Because like how often as a child do you feel a certain way, and then you grow out of it? And for most of these kids we’re talking about, most of them haven’t even hit puberty yet and they’re being encouraged in these positions. But the bottom line, dad, as you’re saying is this is not gender affirming care. This is affirming someone’s emotional position or even what they’ve been taught to be a position. Maybe they don’t even really feel that way. But they’ve been encouraged to lean a certain direction by their teachers, by society by whatever shows they’ve been watching. And so they want to fit in. They want to be cool. They want to be normal. They’re struggling to find their identity because they clearly are probably not learning about their identity in Christ. They haven’t embraced that yet. They don’t know they’re a child of God, created in God’s image and they’re holy, and they’re sacred, etc. We could keep going on this for a long time.

But certainly, the Left has coopted a lot of vocabulary. It’s not accurate. But they are very good at shaping the conversation, shaping debate. Again, going back to the good news here is there actually are some leaders in different Republican states that are standing up very strongly against things that are going on. So there is good news out there. Certainly, there is reason for us to be remain very vigilant, to remain very active and engaged, because there is a war raging right now and we need to be part of the fight. Good news is there are some positive steps being taken. There is some ground being won in some of these states.

Rick:

We’re going to take a quick break, guys, we’ll be right back. We’ve got more good news for you when we return on WallBuilders Live.

AMERICAN HISTORY

Hi, friends, this is Tim Barton of WallBuilders. This is a time when most Americans don’t know much about American history or even heroes of the faith. And I know oftentimes we, parents, we’re trying to find good content for our kids to read.

And if you remember back to the Bible, to the book of Hebrews, it has the faith Hall of Fame where they outline the leaders of faith that had gone before them. Well, this is something that as Americans, we really want to go back and outline some of these heroes, not just of American history, but heroes of Christianity in our faith as well.

I want to let you know about some biographical sketches we have available on our website. One is called The Courageous Leaders collection. And this collection includes people like Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, George Washington Carver, Susanna Wesley, even the Wright brothers. And there’s a second collection called Heroes of History. In this collection, you’ll read about people like Benjamin Franklin or Christopher Columbus, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Harriet Tubman; friends, the list goes on and on. This is a great collection for your young person to have and read and it’s a providential view of American and Christian history. This is available at www.wallbuilders.com. That’s www.wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

We’re back with David and Tim, now to get some more good news on our Good News Friday. And David, I think you’ve got the next piece of good news?

David:

Okay, Rick, I’ve got good news out of Maryland which we don’t often get to say because it is such a blue state. It is the number one gerrymandered state in the nation. And that means they draw their lines to make it really impossible for conservatives to get elected and for liberal progressive to get elected. They do it that way. They favor that.

So out of that state legislature, you can certainly understand they would have very progressive bills, very liberal bills, and they had some abortion bills like that. One of their abortion bills, literally, Tim, you recall is there going to allow you to kill the child 28 days after he was born?

Tim:

Correct. At 28 days after he was born, you could still “legally have an abortion”. First of all, an abortion, like that’s a fancy word for murdering a child. But abortion, almost every time refers to inside the womb. You had partial birth abortion because not to give details and be geographic on the program, but partial birth abortion, there were still a child inside the womb. And that’s why if you look at things like [inaudible 20:20], when he got in so much trouble, as he should have, because we know there’s a God who does amazing things, can save people, unless that dude comes in for repentance before God, that dude has got a very warm place in hell for what he did to some of God’s most precious sacred creation with the unborn. With that being said, he did it to children who were alive many times for minutes or moments, not 28 days after birth.

David:

Yeah. And so that was one of the bills they had. They had three abortion bills up in the legislature. And there was so much public outcry about this in Maryland, that the sponsor of the bill pulled it down. So that’s victory number one is that the sponsor of the bill pulled that bill down, that is not even moving forward in Maryland anymore.

The second thing that happened is that they had a bill that was passed that would allow nurses and not doctors, but nurses and midwives to do abortions. So you’re not talking about the medical training that you have with the doctor on a surgical procedure. Now you’re talking about midwives and those with a lot less training doing abortions. And that did pass the legislature and the Governor vetoed it. And that’s good news. The governor vetoed it in Maryland. But then they overrode the veto. So the bad news is that law passed. The good news is they tried to stop it, didn’t get it done.

And the third abortion law in Maryland was that they created what we would call a “Trigger Bill”, that if Roe v Wade gets overturned or if the summer when the Supreme Court rules on the case out of Mississippi, in the case out of Texas, if they tie the hands of abortionist and say hey, this is not a federally constitutionally guaranteed right, it goes back to the states, Maryland introduced what’s called a “Trigger Bill”, which says if abortions ever overturned by the Supreme Court, and Maryland is always going to be constitutional. Well, that bill got defeated in the legislature. So, that “Trigger Bill” is not there, which is really, really good news. And so even though out of the three bills, one pro-abortion bill did get passed, the two worst bills get stopped in Maryland. That’s great coming out of that state.

Tim:

And that is really good news. And just to offer some clarity for those listening. The US Supreme Court, the abortion issue they would be dealing with would be is this a federally granted right “like a right to abortion”? And if the US Supreme Court comes back and says that abortion is not a federally protected right in the Constitution and this is part of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that whatever is not explicitly given to the federal government belongs and remains to the states.

And so if the Supreme Court comes out this summer, and says something to the effect of abortion is not a right guaranteed and protected in the US Constitution. Well, ultimately, that applies to the federal government. But then it could still come back and be allowed in the States. And that’s where many states are taking what are called these “Trigger Bill”, that if the Supreme Court overturns this federally protected position, then it would trigger these bills to be activated in the States.

And so Texas has one that says, if it’s overturned, then we don’t have any abortion in the state of Texas. A lot of states have gone that direction. But there are some very liberal states who are taking “Trigger Bill” and working to pass them. Some have already passed them. But others are working to pass them to say that if the federal protection for abortion is removed, our state will still recognize the abortion issue.

Dad, you’ve pointed out before, it’s very interesting that some of the language that is being used is very similar to a lot of the abolitionist language prior to the Civil War dealing with the issue of slavery. I mean, it’s very, very significant looking back with some of the proslavery states that did not recognize black individuals as being fully human. And you look at some of these pro-abortion states, and they don’t recognize these unborn children as being fully human. It is kind of scary how similar the language is. And again, we’re talking about human life and the value of human life. And there’s different stages of development along in this life, arguably on some level, but it’s still a human life given by God. So it is interesting to see where some of these states are falling.

David:

And the two Supreme Court cases you’re mentioning, Tim, like on right to life, you had the Roe v. Wade case that says hey, the unborn child is the property of the mother and the mother can do what she wants to that unborn child. So if the mother wants to kill that child, that’s fine, it’s her property. That was exactly the same rhetoric used in the Dred Scott decision over slavery. They said, hey, that black person is property and whoever owns that black person can do what they want with that black person. So we actually took language out of the Dred Scott proslavery decision and we took language out of the pro-abortion decision. And we would read phrases and ask students, is this from Dred Scott or is this from Roe v. Wade, and they could not tell the difference. It was the same twisted logic, that is my property and I can do whatever I want with it. There’s no moral standard. So that’s what you’re referring to on that right to life issue.

Tim:

And the good news is even in a place that generally is as liberal as Maryland, even in Maryland, they were not going as far as some people have before. And this is not even one of the more celebrated wins in the prolife movement. We have inches thick, still stacks of good news, a lot of dealing with prolife. So, a lot of good news happening around the nation. And certainly, this summer, we hope to celebrate a lot more from this Supreme Court decision dealing with the issue of a right to life.

Rick:

Alright, folks, we’re out of time for good news today. But there is more good news at our website. Be sure to check it out wallbuilderslive.com. You can dive into those archives. You can also get signed up for one of our biblical citizenship courses Lots of good news in that eight-week course and you can be the one to bring it to your church or your community, completely free, free for you as the coach that hosts that class, we’ll train you on how to do it. All of that available for free at our website today, biblicalcitizens.com, biblicalcitizens.com. It’s also free for your students.

So I really encourage you to host that class. We’re hearing so many great stories: 11,000 constitution coaches across the country now, thousands of classes where people are finding hope, they’re finding answers from God’s word on how to respond in the culture and what to do to restore our constitutional republic and you can be the one that is a catalyst for restoring those biblical values and constitutional principles. Check it out today at biblicalcitizens.com. Thanks for listening to WallBuilders Live.