Governor DeSantis Signs Law Banning Protests Outside Private Homes And More: So many pieces of good news today! In Florida, Governor DeSantis signs a law banning protests outside private homes, Oklahoma and Louisiana Governors both sign strict pro-life laws and more!

Air Date: 07/01/2022

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:

You found your way to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live. We are taking on 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. You can find out more about me and our organization Patriot Academy at the website patriotacademy.com. That’s patriotacademy.com. You can become a constitution coach for free. You can come to our constitutional defense courses where you learn handgun defense during the day and constitution at night. And you can send your young people to our capitol leadership congresses all across the country. Find out more about all that at patriotacademy.com.

It is my great honor to be here with David and Tim Barton. David is of course America’s premier historian and the founder of WallBuilders. Tim Burton is a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. All three of us you can learn more at Wallbuilderslive.com.

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Alright, David and Tim, I am ready for some of that good news. Let’s jump into our first piece of good news for this week. We already had a kind of a Good News Friday on Tuesday when we talked about some of the Supreme Court cases. But let’s dive into more good news. David, what’s the first one?

David:

You know, we’ve talked in recent weeks about how certain denominations are starting to stand up and say, hey, here’s what our traditional doctrinal position has been on certain issues, whether it’s abortion, or whether sexuality or whatever, and we’re going to stay with our doctrinal position. And therefore, this church is not welcome to stay part of our denomination or the other way around, where the churches who want to uphold that doctrinal position say we’re not going to be part of a denomination that want to uphold that.

And while that kind of sounds, hoity-toity in some ways, I want to read just a little passage out of 1 Corinthians 5, I think happens to be the NIV, I usually read the King James. But I go to what John Quincy Adams said. His dad asked him one time, there’s so many versions out there, what version do you read, and John Quincy Adams said, any version I can read and understand. And so NIV makes this as clear as anything else. I’m going to read it.

But 1 Corinthians 5, Paul is talking to the church in Corinth, and he said, “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.”

Now, that’s some pretty stiff church discipline. You’ve got Paul saying, guys, you can’t tolerate this in your church. Get this guy out of the church. You got to throw him out and hand him over to Satan and he’ll go through, you know, if you want to say a spanking or discipline till he gets his thinking cleared up. But the concept of church discipline is really clear in the Bible.

So having said that, I was really intrigued, and again, in recent weeks, we’ve talked about the United Methodist Church and the fight that they’ve got going on the inside and other denominations. But this one comes out of Massachusetts, and it deals with the Catholic Church. And there is a Catholic school in Massachusetts, in Worcester, Massachusetts, is known as Nativity School. And the bishop there just said, you’re no longer Catholic school. You’ve been kicked out of the Catholic system. You cannot be a Catholic school any longer. And it’s because he asked them to do certain things to conform to biblical Catholic beliefs and they wouldn’t do it.

And so what they were doing is in front of that supposedly Catholic school, it had been a Catholic school, they were flying, for example, the gay pride flag, they were flying the Black Lives Matter flag and all these flags. And this is what the bishop said. Bishop Robert McManus, he said, “It’s my contention that the gay pride flag represents support of gay marriage and actively living an LGBTQ+ lifestyle. This is also true of Black Lives Matter. The Catholic Church teaches that all life is sacred. And the church certainly stands unequivocally behind the phrase “Black Lives Matter”, and strongly affirms that all lives matter.”

So he’s saying, look, what you’re doing doesn’t conform to Catholic doctrine. We believe that all lives matter, including black lives. And we don’t think we should be actively promoting a gay lifestyle, which violates biblical precepts and morality. And so, even pointed to the Black Lives Matter website and on the website, Black Lives Matter said that one of their objectives is to, “disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure.” So Black Lives Matter says we’re going after marriage as a man and woman and children, we’re going to try to disrupt and stop that. He says, you can’t be a Catholic school and not uphold Catholic doctrine, which is based on the Bible.

So I thought this was really significant that you’re starting to have the church say, hey, doctrine does matter and what the Bible teaches does matter. And you can present yourself as being biblical and being part of a biblical denomination if you’re not going to do what the Bible says. So the good news for me is that the church is starting to get a backbone in some areas and you know in Massachusetts, the bishop took a beating in Massachusetts for doing this. And he took a beating from the school as well.

The school said, well, we’re just trying to be inclusive, that’s a Christian thing to do, that’s a Catholic thing to do. No, the Bible is really clear in 1 Corinthians 5, that when someone does not have the right sexual morality, you don’t judge them and condemn them, but you do say you can’t be part of this church anymore. You got to be on the outside, God’s going to have to deal with you, but you just can’t be part of this fellowship. And so it’s really good, in my opinion, to see churches start standing up for biblical values that have been there for 5800 years since God created marriage.

Tim:

And really, what you’re identifying is it’s great that there are finally some leaders who are upholding the clearly outlined moral position from the Bible, instead of pretending like that all behavior is equally accepted in a biblical position. Well, the Bible is very clear it’s not that there are things that God sends judgment because of and there’s things that God doesn’t tolerate and accept. And it’s like the Bible says that a father disciplines a son He love, even so, right, our heavenly Father will discipline us if we sin and mess up.

It’s great to see that in a culture that seemingly has lost truth in this relativistic, this postmodern era seemingly when people are defining their own realities and truth to be whatever they feel in the moment, it’s great that somebody is saying, hey, no, there is a moral standard, and we’re going to pull that moral standard. And since you claimed to be part of this position or this denomination, or Catholics, whatever we wanted to find in this scenario, if you claimed be part of this organization that has a clear moral standard, then you need to uphold the moral standard that you are saying you support. So, again, great to see that somebody is actually upholding a moral standard.

Rick:

You know, guys, this is probably a good place to also point out as we talked earlier this week about the Dobbs decision. And most of our audience, I don’t know that we’ve ever polled on this of our audience or ask them, but probably mostly evangelical audience, we do have a lot of Catholic listeners as well. But I do think it’s an important time to point out five of the six Justices that gave us the Dobbs decision are Catholic.

So we are blessed in this country to have a lot of Catholics that are willing to stand up. So whoever you were talking about there, David, that made that decision for that school, the bishops that have refused to serve communion to Nancy Pelosi and other pro-abortion elected officials, so we’re thankful for those Catholic leaders and just such good news to see that leadership in the county Catholic Church and in evangelical circles. And in the Protestant church, we’re seeing more and more pastors being willing to stand up as well.

Alright, Tim, what’s our next piece of good news, man?

Tim:

Well, this was coming from Florida. And that’s not a surprise to say over the last couple of years that there’re good news coming from Florida. This is coming from Governor Ron DeSantis. And really, governors are getting a lot of credit when they sign a piece of legislation. And rightfully so on some levels, governors can be the ones that are calling for certain things to happen. If there are special sessions in states, governors can be the ones that bring up those special sessions and they can put limitations on what they’re going to cover in those special sessions. So, governors rightfully do get credit as being leaders in the state.

But oftentimes, there are state legislators who have specific ideas, that they are promoting a specific policy and the governors will sign that into law, which again is great, but sometimes there’s legislators involved. Nonetheless, and I’m saying this, I don’t want to diminish there are some great legislators in Florida working on this policy. But this is a really neat piece when the Supreme Court decision came out with the Dobbs case, as we’re identifying, and some of these things happen.

And really, I guess it goes back to when the initial leak came out, and they were people saying, oh, man, we’re going to have to stop these Justice. And there were threats and intimidation and the individual showing up at Kavanagh’s house and the guy that went to jail is being charged with this, maybe like assassination attempt or whatever, however, they’re identifying it with this charge. But what was very obvious is that this group of crazy individuals should not be showing up to a family’s home when the wife and kids are now put in a vulnerable situation from these ridiculous people who are sitting there protesting a decision that at that point had not even happened. They’re threatening violence. The family is not safe. I mean, none of this made sense.

And yet, right, up to that point, President Biden, the press secretary, the White House Administration, even Democrat leaders, by and large, were not coming out against what was happening against these individuals, again, who said they’re peacefully protesting. But you don’t do that at someone’s private residence where their wife and kids are. I mean, just so many crazy things are happening outside Kavanagh’s home. And his wasn’t the only one. But that was the example we saw the most in the media.

With that being said, one of the cool things just happened in Florida, the headline says, “Florida Governor DeSantis signs a law banning protests outside private residence”. This should be one of the common laws that should be in all 50 states. This should be the obvious thing that if somebody is upset with a policy decision, then you go protest where policy decisions happen, you go protest where the government actually is taking place, where these laws are becoming laws. You don’t go to someone’s private residence where their family is.

So this is really practical, common sense. But it’s good news that we are seeing that were unfortunately, in some situations, and generally speaking, they’re in these very liberal-run cities where Democratic leaders, we are seeing in some places where there are conservatives, where there are Republicans, where there are Christians who think a little bit differently, they are doing things to protect individuals and to protect the private life of some of these government leaders or elected politicians, etc.

So, guys, I think it’s really good news that in Florida they’ve made this decision, this is something that I think certainly should be done; again, in all 50 states, this should be a law that you don’t go to a politician’s private residence where his family is and you don’t create a ruckus and cause problems where his family is; you don’t endanger the spouse and the kids. And now in Florida, they have made sure that this will not be something that can happen with these “peaceful protesters”. That’s not going to happen in Florida. You’re not going to someone’s private residence to do this. So that’s another great thing coming from Florida and from Governor Ron DeSantis.

Rick:

Have you all noticed how fast DeSantis and the Florida legislature had been responding to things? I mean, it’s like, instead of the whole oh, we’re going to need two years to get that done, or it’s going to take multiple sessions to get that done. It seems like. I mean, within a week, they’re doing something in response to whether it’s an education thing, or it was the Disney thing, or in this case the protesting at people’s homes. I mean, they are just on the ball. They’re responding quickly. Governor DeSantis just keeps hitting it out of the park. He doesn’t sit around and wait. He’s a man of action, obviously, and clearly has a legislature that backs him up to do a lot of the things that they’re doing. But it’s just cool to see that, yes, your government can respond quickly, when needed.

Alright, guys, quick break, we’ve got more good news. Stay with us, folks, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live on Good News Friday.

CONSTITUTION ALIVE!

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Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live, Good News Friday today. We still got a lot of good news to get to. And David’s got the next piece.

David:

Two stories really interested me and they deal with really kind of parents doing some things that are shining sunlight. Way back in Reagan’s administration, Bill Bennett, Secretary of Education said sunlight is the best disinfectant. And a lot of times just bringing things to light causes a real change.

So the headline of this article says “State Farm Abandons LGBTQ Children’s-Book Program after Whistleblower Email Leak”. So what happens State Farm, household name insurance company, everybody knows State Farm probably, it had a plan to distribute LGBTQ themed books to teachers, community centers and libraries explicitly targeting children as young as kindergarteners. So here’s State Farm pushing this in schools and a whistleblower says look what State Farm’s doing. You know, somebody on the inside of the company said, this is what they’re doing.

So after that news came out, within just hours, one of the leaders of State Farm said no, no, no, no, no, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re stopping that. They had been working with a group called GenderCool. And GenderCool promotes transgender LGBTQ stuff, by speaker-ships, by or whatever. And they do this all the way down to kindergarten level. So they’re really promoting and a lot of people say grooming kids for that lifestyle.

And it’s interesting, I’m convinced that it was a big company as State Farm is and it was somebody in the company doing that without the company heads really knowing about it. And the reason I think that is because State Farm came out so strong, so quick on the other side. This is what their spokesman said. He said, “Conversations about gender and identity should happen at home with parents. We don’t support required curriculum in schools on this topic. We support organizations providing resources for parents to have these conversations.” And the fact that they came out so strong for parents, and so distanced themselves in that program just kind of tells me that really big company, they had somebody that was doing something that they thought was really good for the company. And that’s just not the position of the company. So I thought that was really good for State Farm to react so fast and said, no, no, we think this is the responsibility of parents.

And then going to that I’m going to jump up to the state of Maine for a while, there’s a governor’s election going up there. Paula Page is running. Now he was in office for two terms some years back, he’s not coming back. They had term limits, so he was out, now you can come back. And their current governor Janet Mills, I think he’s running for reelection.

And turns out that the Maine Department of Education had a kindergarten program on there about sexual identity and sexual orientation. And so in this video, they have the spokesman there she was talking about, this is what she said, “The doctors made a mistake when certain people were born. When a baby is born, the doctors will tell the parents what gender they think that baby is. Some people, when they get a little older, realize that what the doctor said was not right.” Really! So this is where you’re teaching kindergarteners is if doctors told your parents what gender you are, the doctors or your parents, neither one know what one genders you are.

And we’re telling this to kindergarten kids. And so we’re saying doctors can be wrong about genders. And they’re professionals, and they’re trained, but you can’t really trust them on this. And so this is what the Maine Department of Education had up. Well, obviously, when the Republican Party of Maine put this up and said, hey, we thought schools were supposed to be teaching math and science, it turns out schools are teaching kindergarteners on gender identity and transgender. Well, that video came down as well, which tells me that they know this is not a winning issue with the people.

So for me, that’s two good stories where that things came out that are leaning to the left and the really woke side. And the reaction was quickly against it when it came to sunlight. So I think, again, the values of the people are very different from what we’re seeing with these groups. And I think that’s really healthy for the country. We may be in better shape than we think we are in some areas, at least the stories would indicate that.

Rick:

Well, and David, I wonder if on the State Farm example how many other big corporations out there that have adopted a lot of this LGBTQ stuff and Pride Month and everything else, that if enough customers of those companies were to say, hey, we’re tired of this, this is not why we buy products from you, you got to stop this from going somewhere else, would they be willing to wake up? Because they hear from the other side, they need to hear from us too.

David:

We covered last week in Good News Friday, how several corporations are starting to wake up and push back against employees. And rather than being bullied by employees that are woke, these companies are saying leave your politics at home. That’s not why this company exists. You’re here to do the work of this company and leave your politics out of the company. And maybe this is some more of what we’re seeing with that, that they are pushing back. And hopefully, maybe some of these companies like State Farm, when they find out they’re going to take a quick stand and say, no, we’re not doing this anymore. We were silent when we thought we had to be, but we don’t have to be anymore and that’s good.

Rick:

Yeah. Alright, Tim, let’s move over to Tim. What do we have for our next piece of good news, man?

Tim:

Alright, guys. As we’ve already talked about this week, a lot of things related to that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and what we think might happen in states, we’ve been talking literally for years about the good news we’ve been seeing on the state side with prolife laws being passed. And so still in my stack of stuff, these are before the Dobbs decision came down that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and sent it back to stage, you already had states making significant drastic moves.

And interestingly enough, I’ve got a couple of articles one from a Republican governor and one from a Democrat governor. The one from Republican governor is Oklahoma Governor Stitt, and this identifies he signs the strictest abortion law in the US. And really some cool stuff from Governor Stitt. But he said “I promised Oklahomans that as Governor I would sign every piece of prolife legislation that came across my desk. And I am proud to keep that promise today.” What this legislation did was essentially banned nearly every abortion after fertilization, which is the strictest ban yet on the abortion procedure in the country.

In the legislation that he signed, it follows up and it gives a cause of action for individual citizens Oklahoma, just like the Texas legislation did. And so several things going on. But this is really neat. This is before the overturning of Roe which maybe this time they kind of saw the writing on the wall, it was kind of coming through the very end of May. Nonetheless, it’s something that’s very cool.

But then you jump over to Louisiana and Louisiana has a Democratic governor, Governor Edwards. And Louisiana is not really a Democrat state as far as their reflected values. They definitely lean more conservative on most issues. Nonetheless, Governor Edwards signed a law that would make the mailing of abortion pills a crime and so doing things to limit abortion in Louisiana. And one of the things that, guys, we’ve talked about a lot is when you look at some basic constitutional issues and the notion of inalienable rights, things that should not be politically divided, it shouldn’t be that Republicans believe in inalienable rights and Democrats don’t, it shouldn’t be that Republicans believe in the Constitution, Democrats don’t, or vice versa. It should be that we as Americans recognize that there’s a structure and a system to our law. We recognize and identify the philosophy laid out by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration, and it shouldn’t be things that we should be able to agree on and unite behind.

And unfortunately, on some of these God-given right, on some of these basic moral value issues, we do see an incredible chasm in this political divide between Republicans and Democrats, and sometimes even between Christians and things that should not be a moral divide, we should be able to unite behind and agree on. In this situation, it’s really neat that I had two pieces of good news in my stack, one from a Democratic governor, one from Republican governor. And certainly, the Republican governor went much further in the legislation that he signed protecting life, protecting the unborn.

However, when you see a Democrat and Republican governor both going the same direction, one going much further, but both going the same direction, that’s an even additional piece of good news, which as polarized as we are, we know that most Americans are not as divided as the media and some of our political leaders would have us believe. Most Americans have a lot more in common than we have apart. And this is again, it’s kind of a cool example where we can see that even though there’s a political chasm in culture today, there’s still some similar value issues being fought for in both the states. So, good news from Oklahoma and Louisiana.

Rick:

Alright, friends, we’re out of time for today for good news. We will have a lot more good news for you next week and the week after and the week after. Yep, that’s just going to keep coming, folks. I’m telling you, there’s some great things happening in our nation. I know there’s bad stuff too. We don’t ignore that.

Now, Fridays are usually ignoring that because that’s Good News Friday. But then throughout the rest of the week we hit it head on, folks; I mean it’s eyes wide open, the brutal truth of where we are as a nation, and then what we can do about it. So instead of saying all there’s giants in the land, we got to give up. Let’s forget it. Let’s go home. Let’s hide out. No, instead of doing that, we’re not like those 10 spies that came back from the promised land. We’re like Joshua and Caleb.

We say, yes, there are giants on the land. Yes, there’s fortified cities. Yes, there are difficult things happening in America. But God has given us this land. He has given us an incredible foundation. He allowed for our nation to be founded on biblical principles so that we can enjoy the results of that, by having biblical principles infused into the culture, that we could actually have a nation of freedom, that we could be free to live out our faith, that we could be free to protect our families, to exercise the laws of nature and nature’s God, that we can be free to choose what we wanted to do with our life, that we could do pursue the desires that God had put in our hearts. That’s the story of America. And we can restore all of those things, despite the challenges that are out there, despite how many giants are in the land, if we will once again get into God’s word and actually apply it to ourselves and to the culture.

That’s what we do here at WallBuilders. It’s all about an application of biblical citizenship. And you can be the catalyst for doing that in your home and in your community by joining us here at WallBuilders Live and becoming a Constitution coach. Check out our website today at wallbuilderslive.com. Make that one-time or monthly contribution. Share the program with your friends and family. Be a force multiplier, and let’s get busy saving this country.

Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders Live.