Court Rules Against Oberlin College In Local Bakery Case And More – The court sides with a local bakery in Ohio against Oberlin College. A judge blocks COVID-19 vaccine mandate for entire Navy and more good news today!

Air Date: 04/15/2022

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. This is the intersection of faith and the culture. And we’re glad you’re here with us. This is a place where we take on the hot topics of the day, from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective.

I’m Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator, and America’s constitution coach. So it truly is an honor for me to get to be here with David Barton, learn these things, and with Tim Barton, he’s a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. You really ought to have him come speak at your church, wherever you can get him in, powerful, powerful speaker. I believe a great voice for America in restoring our constitutional republic today. At wallbuilders.com is where you can book Tim to speak, or David as well. Wallbuilderslive.com, that’s where you go if you want archives of this program. In other words, if you missed some shows earlier this week, or last week, or whenever, last couple of months, actually is available there at our website wallbuilderslive.com.

So we always on Friday, bring you good news. And I’m telling you there’s a lot of good things happening. I realize there’s bad. I get it. There’s things that happen every day, and I go, whoa, how do we survive that? And yet we do. And there’s a lot of good stuff happening as well. And we want to use our Fridays to dive into that good news so that you know these principles work.

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 going to start with Oberlin College. And to start with Oberlin College for good news is kind of hard to do in this day and age. Now I could have done this back in the 1830s, 40s and 50s when Charles Finney was president of the college because the college back then, I mean and by the way, Charles Finney was probably the lead name in the Second Great Awakening and a great revival. And it’s estimated that in one year alone, 1857 and 1858, he lent 100,000 people to Christ. So he’s a real lead figure there. And he was very clear on what the Bible says and biblical morality and biblical rights and wrongs. And so as such, he became a huge voice in the rise of the antislavery movement being organized before the Civil War.

As a matter of fact, he did not let any student come to his college. And just back it up even from that, that college, Oberlin College, where Charles Finney was, was the first college in America to treat men and women in black and whites as equal. So if you went to that college, it’s all men are created equal, all men and women are created equal. And that’s, of course, New Testament Old Testament verses together basically. And he said, everybody’s equal here, everybody’s equal worth before God and under God. And so that was a position they took.

And he even required that if you’re going to be at Oberlin College, when the fugitive slave law came out, you had to be engaged actively in civil disobedience against the fugitive slave law. And so students had and fugitive slave law, by the way, was terrible federal law out of the millions of federal laws that have been passed, this is hands down one of the top three worst federal laws, it’s suspended so many constitutional rights just because they didn’t want those rights to extend as someone who had been accused of being a slave or fugitive slave, etc.

So it’s suspended constitutional rights, and it was terrible. And all over the nation, we have old sermons of pastors calling on their congregation that if you ever get faced with this law, you are required to disobey it. Because if you don’t disobey this federal law, then you are disobeying God; if you’re going to obey God, you have to disobey this federal law. And so that led to a rise in what they call Jury Nullification where the jurors, if someone was being tried under the fugitive slave law, the jurors would just say, no, you’re innocent, because this is such a bad law. If we found you guilty under the fugitive slave law, we would be violating God’s law. So it was really strong.

And so Charles Finney required all the students at Oberlin College to be active in the Underground Railroad. And the students would even go out and confront federal marshals who had arrested people under the fugitive slave law and free those people, take them from the marshals and freed them. So it was very active in biblical righteousness.

Now, as you move along toward where we are now, the school is almost exactly on the other side of that. It’s kind of like if you look at the United Methodist Church, many of them have moved exactly opposite to the way they were founded. They’ve moved away from the George Whitfield’s and the John Wesley’s and those guys, and now they believe things just almost the opposite. And that’s kind of where Oberlin is.

They’ve become one of the biggest LGBTQIA+ colleges in America. And they’re not just for, they’re radically for. They’re fine arts kind of college. And so they were becoming woke before most of the nation was becoming woke. And so what’s happened was here they had an incident here months back where there’s a family bakery there in town, it’s been five generations there in town. And Oberlin has long been known is really a good civil rights area. They did fight for freedom and antislavery.

And so there’s a strong community there and there’s a lot of family businesses there. It’s not a very big town, by and large, it’s kind of a quaint town. And so the family business is there. They cater to the college and the students, etc. Well, one of the family businesses there was a bakery. It’s been five generations of the same hands there in that bakery. And there was a student that went in and shoplifted and one of the family members saw it and stopped that and actually were three students involved because two of the students apparently went in to try to get the third student freed. As they were walking out with stuff that was not theirs, actually, I think they were confronted outside on the sidewalk after they left with it. And it turned out to be three African American students.

And so what happened was even though those students pled guilty to shoplifting and violating the law, the college starts a boycott and says this is racial profiling. This is the racism that we all hate. And so even staff from the college, even leaders, Assistant Deans went out and stood in front of the business giving out flyers about how racist they were, and you got to boycott this business. So they started this big boycott over this racism stuff. Well, obviously, in a small town in a community, that’s going to have an impact on their finances. And so they countered back and said, that’s defamation, that’s not good.

Tim:

And you’re referring it’s going to have impact on the finance of the small business?

David:

Right on small business.

Tim:

Not actually Oberlin, because one of the interesting things even about this issue because I remember reading the article, and actually several articles about it, you sent me several because you’re like, look what just happened. And one of the things that’s interesting is part of this move actually started from a club on campus. A club on campus starts saying this is racism. And so it was misguided students, misinformed students or woke students. And along the way, that’s when school staff and leaders, administrators started joining in to the movement from the students.

So instead of the school leader saying, hey, guys, actually, this is part of the rule of law. And they pled guilty they actually did this. This wasn’t a racist move. This was right stopping theft or whatever the case might have been. Instead of the professors or school administration being leaders in the moment, they joined into the whim that will the emotions of the woke club, the woke students on campus. And that’s part of what led to some of this unfolding. But dad, as you’re alluding to, not only was this a crazy move for the college, it had a major impact on the financial stability of this really old bakery there in the town.

David:

And so they went to trial over this and it’s gone through several layers, and now the ruling has come down. And remember that the family sued the college. I mean, you’ve got the right to free speech, but you don’t have the right to lie about us and defame us and try to harm our business with things that are not true. And so the jury came back in favor of the family and the court upheld it in favor of the family. And then there was appeal and the Appeal Court upheld in favor of the family.

And so as it stands right now, what happened was Oberlin College was ordered to pay 11 million in compensatory damages, 33 million in punitive damages, plus more than 6 million in attorney’s fees to the families attorneys. So compensatory damages, that’s where they would say, hey, we’ve lost about $11 million in business ever since this happened. The punitive damages is we’re going to slap your hand really hard so that you’ll never do this again. And a $33 million punitive damages against the college, I’ve got to think that’s bad news for the college.

Tim:

I think this is where the appropriate adage comes in that you go woke, you get broke. We haven’t seen this across the board in America, although I think there’s going to be some Disney, some groups that are maybe going to experience some of this financial backlash now…

David:

Some of the ESG companies.

Tim:

Right. It’s going to be different in this case because this is the court recognizing that you clearly violated some basic notions of civil society of law of how to work together. So this is really good news that you now have the rights of individuals being protected. And even though I mean, guys, we talked about we are big fans of the First Amendment, we’re big fans of the Bill of Rights and certainly free speech, we still recognize that there are limits and there should be limits on free speech. Because just because you have a right doesn’t mean that you don’t have any responsibilities.

And dad, I know you’ve talked about this a lot with, one of the things, I think James Wilson was one of the Founding Fathers who talked about this, with every corresponding right that we have, there is a corresponding duty or responsibility we have within that right. So even though we have, for example, the right to speak freely, we have the duty or the responsibility to speak truthfully and honestly. And this is the way the Founding Fathers viewed our rights.

So even though we believe in free speech, we don’t believe that doesn’t mean there aren’t some level of parameters or constraints or that you’re not accountable for things that you say along the way. This is certainly one of those moments where it’s very good there was accountability along the way.

David:

You know, one of the things I found very interesting when you go back to the formation of America and the Bill of Rights, and those first five freedoms we have in the First Amendment, one of them is freedom of the press; you got freedom of speech, freedom of press. And it’s interesting to me that people who are actively involved in the press like Ben Franklin, you know, Ben Franklin, one of the biggest printers, publishers of the time, and Ben Franklin was so big about not only supporting freedom of the press, but supporting the accountability of the press. The freedom of the press did not mean you were not accountable for being wrong.

And so I mean, he has accents like well, you don’t ever want to attack somebody who buys ink by the barrels kind of stuff. I mean, somebody’s got a press like that. But at the same time, he said, but you have to hold the press accountable for bad things they say. So whereas today, it’s really hard to sue and get anything done on defamation if it’s against the paper or whatever. We’ve seen that change in the last several years. We’ve seen it like with Nick Sandmann and Rittenhouse and some of these guys that are out there who’ve been defamed by the papers.

And now here you have a school, an institution, which I guess probably, yeah, it would be a nonprofit, but they went over the line, they crossed that line, and you’ve got to be accountable for bad behavior. And the concept of accountability, and Tim, you hit it right, for every right, there’s a corresponding responsibility. But I thought it was interesting to the Founding Fathers who were engaged in the free press and free speech were very engaged also in making sure there was accountability for abuses of those rights. And that’s what we see the court in Ohio doing.

Rick:

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

Tim:

Alright, guys. Yeah, I have the next story. And this one is dealing with a situation from the Navy. As we’ve seen in many of the military branches, this COVID mandate that came down, there were many Christians inside of the different branches of the military that did not want to get a vaccine, had a religious, or even some of the medical reasons they don’t want to get the vaccine. And unfortunately, for many of the branches, initially, they did not recognize any exemptions, whether it be for medical reasons or religious reasons.

Dav id:

And by the way, may I pointed out the reason that’s a problem is that puts the government in charge to determine whether your religious convictions are real or not. They’ve always kind of defer to religious exemptions, because they said, look, we can’t judge whether this is part of your faith or whether your faith is genuine or not. So if you’re claiming a religious exemption, the government’s not in charge to determine what your religion teaches or doesn’t teach. And the fact that they did not give any religious exemptions for so long at all, means the government’s in charge of theology. And that’s a really bad signal.

Tim:

And we talked about this is also one of the things where they told really any military personnel who did not want either vaccine that military wasn’t the place for them. And we talked about it’s kind of a dangerous position when the military is coming to a place where they say we only want people that will do everything we say how we say, and we don’t want anybody that’s going to question or challenge our position. That’s a very unhealthy place to be.

Well, the Navy has been the only branch of the military that still to this day has offered zero exemptions. Because right now you have the Marines, you have the Army, you have the Air Force, the Coast Guard, pretty much every other branch are going to look at it the military, the armed services, they have offered exemptions, whether it be for medical, for religious reasons, except for the Navy. The Navy still is offered no exemptions.

And we’ve actually had Mike Berry from First Liberty on they have a case dealing with several dozen Navy SEALs, who are right some of the fittest people in the world. And one of the things that was even known at that time, in COVID, was that if you were young, if you were healthy, if you got COVID, it was not generally speaking, life-threatening and generally didn’t have long consequences, didn’t last very long. And the Navy SEALs, generally, are some of the fittest people in the world, active duty Navy SEALs. And generally, you’re talking about guys in their 20s and early 30s are your active duty Navy SEALs.

And so, many of them filed for exemptions. And all these were for religious reasons. And the Navy failed to recognize any of them. Fortunately, there was a Judge who stepped in and said, hey, we’re going to recognize these individuals. And we’re not going to let the military to force their vaccine. And so there’s a court case going on right now. Well, a Judge just recently, and we’re talking just in the last couple of weeks, said that now they’re going to add, there are several thousand other Navy members who have filed for religious exemptions who have been denied. And they were essentially told they are going to have to leave the military or get this vaccine. And the Judge has just now said, hey, we’re going to include them with this already existing challenge to the lack of any kind of religious exemption or acknowledgement from the Navy.

And so now there’s been a grant for 4,000 individuals, which includes the 35 Navy SEALs that were initially there, and now roughly 4,000 others from this Judge. It’s US District Judge, Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee. And there are several details about him in the article. The title of the article is “Judge blocks COVID-19 vaccine mandate for entire Navy”. So right now, the Judge has said for everybody in the Navy who has filed for this religious or even a medical exemption, we are going to say the Navy cannot require that until this concludes in court however long that might be.

So there is good news right now that even though largely speaking, we think the military did not handle this well on almost every level, and even right now the Navy is not handling it well. The good news is there was a Judge that stepped in that’s offering some relief and so many good people fighting for the military. And it’s not just First Liberty with this case, although Mike Berry from First Liberty is the one leading the charge in this case.

We know there are several other really great law firms where some of our friends leading those charges in those law firms to try to help recognize and represent these military individuals, people who put their lives on the line to defend and protect us, our rights and our freedoms, that these attorneys, these religious liberty law firms are trying to make sure that their freedoms are not sacrificed along the way as they’re protecting our freedoms. So this is really good from a Judge that now gives kind of a blanket protection for all members of the Navy when it comes to this COVID 19 vaccine mandate.

Rick:

Love hearing that good news. 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 how WallBuilders Live.

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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 got the next piece of good news?

David:

Okay, Rick, as we have seen in recent weeks the whole phenomenon that’s going on swimming with Lia Thomas, here’s a biological male swimming as a woman, was ranked in the 400 kind of ranking as a male, but now as a female swimming against other women is in the top 10 kind of stuff. And I say he, because still biological male. So this is going on. Well, it’s kind of getting in the other sports.

And by the way, we’ve seen I think now 26 states take some type of action to say, hey, we’re going to keep men out of women’s sports, biological men out of women’s sports. And so it’s kind of going in other areas. And I’ve got an article here about a cyclist race that was going on where the top cyclist was a biological male riding in a women’s cyclists race. And they did not let him do that in part because the other female cyclists said if you did this, we’re just boycotting the race. You won’t even have a race. It’ll be kind of like a one bicycle race. And I thought, you know, that’s really good. That’s a lot of courage. And that’s people standing up to defend their own sports, rather than letting someone redefine the rules. And you play by redefined rule, say no, the rules are this is women’s cycling and this is going to be women’s cycling and women’s cycling.

And so the fact that they stood up and said, no, we’re not going to let you do that, I thought was really good because that had an effect in really kind of shutting down the guy from being able to cycle on the women’s side. Which really led me something, Tim, I think you were telling me that Charlie Kirk had put out this call kind of recently the said, you know, used to be in America, men stood up and protected women, it used to be that men would stand up and say, hey, what are you doing? This is crazy. And I look at this and say it’s good that the women stood up for themselves. But I think Charlie may be right, this is time when a lot of other people need to stand up and start voicing some protection for women’s sports as well.

Tim:

Yeah, it’s something that I think a lot of conservatives, a lot of people who are logical thinkers recognize there’s a lot of flaws in this argument. And certainly, along the flaws of the argument, originally, the feminist movement was that we want women to have equal rights. Well, now women, again, are losing equal rights because you again are having biological males, people who were born as a male with an X and Y chromosome, this is a big deal. When people say, but we’re not sure male or female. Well, everybody has DNA. Everybody has chromosomes. And you can look at that DNA. And by the way, you don’t even have to go as deep as DNA. Generally, you can just look at the physical body when it’s born, and you don’t have to be a biologist, it’s actually pretty easy to determine male and female.

And when people apparently were having a hard time defining what a woman is, as in like an adult female human being, these are not complicated notions. But in the midst of woke culture, there’s a lot of people who are afraid to stand up and speak truth because they might get canceled, or I might lose my job, I might get fired, or I might offend somebody.

And this is where we definitely have to recognize that there is a God and God did create things in a certain way. God didn’t make male and female. God also even clearly defined what right and wrong is. And we can’t be afraid to speak up for what is right because if we don’t speak up for what’s right, then de facto we are allowing what is wrong to take place.

And this is part of what now many conservative voices are echoing. Charlie Kirk is certainly one of them. But we can go down the list. There’s a litany of conservative voices out there, whether it be an Allie Beth Stuckey, or a Candace Owens, or Michael Knowles, or Ben Shapiro, or Steven Crowder, I mean, literally, we can go down the list of 15 or 20 conservative voices identifying these basic truths.

And so, dad, to your point, it’s really great to see that, in some of these moments, if men would have stood up and said, wait a second, we can allow a biological male to compete against biological females, that could take a lot more flak then. In this case, it’s a group of female athletes who are part of the competition, saying, okay, we’re not going to do this. And it might take in some moments, people who are actually participating in the competition to say, well, we’re going to boycott this event because this is not what we signed up for. We signed up to compete against other biological women, not against confused biological males as the case might be. Nonetheless, it is really good news that these women did stand up in this moment.

Rick:

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

Tim:

Alright. Well, guys, I have a lot of these in my stack. I’ve just pulled two that were kind of close to the top of the list. And it’s dealing with some prolife victories. This one is from Louisiana. Oh, actually, you know what, let me make this one the second one. Actually, the order will be important, not really that important, but kind of important here in a second. So the first article says “Texas City unanimously votes to ban abortions, becomes a sanctuary city for the unborn”.

This is Lindale, Texas. And the article identifies Lindale became the 47th city in the United States to pass a sanctuary city for the unborn ordinance. Now the big deal, it’s an ordinance. So this isn’t a resolution. This is an ordinance, which means it’s a law inside of the town.

David:

Yeah, it’s a city law, whereas you have federal laws, state laws, a city law, that’s an ordinance.

Tim:

So there’s an ordinance now in the town of Lindale that they can’t do abortions, also that you can’t even have an abortion facility inside the town because there are a town where they’re sanctuary city for the unborn. So they will only protect unborn life and protect young children coming into the world.

What’s fun about this is it actually identified the article that Lindale residents collected enough signatures on a petition to require the city council to vote on the ordinance. And so they went out, gathered all kinds of signatures and the options for the City Council were that either they could vote on the ordinance there or they could just kind of make it a ballot measure initiative for the town or the people to town vote on it from this ordinance. But they decided that they would go ahead and vote on it.

And guys, before they took the vote, their word got out actually Mark Lee Dickson, he’s the director of Right to Life of East Texas, but he’s the founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative. So he’s one of the guys spearheading a lot of this move along the way. And as he’s doing this, one of the things that is kind of worth noting, he’s encouraging people all over the nation to do this in their city. But he also, when this was going on in Lindale, and the city council was going to vote on it, he encouraged the people of Lindale to show up and show their support.

Now, guys, if you think of a city council meeting, dad, for example, what do you think is the normal attendance at a city council meeting? Now, Lindale Texas also keep in mind, not that big of a town, so what do you think is the average attendance of the city council meeting?

David:

City council and school boards that I’m familiar with, I would say a dozen, maybe.

Tim:

That’s what I would think, right, probably 15, could be 20.

David:

If it’s a really big issue.

Tim:

Right. And now, I mean, granted, there’s the CRT kind of issue. So more people have been showing up at school boards with city council issues, people are now becoming more active and involved. And this is a really good example of people being more active and involved at this city council meeting. And so guys, Rick, dad, you can put yourself now in a city council position, if you’re used to seeing 15 or 20 people, at this meeting, they had over 500 people show up.

David:

That’s more than population. That’s facetious. Lindale is not that big a town but 500, man, that’s a sizable percentage.

Tim:

I mean, to your point, right, that’s almost every adult male in the town. Again, not really, but like this is a ridiculous number for Lindale, so over 500 people showed up in favor of this ordinance. So the City Council voted unanimously 4-0 to go ahead and pass the ordinance. And so Lindale is now a sanctuary city for the unborn.

Now, let me jump to Louisiana. And the Louisiana, Pollock City Council just did a very similar vote, and this was less than a week later, they did a vote where they were going to be a sanctuary city for the unborn. And they’re the first city in Louisiana to actually become a sanctuary city for the unborn. And this is actually something, as the vote happened, it was a 4-1 vote. So there actually was a city council member who was not in favor of being a sanctuary city for the unborn. But there were several pastors there in attendance.

One of the pastors was interviewed afterwards, Pastor Brian Gunter of First Baptist Church, and he said, here we are, we value the lives of children. We care about families. And by passing this ordinance, our message is very simple, innocent blood will not be spilled upon our soil. Well, Pollock becomes the nearly 50th city to join in this movement. And so there’s cities in Texas, Nebraska, Ohio. I think there’s now some in Arkansas. And now there’s Louisiana.

So guys, this is a movement. And, by the way, huge encouragement and kudos going back to Mark Lee Dickson because he’s the guy who’s starting this movement and he’s encouraging to happen all over the nation. And we’re seeing this happen, where cities are actually passing these ordinances to protect innocent life and their cities. So we’re seeing so much good stuff happening on the prolife front. And this is just one of those example.

David:

And I’ll add one real quick, we should have done this a week or two ago, we just didn’t get to it, but I got to do it now. Elon Musk, what he’s done with Twitter, 9.2% is what’s been revealed that he owns. He may own as much as 14%. But nonetheless, he’s committed to going in there and changing it and make it an open platform like it’s supposed to be under federal law, Section 230. Twitter has responded by saying, well, we’re going to have everybody vote in our meetings. It still means Elon Musk only has maybe 9-14%. So you still got 85% they get to vote. But nonetheless, it’s a shot over the bow and it’s something we’ve been wanting for a long time. And so thank you, Elon Musk, who’s not a conservative, but yet he’s committed to the principle of free speech, we appreciate that and applaud him for what he’s done.

Rick:

Alright, guys, we are not going to get anywhere near through the stack of good news that you’ve piled up from the last few weeks. So we’ll dive into more of that next week. Thank you for listening. Share the program with your friends and family and join us in being salt and light in the community. Biblical values, that’s where all the answers are right there in God’s Word. And you can be the one to apply that in your community.

Thanks so much for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.