State Pays Millions To Cover Court Costs Of Church And Much More – Churches that were willing to fight against government overreach are rewarded for their faithfulness. State pays millions to cover court costs of John MacArthur’s church and much more today!

Air Date: 09/17/2021

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 the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live. And it’s Good News Friday, looking forward to getting some good news today to share with you. Hope you’ll check out our website today wallbuilderslive.com that’s where you can find more good news and our other programs.

I’m Rick green America’s Constitution coach and a former Texas legislator. And I’m here with David Barton, America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders, and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. It’s Constitution Day by the way, September 17th. So this is a very special day. And if you’d like to join us tonight live, we’re going to have a live stream of our Constitution Day dinner benefiting Patriot Academy in the Patriot Academy campus in Texas, and you can be a part of it. Go to patriotacademy.com, you’ll see the link there to get signed up, and you can live stream not only tonight’s dinner, but tomorrow’s Constitution Coach training, and the tour of the American Journey Experience. Join David Barton, Tim Barton, and myself and be a part of tonight’s very special dinner for Constitution Day and tomorrow’s training over at the American Journey Experience.

Alright, David and Tim, let’s dive into that good news. David’s got our first piece of good news. Where are we headed first, sir?

David:

I’m going to head to California. And in California, we have here an article that is a repeat of what we’ve seen with several other articles over the past month to six weeks. This article headline says “Governments Must Pay $800,000 in Legal Fees to Church for COVID-19 Overreach.” Now this is the same story we’ve been seeing were that the courts have ordered the government of California to pay millions and millions and millions to cover the legal fees of churches who refused to shut down when the governor said you have to shut down.

Now it’s interesting, he said you’re not essential, they said we are essential. And so this deals with that period of time back to March of what is it, 2020 maybe when all this kind of stuff started. And it’s interesting this most recent headlines is for John MacArthur’s church. The reason I find this so interesting, even when MacArthur’s church been one of those guys who has taken an interpretation in Romans 13 that says, you do whatever government says; I mean, whatever government says, you do that. And yet he didn’t do that. And we pointed out all along the way you only do a government says when government’s telling you to do what God says. If God and government come in conflict, then government takes second fiddle to God.

Boy, that’s an old Texas accent, anybody knows this, second fiddle is anymore? That’s for the old bands that had fiddler’s and etc. So square dancers…

Tim:

Were there banjos back then too?

David:

There were banjos and fiddlers…

Tim:

It’s a good story, grandpa. Tell us another one.

Rick:

And cloud hoppers.

David:

That’s right. Oh, yeah. Oh, man, that’d be funny to see if anybody even knows what cloud hoppers are. That’s a great one, Rick. Where did you bring out the old stuff, man? So, John MacArthur has been this thing that you do what government says. And here he was put into a situation where his beliefs about civil liberty, etc, got directly challenged. And Gavin was put in the position of telling him when he could have church and if he could have church and where he could have church and how he could have church, and he just put his foot down and said I’m not doing that.

Tim:

And to his credit, because that is not the position of federal government, or even state government to tell a church how they can conduct their services, or if they can meet or when they can meet, or if you’re going to find somebody for meeting together, when in California, they were allowing people to go get alcohol, they’re allowing people to go to the marijuana dispensary, that those were central businesses, but churches were not. So, so much misapplication of law so much misapplication of justice.

And, again, credit to people who, for years, we would have disagreed with their interpretation of Scripture, and yet when the rubber met the road, they ended up being on the side that we have been trying to convince them of for years of, guys. You want to make sure that you’re standing up and advocating for biblical truth, and even helping influence government to defend biblical truth. And this was a situation where to his credit, he definitely stood up and said, we’re not letting this happen.

David:

And this is exactly why we’ve been saying for years, you’ve got to be involved in civil government. Because if you don’t get involved, the civil government’s going to become the enemy of the church, which is exactly what happened. And this is why you want to get on the front end of this. Don’t get on the back end where you have to react. Get on the front end where you elect leaders who are not going to come after the church. That’s the best way to do this.

But nonetheless, here we are, and this is now John MacArthur, there’s $800,000 in legal fees. Now, this is pretty significant too. The church went to a lot of expense to stand and resist and say no, we’re not going to do everything the government tells us to do. If it’s not biblical, we’re not going to do it. They stood and resisted to the tune of $800,000 in legal fees. Now, that’s significant, but this is now one of multiple churches. And it’s interesting that the only church that are getting repaid for all this are the churches that were willing to stand.

And to the credit of California, so many churches did stand. They took on civil government, civil government has lost. And what the courts have said in California, both the state and federal courts, is that this is a permanent injunction that at no time now or in the future can government shutdown churches in California.

Tiom:

Well, and dad, even saying that there was a monetary compensation for churches that had lost things along the way for those who are willing to stand, and maybe even be more specific in the sense that it was those who were on the lawsuit. Because there probably were some that stood that might not be compensated, but maybe now there’s legal precedent to go back and say, wait a second, and we lost something here too and so maybe now even these churches that were willing to fight the legal battle have laid the groundwork for other churches to be able to go back and say, hey, we suffered these damage as well due to your bad policies, etc. Nonetheless, this is a really, really good ruling coming out of California for these guys.

Rick:

You know, it’s hard for us to sometimes deal with the fact that we have good news coming out of some of these places we typically don’t expect. I still think California man, I mean, those pastors there that did stand up from the beginning like Jack Hibbs, Rob McCoy, all these others, and MacArthur have really paved the way for the rest of the country. So we keep getting good news out of California. Hopefully, we’ll continue to be able to do that. Tim, where are we headed for your first piece of good news?

Tim:

Well, the first one on top of my list is coming from Texas. And the article headline it says “Texas Governor Abbott: Gender Affirmation Surgeries Considered Child Abuse”. Now, what they’re referring to is that there is a sex reassignment surgery, which actually does not reassign sex, it’s also in this article described as genital mutilation where they go in and they change the anatomical structure, so to speak, I’m trying to be careful how we word this. But they go in and it’s considered genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery.

And what Governor Abbott did is he went to the State Department of Family and Protective Services, and he said, hey, will you please give a ruling on this of what you think because you’re the organization, you’re the agency, the service, who’s supposed to be in charge of giving guidance and recommendation for this. And so they came back, and sure enough, the letter from the individuals in charge of the DFPS said that this surgical procedure physically alters a child’s genitalia for non-medical purposes, potentially inflicting irreversible harm to children’s bodies, and therefore is child abuse.

And what’s significant about this now is because this is now recognized as child abuse in Texas, one of the things that is coming from this as failure to report this abuse is considered a class, a misdemeanor, and is punishable by up to one year in jail, a fine or both Master said in letter. And again, Masters was the leader from the Department of Family and Protective Services, he wrote this letter.

What is interesting is right now you do have other people running for governor in Texas. And so you have Don Huffines and Allen West who’re both running for governor of Texas. And there’s other people who are talking about maybe challenging Abbott’s in the Republican primary. But one of the criticisms is that Abbott did take a long time to actually seek this ruling, because this has been something that’s not a brand new issue. There’s been people who’ve been calling for this for more than six years. And so there might be a little more politics involved in this.

Nonetheless, it is good news that actually there was finally a decision in Texas that a sexual reassignment surgery for a minor is now recognized as child abuse in Texas. So that’s a really good thing.

Rick:

Yeah, very good news. And you’re right, Tim, I mean, even back in session, a lot of consternation in Republican circles over this because of it not becoming legislation that got through where there were some good pieces of legislation authored, in fact, by our good friend, Matt Kraus. But there was a lot of blockage at the committee level, at the Speaker level and just didn’t happen, and the governor certainly didn’t help in getting behind it and pushing it and finally got this from CPS. But I still hope they’ll actually do legislation on it, we’ll see. And like shared with the pressure from the other candidates, it’s very possible that that might happen. But good news, nonetheless. Alright guys, have we still got time for some more good news before the break? David, what’s the next one?

David:

Well, in the last several weeks, we’ve had two or three people on talking about what’s happened since the COVID pandemic, as far as education is going on homeschool communities. And there’s been just an explosion of people starting to homeschool because of what they saw on COVID on the online kind of stuff going on, what was going on in the classroom, what’s being required of their kids, whether it be vaccinations or whatever else it is, and it is really taken off particularly minority communities, the black community, I mean, it’s just amazing to see the growth in the last 12 or so months.

But this is an article I have that goes back, not just the last 12 months, but goes back all the way to 1973. In 1973, they were still arresting parents for homeschooling. There was a big sage…

Tim:

Do you like over in Germany or?

David:

Like in the United States, like when we were traveling with you, we were very careful not to talk about homeschooling you guys on the road, because they saw that as illegal. We went into states…

Tim:

Well, that was in the 80s and 90s.

David:

That was in the 80s and 90s.

Tim:

And still, it was an issue?

David:

It was still an issue.

Tim:

Wow.

David:

In the 70s. there was actually a standoff, I think in a church in Omaha, where that a bunch of homeschool families took refuge in the church because the civil authorities were coming to arrest them for homeschooling their children. So I mean, this has been an issue. And in the 80s 90s when we traveled, Tim, we still were extremely careful about which states we went into and said that we were homeschooling. So it’s been an issue.

So when you look at it right now, we’re looking at, depends on what study you say, but somewhere from 13%, 15%, 16% of the population right now is homeschooling. That’s a large amount. That is millions. I don’t know. That’s 5, 6, 7, 8 million right now homeschooling. Do you know how many total homeschoolers there were in the United States in 1973? Anybody want to take a shot?

Tim:

5,000.

Rick:

Not that many.

David:

13,000. So you’re going from 13,000 to what 5, 6, 7, 8 million, whatever it is, and it’s really blown up since COVID. So when you look particularly at what’s happened with homeschooling now and it used to be a homeschooling was a wide phenomenon, no longer. As of current stats you’re looking at about 43-44% of homeschoolers are non-white, so that’s Asian, it’s Hispanic, it’s black American. It’s all these things where that now, it’s a lot closer to what population looks like.

And it’s interesting that even in Texas, here in Texas; just in the last 12 months in Texas has been a five-fold jump in the number of homeschoolers in Texas in the last 12 months. You’re talking about a 400% increase, five-fold jump in the last 12 months here in Texas. So this thing is really, really taken off. What’s interesting is what you’re seeing nationally right now is that when parents homeschool, it does not matter what educational level the parents had, they could be PhDs, or they could be GED graduates from high school, either way.

What you’re seeing is among all homeschool students are 15-30 point higher achievement level on academic testing. So they’re scoring much higher than those in public schools. And it’s not because their parents have teaching degrees, because most parents don’t. I think in California, when they look, only 6% of parents who were homeschooling actually had teaching degrees, so 94% were not and they were showing 2-4 grade levels higher achievement homeschooling with non-trained parents, if you will, non-teaching degreed parents. They were getting 2-4 grade levels higher. And so they’re seeing that nationally, and even the same is true with SAT and ACT testing for college entrance.

So regardless of the educational level of the parent, homeschooling is producing just outstanding results; pretty interesting to see how much we’ve changed not just since COVID, but going all the way back to 1973. People today kind of assume homeschooling has always been around. It’s not. It really is more of a kind of recent phenomenon over recent decades.

Rick:

Well, definitely around earlier in the country founding, right, many of the founding fathers themselves homeschool, but very recent in terms of the last century or so for sure. And David, that’s good news, not just for those families, right. I mean, that’s a cultural impact. That means that you’re going to have that many more kids raised in a home where they’re going to learn good history, they’re going to learn how to be a good citizen. Many of those homes are going to teach biblical worldview of how to be a good citizen and all of those things. So this is actually good for the whole culture. It’s good for especially those areas where it’s exploding. Just good news all the way around and a tremendous impact on the future of our country: 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 on WallBuilders Live.

CONSTITUTION ALIVE!

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Rick:

We’re back on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us on this Good News Friday. Tim Barton has our next piece of good news. Tim.

Tim:

Well, guys is coming out of West Virginia. And one of the things that we have seen a lot as a response to some of this pandemic, and specifically, even now from some of the federal government overreach is we’re seeing a lot of the reaffirmation of the 10th Amendment of state’s rights. We’re seeing a lot of attorneys generals. We’re seeing a lot of governors looking at some of these mandates, whether it be masked mandates, or vaccine mandates or right, whatever the case has been, a lot of governors have stood up and said, hey, the federal government has not the authority the position to do certain things.

Well, in the midst of states, wanting to protect their state looking at the 10th Amendment, which really is a state’s rights issue in the Bill of Rights, one of the interesting ways that now we’re seeing some state and really the Attorney General’s from the state respond is like what’s happening in West Virginia. And this article says West Virginia AG citing fentanyl imports sues over remain in Mexico policy.

For those who remember, under President Trump, there was a remain in Mexico policy which said that all people who were coming to America and they’re seeking asylum, they’re trying to come across the border they’re await in Mexico until their paperwork was processed, until things were done. And then if they were legal, or were allowed to be here, they could come over. And this was the idea was try to stop the just open flow of people across the border, which is what we have seen in really this last year.

What we’ve seen so far with over a million people haven’t come across the border by this summer is that a lot of those people coming across the border are not all good people. And actually, there’s been a lot of drugs coming across the border as well. And this is something that in West Virginia, they identified the increase of drug use in their state and the negative impact that it’s had on the people of their states, what is done with the law enforcement and just the additional problems they’re dealing with now in West Virginia.

And they’re identifying a lot of this fentanyl has come across the southern border. And so the Attorney General is suing the Biden administration for revoking this remain in Mexico policy. And this is something, guys, that the US Supreme Court actually went against Biden as well and said, hey, you cannot just arbitrarily remove this remain in Mexico policy. And so this was something that Supreme Court even weighed in on telling the Biden administration that they had a follow that policy to this point, it really doesn’t seem like that policy has been followed at all. But this is where you now see states that again working to protect their state, working to defend states’ rights, state sovereignty.

But even now, just protecting the people of their state, you have states and specifically attorney generals from those states stepping up to protect their state. And so in the midst of the problems, in the midst of the chaos and confusion, we’ve talked about, even with all of the COVID problems, with all of the heart ache and death and the negative consequences, we’ve seen a lot of positive things come out of the midst of this. And we’ve talked about we think that God is really stirring up and awakening a lot of people in this nation where a lot of people are recognizing now the importance of getting involved. And you’re seeing people show up at city council or school board meetings especially that people are talking about the role of the federal government.

There’s a lot of positive things happening in the midst of the problems and frustration. And one of the positive things is you’re seeing attorney generals stepping up to defend their states in ways that we really hadn’t seen in many decades. And so that is a piece of good news coming out of this one is West Virginia, where the Attorney General is challenging the Biden administration to go back to a southern border policy that was much more effective, but again, something to protect their state.

Rick:

And hopefully, we’ll see more and more of that obviously with the federal mandates increasing from this administration. More and more AGs are saying, hey, we’re going to fight that, governors are saying they’re going to fight that, I think we’re up to something like 27 states where either the governor or the attorney general has said they’re going to fight Biden’s vaccine mandate. So this sort of interposition in a strategic constitutional way is going to be vital going forward as the federal government continues to go beyond its reach and to trample on rights. That’s where states need to step up. So, very good news out of West Virginia. David, where’s our next place to go for good news?

David:

We’re going to Texas too, big national news story that was there, just in recent weeks we’ve seen this. And since I’ve already jumped into old idioms by talking second fiddle and you throw in cloud hoppers, I’m not going to say this is the recent soap opera that we had in Texas. Now, a lot of folks that have no clue what a soap opera is. So nonetheless, look it up, it’s an old school…

Tim:

I think, mostly it was like 30 and below and I think soap operas probably are still running today. It’s just we haven’t watched TV in so long. We couldn’t speak to the fact that they’re running or not. So maybe it’s actually not as old of an adage as you think. It’s maybe just older for us, because John Wayne was never on a soap opera. So you know, Clint Eastwood, never on a soap opera. I don’t know what these people are watching. But yeah, so a probably a lot of drama…

David:

A lot of drama…

Rick:

Red Green would be the closest thing to a soap opera for the Barton family.

Tim:

That is correct.

David:

That was good, Rick. So what happened in Texas was, as Texas goes into a special legislative session to deal with voting issues that did not get done in regular normal session that Texas has, special session to deal with that and others. Democrats decided to show how courageous they were by fleeing the state. They went to Washington DC. They were up there to protest what Texas is doing with actually trying to stop fraudulent voting, they think that stops. They think all voting should be any way you want, legal or illegal, and we say no, should just be legal. So they fled the state.

Tim:

And not only that, they then requested care packages, because their life was so hard while they were having to be away from their homes and families, even though some of them took vacations in other nations in kind of tropic locations. But yes, they abandoned the state, and then they requested people that cared about them to send them care packages because they were getting lonely and they wanted food and special treats from Texas. I mean, just ridiculous on levels of ridiculous.

But we saw recently where AOC attended the Met Gala, and she’s wearing this incredibly, ridiculously expensive designer dress at a gala that’s $30,000 per person to enter. And on her dress, she has “Tax the Rich”. She doesn’t understand the irony of this, like you are literally roasting yourself. You’re in a place with incredibly wealthy people where you just paid $30,000 to get in and wearing this designer dress and you’re saying you should “Tax the Rich.”

Like, it’s that level of irony that this is what the Democrats did when they left Texas. They said, oh, we’re sacrificing so much to go on vacation, please send us care packages, like okay, you’re just being ridiculous on every level. But that’s what they did.

David:

And they talked about the courageous effort it was and how much courage it took to turn and run, which that was an irony in itself. Especially Texas, the state of the Alamo, etc. So, they’ve all left the state. So what happens is the Speaker of the House issues the order to go arrest these guys, bring them back, get them in the legislature. So they say, you can’t arrest us, for this great courage we’re showing you, you can’t do that. And so they went to a judge in Harris County, which is down around Houston, and that judge says no, you can’t arrest the Democrats for leaving the legislature. Then they went to a judge in Austin, Travis County and said, no, you can’t do that.

And by the way, Austin is kind of like Texas as San Francisco. And Houston is kind of like Texas as LA, so super liberal parts of the state said you can’t do that. What’s interesting, this is something that is in the US Constitution that you can go arrest members and compel them to come in order to force a quorum, otherwise, they can hold the whole state hostage.

And so what happened was, these lower court orders were appealed up to the Texas Supreme Court. And the Texas Supreme Court, interestingly, gave an order that said, no, you can arrest them and bring them back. I love the wording here because they did such a good job of pointing to history and the US Constitution. Let me read part of the wording.

The ruling says “This question now before this court is not whether it’s good idea for the Texas House of Representatives to arrest absent members to compel a quorum, nor is a question whether to impose voting legislation they’re protesting, giving rise to this dispute as even desirable. These are political questions far outside the scope of this judicial function. The legal question before this court concerns only whether the Texas Constitution gives the House of Representatives the authority to physically compel the attendance of these members. The text of Article 3, Section 10 of the Texas constitution is clear. And the uniform understanding in this provision throughout our state’s history, including at the time of its enactment has been that it confers on the legislature the power to physically compel the attendance of absent members.” It then quoted the US Constitution and said Texas based its clause on the US Constitution. And yes, you can force elected members to do the duty, to do exactly what they are elected to do. And for these Democrats to run off and say this shows courage. Let me just point out. If you’re a Republican in Connecticut, if you’re Republican in Washington state or Oregon or California or Nevada, or Massachusetts, you know what, you’re in a big old minority and you don’t see them running off because they don’t get their way. So it really is good that the Texas Supreme Court quoted the US Constitution, cited history to say no, step up, man up, do your job, do what you’re elected to do. You don’t have the right to run away. We can force you to come back. That’s part of the Constitution. Great constitutional ruling, great reference to history.

Rick:

And of course, we’ve had to do this before many times in the last 10 or 15 years. But David, Tim, I know you all probably already know this story. All the way back to 1871, whenever the Democrats fled, because they were teaming up with the KKK and preventing blacks from voting in Texas, and so the legislation coming through was going to be to prevent the KKK from doing that. So the Democrats went and hid in an office at the Capitol because they didn’t have the private jets and Miller lighted they had this go around. And guess what, the Sergeant at Arms dove through the window, he said he rolled, it was a wooden window, not glass, but he rolled into the room and stood up and arrested them and took them into the Senate chamber.

So it’s a little different this time, but Democrats have always tried to complicate the voting and prevent other people from voting, and all of the suppression they’re claiming that Republicans are after, they’re the ones that have a history of that. And folks should definitely get American History in Black & White: Setting the Record Straight at wallbuilders.com to learn more about the difference in the parties when it comes to voting rights, especially for black Americans.

We’re out of time for today. Folks, that’s all the good news we’re going to be able to share with you today. But I tell you what, if you tune in tonight live with our live stream for Constitution Day for the dinner tonight benefiting Patriot Academy and the new campus in Texas, and also tomorrow for the training over at the American Journey Experience, you can join David and Tim and me, we’d love for you to be a part of this. So go to patriotacademy.com, get signed up and join the live stream, and celebrate the Constitution and dedicate yourself to preserve it for future generations. Thanks for listening today to WallBuilders Live.