Valedictorian From Michigan Now Allowed To Mention God And More – Individuals from around the Nation are standing up and fighting the battles that need to be fought. A Valedictorian from Michigan is now allowed to reference God in her speech, and much more good news today!

Air Date: 06/11/2021

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, where we’re talking about the hottest topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. And this is kind of a special day of the week. It’s the one I look forward to the most. It’s Good News Friday. It’s a chance for David and Tim Barton to catch us up on some of the great things happening out there across the country, sometimes around the world. Most of the weekend, it seems like you only hear bad news, especially for major media, but God is moving in some awesome ways all over the country. And we love to bring those stories to you, so thanks so much for tuning in today on this Friday.

By the way, find out more about us at our website wallbuilderslive.com. That’s where you can learn about the three of us that hosts the program and you can also get archives of the program. Now David Barton is our founder here at WallBuilders. He’s America’s premier historian. Tim Barton’s a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. And my name is Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator. You can find out more again at wallbuilderslive.com. And that’s the place to make that one-time or monthly contribution. But let’s dive in, guys. Let’s get to some good news. David, what’s our first piece of good news today?

David:

Well, we’re going to Westland Michigan. And Westland Michigan, the valedictorian there, Elizabeth Turner was told by the high school that when she gives her valedictory address, you have to let us go through this and check it out. And oh, by the way, you’ve got God in here, you can’t do that. You have to take God out. You can’t mention God in any way, shape, fashion and form. Ignore the fact that that is the national motto. Ignore the fact that has to the heritage of Michigan and our state of papers. Ignore all of that. You can’t say God if you’re going to be the valedictorian of Western High School here in Michigan.

Well, First Liberty Kelly Shackelford for those guys. They’re the nation’s largest legal group dedicated solely to religious liberty. They got involved with that. They got to hold the school officials I said, you might want to reconsider that. Here’s what the law says. Here’s what the courts have said. Here’s what the Constitution says. And so, the school back down, and so she did get to give her valedictory address, and she did get to mention God, but here’s the part. And that’s all good news.

I just got a little commentary here that I have to just point out. Even though the school said, okay, well let her do it, the school said, but this is just a one-time exception. Don’t expect us to follow the Constitution every time something comes up. We’re only doing it because the legal group threatened us. Now that’s a real problem. I mean, this is a one-time exception to do something that’s in the Constitution? And that tells you something really clear about the school officials there, that rather than getting in a lawsuit, they’ll let her do it. It’s a one-time exception. No, this is the Constitution right. It should be every year if a student wants to.

And the second thing was they let her give her space, but they added a caveat. They had this disclaimer saying, “Well, her speech is not endorsed by the school.” Give me a break. Do they say that with anything else in that school? Do they say that when they say oh, the pronouns after the word of the student wants and gender LGBTQ? No, that they say, if you’re going to talk about God, this is not endorsed by the school.

Guys, this is just another of the 1,400,000 indications that the philosophy of government schools is really so bad in so many areas. Yes, there’s good people involved, there’s good teachers, there’s definitely good kids like Elizabeth here. But I mean, just the philosophy that we’re going to give you one-time exception to follow the Constitution because you threatened us. And by the way, this is not a position the school holds that you can say God. That’s just crazy, crazy thinking.

So despite a terrible government school system, the good news is that Elizabeth, stronger her faith, stood up, took on the system, beat the system, got to acknowledge God. Great stuff on the part of Elizabeth. And by the way, thank you First Liberty for being willing to come to the aid to people who want to exercise their constitutional rights. So, really good news out of Westland, Michigan.

This other one that went through it is good news too, and it comes out of Lubbock, Texas. And we talked in previous programs about how Lubbock had a city vote and it was like you guys remember what like 70-30 that the city of Lubbock voted to be an abortion free city?

Tim:

It was a very large percentage. I don’t remember now exactly what the percentage was. But the vast majority of the city upheld that they wanted to be an abortion free zone.

David:

Yeah, it was like the 27th city to become an abortion free city. And it was significant because that’s the home of Texas Tech. And you would think that well, generally most University towns and most state capitals are very liberal. But here is a university town with 30,000 students overwhelmingly they vote that we don’t want abortions in our city anymore at all. And as this happens all across the nation with stuff like this, Planned Parenthood instantly filed suit because there is an abortion clinic there in Lubbock.

And so Planned Parenthood filed suit, it went through the courts. As it got to the courts, the judge says no, Planned Parenthood doesn’t win this. The city banned abortion in the city limits and they actually even in the city ordinance allowed people to sue doctors who perform abortions, and that law is going to stand. Now, that is super significant. It’s not often that Planned Parenthood has been losing cases like this when they challenged these kind of restrictions.

What’s even more amazing is that after that law went into effect, the abortion clinic there in Lubbock actually shut doors. They shut their doors, they would not perform any more abortions, because the law said they can’t, and a Judge upheld that. And I do not recall the last time that I know an abortion clinic is shutting down in a city because of a city ordinance or something like that. But this is really, really significant to me. It’s one of the rare things that I’ve seen across America in the last 15-20 years on the abortion side, where that you actually have abortion clinics shutting their doors because the people in the community said, we don’t want you here anymore.

Tim:

Well, speaking of people and community standing up and doing something, making a difference in their community like we saw in Lubbock, I have an article dealing with something with a southern border. And this was something that took place many, many weeks ago. And so at this point, some of this is already updated in a positive direction. But this was a sheriff from Kinney County, the Sheriff is Brad Coe.

And down in South Texas, the Del Rio area, there’s so much illegal immigration happening across our southern border right now. And at this point, the Biden administration has said we’re not really going to do anything about it. The Biden administration announced they’re going to have 87,000 new IRS agents, more than doubling the size of the IRS, which the IRS targets American citizens and trying to take more money from American citizens. So he didn’t want to put more agents on the southern border to protect Americans from the inflow of, right, whoever’s coming across the border witness…

David:

Did you say just doubled the size there?

Tim:

Yes, it’s more than doubling the size of the IRS.

David:

Oh, gosh.

Tim:

Correct.

David:

And IRS, we heard recently had SWAT teams as part of the IRS. Why do you need a SWAT team for tax enforcement?

Tim:

We’re talking 87,000 agents. And when you’re talking agents, a lot of those people are going to be armed. Yeah. So it’s really silly to see the current presidential administration, their mishandling of the border. And I’m saying it’s really silly to see, it’s really devastating. It’s a crisis. It’s a major problem. It’s not really silly. It’s really dumb on a lot of levels. But let me back up to the sheriff from Kinney County.

So he’s down in the Del Rio area. And this sheriff said that we’re going to do something locally. Said we can’t solve the national problem, but we’re going to do something locally. He says, I’m going to start here. If we catch them, we’re going to start prosecuting these people that are trespassing on your property. We’re going to hold these people accountable. And so one of the things they’re doing is they’re going to charge illegal aliens with child endangerment, with criminal trespass. And this was before.

Governor Abbott then came out it just a week or two after this and said that Texas, we’re going to start actually following what this sheriff for saying, that Texas is going to start following this policy, and the state of Texas is going to start criminally charging these people with what they’re doing. And the criminal charges go along with six months to a year in jail. But what’s really great to me, the good news about this article is you had people who were looking at so many federal issues, and they said we can’t solve the federal problem, but we can solve this problem right here: we will start locally. And this is the attitude that we are seeing more and more happening around the nation.

And one of the things his article highlights is that, looking at the crisis on the southern border, the Border Patrol detects a daily average of more than 1,000 illegal aliens who evade capture every single day along the southern border. And they said it’s impossible to really determine how high that number might be, but the estimate is at least 1,000 people a day that are coming into America undetected. So the estimates are we’re capturing or by the end of this year, we will have caught roughly 2 million people that have come across the southern border. And we know unfortunately, many of those are being turned loose under Biden administration policies. What’s super interesting about this is the Border Patrol, and this is down in the Del Rio section, the Border Patrol section down there, they are have apprehended illegal aliens from 70 countries. Now again, this is significant. Because one of the things we hear as people are seeking asylum, when you are seeking asylum, you go to the nearest nation to you that will take you in. Kind of a newsflash, there are not 70 nations in Central America, so you have people literally coming from around the world coming across the southern border, and the Border Patrol has identified the number of sex traffickers is astronomical this year what they’ve already caught as opposed to last year. Or criminals in general, this year, they’ve caught more than 813 convicted criminals compared to 161 in all of 2020.

So already, we’re seeing this unbelievable influx coming across the border. But this is part of, again, that the Biden policy, the White House administration policy difference, on the southern border is totally different. But here again, I’m going to go back to the good news. The good news is, you now have people saying that we are not going to wait for the federal government to do something. We are going to stand up. We are going to take matters into our own hands. We’re going to make a difference where we can. Guys, this is encouraging, as we are seeing more and more people around America not waiting for the federal government to solve problems where they’re saying we’re going to do something.

And so man, major props to Sheriff Brad Coe from down in Kinney County, awesome job standing up saying you have to do something. Of course, Governor Abbott came out a couple weeks after that, and said that he’s going to protect Texans where he can. And this is one of those things where we’re going to give honor to whom honor is due and Governor Abbott made a really good decision saying that they’re going to start prosecuting people who are breaking the law coming into America to help protect Texans. This is really good news.

Rick:

Yeah, exactly right, give honor to where honor is due. You guys know, I’ve been a very outspoken critic of Governor Abbott over the last year. But here’s a good one that he’s done, and we obviously want to thank him for that. We got time before the break for one more piece of good news. If you got quick one, Tim?

Tim:

Yeah, let’s highlight this coach from up in Virginia who a couple weeks ago stood up and he’s a PE teacher at elementary school. And he stood up and they were encouraging him to embrace a lot of this transgender, and human sexuality and gender ideology in elementary school for the students. And he said, I can’t do it, I can’t lie to a child and tell them there’s something they aren’t. He said, I’m a teacher, but I serve God first. And now this is kind of become a very big ordeal.

But Tanner Krause is this guy’s name. And he stood up, he now actually, it’s been on 60 Minutes, it’s been on basically every news outlet with what this guy has done. And he identified, he said, look, for me to say this, it’s like lying to a child, it’s abuse to a child, and it’s sinning against our God. And the school disciplined him. They wanted to remove him for this. And this is from the Loudoun County School District. He’s at Leesburg Elementary. And what’s interesting about this, ADF has now picked up the case, because he had the audacity to say that boys are boys and girls are girls, and especially for elementary students, as they’re just picking whatever pronouns they feel like in whatever gender they want to be that day, and as all this is unfolding, he’s saying, look, that’s being dishonest. It’s not loving the kids. We’re lying to the kids.

Well, this got him put on leave from his school for, again, having the audacity to do something as terrible as telling a boy that he was a boy or girl that she was a girl. The good news is Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the great religious liberty law firms in the nation is representing him. And they have a very good track record. Right now, I don’t have the latest update on the case. But it’s certainly something we expect to see him reinstated.

But here’s the good news. Again, we are seeing individuals from around the nation standing up and engaging in the fights that need to be fought. And this is something, dad, you already pointed out, so often in public schools, we see so much brokenness, so many problems, so much nonsense coming from a broken system. And it’s not because there are not good people. There again, we would point to somebody like Tanner Krause and say this is a great guy who is elementary PE teacher. This guy is awesome, this coach is awesome, that he’s standing up for what is obviously biologically true for what is biblically correct.

David:

Are you telling me he’s following the science?

Tim:

He, in fact, might be following the science as opposed to gender dysphoria for a second, third or fourth grade or whatever the case is. But this again, that this guy’s, this is where I get encouraged. In the midst of the battles we’re seeing, I’m encouraged by how many people are standing up and saying, you know what, we’re not compromising truth anymore, we’re not backing down anymore. We’re not going to be bullied. We’re going to stand up for what is right, for what is true, for what is biblical, for what is constitutional.

And so Tanner Krause, man, we are praying for you. And I would encourage everybody listening right now, Tanner Krause, is somebody we have to be praying for. In the midst of many of these other people that are going through persecution that are having these challenges, we need to pray for these people as we find out their stories as we can identify them by name. But Tanner Krause, man, we are praying for you. We’re so proud of you for standing up trying to make a difference and helping these young kids. And this is really good news coming out of a school in Virginia that there is a coach like Tanner Krause, who is going to be honest about the science, but also stand up for biblical truth.

Rick:

Is so good, Tim, and also just the fact that exactly what he said that it’s not love to lie to someone, right, that being honest in this way is truly loving these folks that are struggling with this. So just such a great story, thanks so much for that one. Let’s take a quick break, guys. We’ll be right back. We’ve got a lot more good news to get through today. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have here at WallBuilders called The American Story. For years, people have been asking us to do a history book, and we finally done it. We start with Christopher Columbus and go roughly through Abraham Lincoln. And one of the things that that so often we hear today are about the imperfections of America, or how so many people in America that used to be celebrated or honored really aren’t good or honorable people.

One of the things we acknowledge quickly in the book is that the entire world is full of people who are sinful and need a savior, because the Bible even tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And yet what we see through history, and certainly is evident in America is how a perfect God uses imperfect people and does great things through them. The story of America is not the story of perfect people. But you see time and time again how God got involved in the process and use these imperfect people to do great things that impacted the entire world from America. To find out more, go to wallbuilders.com and check out The American Story.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. It’s Good News Friday today. Let’s dive right back in. David, what’s the next piece of good news?

David:

Rick, I want to go to a unanimous Supreme Court decision. I think we’ve covered some of this a couple of weeks ago. I think Tim covered some of this. And it dealt with the thing we’ve seen of Biden administration being aggressively anti-Second Amendment. Last couple of sessions, we’ve seen states passing what are called Red Flag laws allow them to go into take guns from people they think might become a problem someday.

And so we looked at it from Second Amendment standpoint. But there’s another aspect of this case that I think is super important here. And it goes back to a clause of the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, that’s actually part of the due process clauses from the Fourth to the Eighth Amendments. But the Fourth Amendment says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”

Now, this is a super important amendment to the Constitution. It goes back to things that happened in 1761. And before 1761, the British were using search warrants, but the search warrants were they gave a blank warrant to the officer and said, go look in the home and if you see something that’s wrong, fill out the search warrant, and that’s what you were looking for all the time. So they go with these blank search warrants, so don’t have anything specifically listed, they would dig around in your home till they found something they thought was illegal, then they would fill in the search warrant and they say that’s what I came for. They would take it and you would end up in court somewhere.

And so in 1761, James Otis, who is a great Founding Father, he was the mentor of Sam Adams and John Hancock and John Adams and these guys, in 1761, he argued in a case in the British courts against what were called writs of assistance. And a writ of assistance was a blank search warrant, it assisted the officials to find out if something was wrong. So he argued against this, he says look, a man’s home is his castle. You don’t just go into somebody’s house because you want to. In British law, we have this principle that a man’s home is his castle, and you can’t go in and just search because you hope something’s wrong, or you think something might be wrong, or you’re going to search and see if something’s wrong.

And so the result of that was, and this is what we had the Fourth Amendment for was you cannot go into anybody’s home and look for anything at all unless you have a search warrant, and unless that search warrant has been brought to a Judge, and the Judge has seen substantial evidence, and the people who gave that evidence are giving their oath that they saw it. In other words, this is the kind of stuff you would expect in a trial. If you have a trial, the witnesses are sworn in, they give testimony, they take an oath, and yes, they’re telling the truth. And so you can’t even have a search warrant if it doesn’t have substantial evidence behind it. Well, that came out of what were called writs of assistance back in 1761.

So what happened in this case that was covered a couple weeks ago, we talked about Second Amendment. The police went out and took guns out of the house. But the deal was, it was a warrantless search. They did not have any kind of a search warrant to go into that house and take guns. And so what’s significant is the Supreme Court in a 9-0 decision, and that means the liberals on the court, the moderates on the court and the conservatives on the court all agreed you can’t go into somebody’s house with a warrantless search. You can’t do this. And actually, they’ve allowed warrantless searches since 1973 in what they called a Community Caretaking Doctrine.

They said, you know, if there’s an accident, a vehicle accident, or police can look in the car and see if something might have caused it or whatever without having a warrant. Well, how does it go from looking at a car wreck to going into someone’s home and taking guns? And so over the last really 45 years, the police have expanded this in many areas to now these warrantless searches. And now the Supreme Court has put their foot down and say, nope, we have a specific clause in the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment that does not allow this to happen, and we’re all agreed, liberal, conservative, moderate, you’re not going into somebody’s home without a search warrant. That Super good news for the entire nation when we have that political spectrum come together and say the Constitution is the standard, and we’re going to uphold it.

Rick:

Alright, so good news on the Supreme Court level. And like I said, David, I mean, that’s good news for the whole country, regardless of what your perspective is, and upholding those constitutional due process rights that we have. Alright, Tim, next piece of good news.

Tim:

Now I will speaking of the whole country, there was a survey, actually in May, there was a poll that was done and it was asking people where they stand on the issue of transgender athletes. Should people that are biological males, but identify as girls be allowed to play in girls sports? And it goes both ways. If someone is a girl and identifies a boy, should she be allowed to play in boys sports? Where’s that break down?

And so what’s interesting about this poll is, first of all, 62% of Americans oppose allowing transgender girls to play on biological girls’ sports team. And again, the transgender girl is someone who’s a biological male, but identifies as a female. And so 62% of Americans say we don’t support that. Here’s what’s really interesting to me though.

One of the things they do in this poll is they break down where the demographic support comes from, the percentage of support. So 62% of Americans, first of all, say that transgender athletes should play on teams that match their birth gender, so they match their actual biology. Only 34% of Americans said that people should be able to play on whatever team they want, regardless of their biology. So that number is a lot smaller than sometimes what we might get the impression of based on where the news is. Here’s where it gets interesting though.

First of all, this is a political breakdown. So among Republicans, 86% of Republicans said that you should play on the sports team of your biology. 63% of Independence, which is almost the number of the poll, 62% of Americans is what said they believe that people should play on the sports teams that aligns with their biology, so how you were born. Well, 63% of Independence supports that. Only 41% of Democrats support biological boys only being able to play on biological boys teams. But that number is actually higher than what many people might realize, because the Democrat Party is very split on this issue, so just kind of interesting demographics on that.

But then the one to me that’s the most telling, if you look at 18 to 29 year olds, they have a 59% support for maintaining that biological boys can only play on boys teams, not on girls teams. Now, that’s 59%, so that’s a little below the national average. But here’s where it’s interesting. If you look at people that are 50 to 64 years old, now, we just talked about the 18 to 29 year olds, so 59% of 18 to 29 year olds, among 50 to 64 year olds, 58% support biological boys having to play on boys’ teams. So you’re talking about the younger generation of rising leaders has a more scientific, conservative, biblical perspective on this issue than does the older age group and in this case, what would be probably for most of them, their parents.

And we’ve talked about it many times, it’s interesting when you see that kids have a better constitutional, biblical, even a theologically conservative perspective that is different than their parents. It’s something that’s very interesting to note, it’s one of the many reasons we talked about the times, that we believe America is in the midst of some kind of awakening, that God is awakening people, God is stirring up people, God is raising up people.

And even though we can look at his younger generation and see that there definitely are some theological issues, there definitely are some moral issues that are problems, that we certainly want to help guide people in biblical truth and help them have a biblical worldview, it’s interesting that on areas where we’re you might think they would be in a totally different perspective, they actually are better in some areas than we think. And let me give one more piece of good news as we’re wrapping the show up.

There is a man in Huntsville, Alabama, his name is Rodney Smith, he started a lawn service organization, a service back in 2015. And it was called the Raising Men Lawn Care Service. Now, the fact it says “Raising Men” already caught my attention. What does that mean? How are you raising men?

Well, back in 2015, he decided he was going to start the service and they’re going to mow lawns free of charge for the elderly, the disabled, the single parents and the veterans. And the reason was one day he was driving home, he saw an elderly man really struggling to mow his yard, he decided to stop and help and he mowed the elderly man’s yard and decided I want to do this more. His goal was then to mow 40 lawns by the end of that year for the elderly, the disabled, veteran, single parents. And he completed 40 lawns so quickly. He decided he would up to 100, well, in a month and a half, he’d done 100 yards.

And it continued to challenge him that he thought I want to help other people understand how great it is to help people in need. I want them to learn what it means to serve and give. So he started Raising Men Lawn Care Service. And initially, he was decided to recruit about 30 or 40 kids from Huntsville, and by and large, they were boys, which is why it was Raising Men Lawn Care Service, he was trying to help these boys raised to be men. And he gave them a 50 yard challenge and asked him to mow 50 lawns free of charge for people in their community as a way to give back.

Well, this home went not only well in his community, it went viral, and people from around the nation have started participating in this challenge. And so one of the things they do now is for people that embrace this challenge, they post on social media they’re going to do it, they have a sign up talking about it. And so as they mow the lawns, they will post their success and so they actually get awarded from the Raising Men Lawn Care Service. After 10 lawns, they’re awarded an orange shirt with some writing on it; after 20 lawns, a green shirt, blue shirt after 30, a red shirt after 40, after 50 lawns, the kids are awarded a black shirt plus they are personally delivered a brand new lawn mower from Rodney for mowing the 50 yards.

So guys, so cool to see an individual deciding he wants to get involved to help give back, serve his community, and it’s gone viral. People from around the nation are now helping serve people in need. This is really good news.

Rick:

Now how many lawns do I have to mow to get the new lawnmower?

Tim:

Only 50, but it’s probably a push lawnmower. So keep that in mind.

Rick:

Very good news today, guys. Thanks so much to David and Tim for compiling all the good news for us today. Thank you for listening. Be sure and check out more on our website wallbuilderslive.com. We appreciate you listening today to WallBuilders Live.