Defending Faith, Family and Freedom Podcast

Guest (Male): You're listening to Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom featuring Gary Bauer, senior vice president of Public Policy at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. And now, here's Gary.

Gary Bauer: Hi, this is Gary Bauer, senior vice president for Public Policy and Culture at the James Dobson Family Institute. Welcome to our podcast, Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom. I'm glad you're with us. Please tell your friends about us. Well, I probably sound tired. I am tired. Um you can imagine the evening I had. I'm talking to you now uh the day after a very consequential election that did not go well. So um I was up well after midnight last night uh doing interviews. I don't know why I punish myself like this. Not only interviews with um American media, but even with some foreign media.

And guess what, folks? They're uh they're just like the media here. Um I you probably most of you probably know this. I I grew up in Kentucky, but I I live in Virginia and Carol and I and our family have lived here for decades. So Virginia really feels like home. And Virginia, you know, is not just any state. I mean, Virginia was one of the the the great sources of our founding fathers. Many of them were born in Virginia. Many of them were molded in their early years by uh what they experienced in this great state.

George Washington, the father of America, the father of our country, the the first president of the United States was a Virginian. Thomas Jefferson, one of the authors of uh our Declaration of Independence uh was a Virginian. People like James Madison and Patrick Henry um I I can go on and on. When Carol and I first uh moved to Virginia, it was um sort of a centrist state, but leaning a little bit to the right. And we have watched uh as this state has changed right in front of our eyes. Uh it's been in slow motion.

It you know, it doesn't happen overnight, but it did happen. And Virginia's population looks nothing like the population of Virginia that Carol and I saw four or five decades ago. And with a different population, the state has changed in the way it votes, in the culture of the state. Um so last night, yesterday in the election, the state of Virginia the one of the founding, you know, treasures uh put into its state constitution a right to abortion in all nine months of the pregnancy. That not only all nine months, but because of the way the referendum was worded, your 13-year-old daughter can go get an abortion without your knowledge or permission now in the state of Virginia.

But but the the the people that drafted these things, they didn't stop there. They also enshrined in the state constitution a um a a new amendment that says that if if the federal government, if the Supreme Court at some point in the future uh decides that marriage really should be only the union of a man and a woman. In other words, if it overturns the previous Supreme Court decision that said marriage can be two men or two women, that if that happens in Virginia, same-sex marriage would still be allowed. So the state of the founders of America, the founders who built the country on the biblical principles they were so familiar with, has now enshrined in their state constitution a right for men to marry men and for abortions to happen from the first week of pregnancy to the last month of pregnancy.

I imagine the the founding fathers are literally twirling in their graves at this development. I um last night when I was crawling into bed and it was also something I thought about this morning when I got up. I I was imagining what the phone call would have sounded like last night if Dr. Dobson were still alive. Or maybe he would have been kind to me and and not made the phone call until this morning. And um I I can almost hear his voice. Basically, he would be saying, Gary, what is happening to our country? What is going on?

And then he would say inevitably, what are we going to do about it? And I can tell you something else that I would hear in his voice, anger about the failure of the church in America to do what it's supposed to do, which is not only bring people to Christ, but it is supposed to educate and lead and teach the flock. I mean, the flock perishes without a shepherd. And pastors and priests are supposed to be shepherds of believers. Jim and was complaining about the failure of the church to do this in America for decades ago.

I mean, it was a it was a continual theme in in many of his radio shows and uh in many of the things that that he wrote over the years. The Jim and I traveled all over America in several election cycles. I bet most of you are too young to know that or maybe you're old enough to once have known it, but you've since forgotten it. Jim Dobson, who some people say, well, you know, Jim was not a political person. No, he was a an involved Christian that cared and loved uh America. And uh he regularly got involved in what some pastors are saying, oh, well, that's a political debate.

He and I traveled all over the country on the issue of same-sex marriage. I mean, we we went to 20 or 30 states. We we spoke at rallies. We had to get we had to hire protection for ourselves because of the threats. And we contributed to state after state in America voting down same-sex marriage. And eventually, of course, we lost at the Supreme Court. But I I know that when Jim would have made that phone call to me, he wouldn't have said, oh, goodness gracious, Gary, the Republicans lost. That's not what he would have said.

Jim did not first and foremost think of himself as a Republican. He first and foremost thought of himself as a follower of Jesus Christ. And what he wanted the church to do was to approach issues that have a moral core to them and are being debated in the public square. He wanted the church to lead the flock to understand why they had to to to jump into these issues and and do something about it. So this is what I want to clarify. If you saw the headlines, all the headlines are saying uh that Republicans lost last night, that's not really the most important thing I want you to put your arms around.

We lost. Yeah, you and me, followers of Jesus Christ, we lost this week. Now I know you believe just like I do that all of our children are made in the image of God and and they ought to be welcomed into the world and they ought to have a seat at the table and be protected by all the promises of our founding documents. If if that's what you believe and that's what I believe, we lost because we just elected the most pro-abortion group of House and Senate candidates in the history of the United States. Think about that.

That's what just happened. It's not that there are fewer Republicans. The headline is we just elected more pro-abortion senators and congressmen. If you think as I do that God created the the the institution of marriage as being the union of one man and one woman and that our children ought to be protected from uh homosexual indoctrination and graphic information about homosexuality in the first and second and third grades. Uh if you believe that, and I trust that you do, uh you and I just lost. The the the people who just won the election are the most aggressive LGBTQ advocates ever elected to the United States Congress.

Some of them are even pastors who hang out the gay pride flag outside their churches. What? But that's who we just elected. Now what other issues were impacted this week in in the voting? I believe the Jewish people are God's covenant people. I believe that uh God actually had a conversation with Abram, who then became Abraham in the desert and said to him, uh I will be your God. You will be my people. I will bless those who uh bless you and I will curse those who curse you. I I believe, I trust you do too, that that covenant relationship still exists.

If you are as horrified as I am about the growing ranks in our country of antisemitism if if you believe that Israel has a right to exist as the one and only one Jewish nation in the world, you and I lost this week. We lost, not the Republicans. The important thing is we lost. We just elected the biggest group of anti-Israel, antisemitic congressmen and senators in the history of our country. El Sayed in Michigan was just elected as the first Muslim in the United States Senate. And my friends, I am telling you right now, I probably won't live to see it, but you may see El Sayed elected as president of the United States.

This guy is sharp as a tack. He knows how to articulate his views. He's winsome in many ways. He can take hate and put it in a beautiful package and sell it to you. And he's emerging at a time when the population of America is changing every day as we have fewer and fewer Christians and more and more Muslims in America. Now there are a lot of Muslims that have come to America to get away from the kind of radical Islam that exists in countries like Iran and Iraq and Syria and Libya and Egypt, other places in the Middle East.

And they come here to to just practice their faith peacefully and get away from that. He's not one of those. He's one of the guys they're trying to get away from. But yet out of pride of seeing a Muslim run for office, Muslims in Michigan turned out in incredible numbers to elect him while Christians stayed home and failed to come out and vote to the Christian that was on the ballot in Michigan. If if you believe those things about Israel and Islam and so forth, we lost last night. If you believe America was founded on biblical principles, on Judeo-Christian ideas, on the belief that liberty comes from the God of the Bible, not government, you and I just lost last night.

We just put anti-Christian bigots, left-wing Christian imposters, radical Islamists, and radical Marxists in massive numbers in the House of Representatives and in the United States Senate. Now if you are under the impression in the wake of the election that uh this was all about politics or that uh boy, this was a bad night for Republicans, you're missing the major point. This was a bad night for Christians. This was a bad night for believing Jews. This was a bad night for America. And the impact of what just happened is going to negatively impact our Christian faith, our Christian families, and the freedom that we hold dear.

And unless the church wakes up soon uh I will someday down the road be doing a last podcast because the things I'll say probably won't be legal to say anymore. We're well on our way to history recording that it was this generation that ended up being the generation unwilling or unable or too cowardly to step up and defend the United States of America, one nation under God, the shining city on a hill that the founders gave us and that every previous generation of Americans have sacrificed even to the point of death in order to preserve for us.

Are we going to do the same thing for our children and grandchildren? At JDFI, we hope and pray we will. But you are the only ones that can answer the question. Thanks for being with me, my friends. I'll be back soon.

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