Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Guest (Male): Yesterday, connecting past. Today, with an outer view. Tomorrow, to understand future. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is the program that covers the current contemporary social issues in the light of our history to understand our yesterday, to live fully today and tomorrow. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow with Inseong Kim.

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong Kim from Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. We have a very special guest today. Mr. Peter Gentala is with us, and he is the president of Center for Arizona Policy. Thank you so much for being with us.

Peter Gentala: Hi, Inseong. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Inseong J Kim: I'm very excited about this Center for Arizona Policy. Without this organization, I don't know where we'd be. It's been an amazing organization helping put us together on life issues, family issues, education, and all matters that are so important to us. Thank you so much for serving for this organization.

Would you share with us a little bit about yourself, how you got involved in Center for Arizona Policy, and for the first-time listener, share with us about what Center for Arizona Policy organization does?

Peter Gentala: Sure. I'm a native of Arizona and I'm an attorney. I did my training at Regent University Law School, which is in Virginia Beach. Then I was blessed to be able to come back to my home state and practice law. I started at Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a ministry that, among other places in the United States, was located in Scottsdale.

I was able to work there for the original president, Alan Sears, and for the man who built their litigation department, Benjamin Bull. The mission of ADF is representing Christians so that they can share the gospel freely. I was able to do that for several years and then I connected through Alliance Defending Freedom with Len Munsil, who was the original president of Center for Arizona Policy.

We started a conversation about me going there, and I did join CAP. I worked there for almost five years from 2003 to 2008. That was just a real honor. I got to work for Len and then after he left to run for governor, Cathi took over as the president. She and I worked together for many years there.

I've just stayed very close to Center for Arizona Policy through the years. My wife and I are supporters. I used to work at the Arizona legislature, so I would see Cathi at the legislature and her team. She's just such a dynamic force for Arizona families and for the truth. It's a ministry I've always cared a lot about.

I was able to spend about 10 years focusing on child safety as an attorney and really focusing on those issues. That's what I was doing when Cathi decided that her season was over and she was ready to hand over the reins to someone else at Center for Arizona Policy. So I started a conversation about going back to my old team there. It's been like coming home. I've been now the president at CAP for a little over a year and it's just been a wonderful experience.

Center for Arizona Policy is the sweet spot for people of faith being engaged in public life in the state of Arizona. It focuses on the issues that matter most for living together in community. That's the sanctity of human life, a respect that each of us are made in God's image, marriage and family, which is our foundation for our present and our future, and religious freedom.

This is one that particularly I have seen that the Lord has done a work on my heart. Originally when I started working on religious freedom, I saw it more as something that was defensive and more focusing on Christian communities. Now I realize that it really is integral to a Christian being able to serve in their community, being able to effectively love their neighbor.

The passage of scripture that has really resonated with me about religious freedom is Christ's questioning of the lawyer about who is his neighbor and then also the question about what is the greatest commandment. Of course, it's loving the Lord with everything that's within us, but then the second commandment is close to the first, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself. I realize that my freedom and ability to serve Jesus and to love Jesus is inseparable from my freedom to serve my neighbor. That's religious liberty in the United States.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. I came from South Korea to have more freedom. There was a time that I felt like there's oppression toward Christianity in America. It didn't make sense to me. I saw the Center for Arizona Policy organization growing since then, and I first-hand observed it since this organization actually helping Christians to have more freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom to exercise our faith.

Peter Gentala: Absolutely. Of course, exercising our faith means getting involved and caring about others. We're not interested in just church on Sunday morning. We are interested about being able to share the gospel and live the gospel out. That's powerful to us.

The way we accomplish prioritizing those issues like life, marriage, and family, and religious liberty, is by advancing public policy, affecting elections. Public policy and elections are very closely tied together in the state of Arizona. Acting with the church, the local body of Christ, which is the expression of God's plan for the world and how his people can share discipleship with the world, and then by advancing partnerships.

That's part of our conversation, that when we see Christians in the community that should be supported or are speaking out, it is our goal to equip them and advance the partnerships that are there as the life-giving coalitions in the state of Arizona.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. Social media has its own platform to changing the landscape of our conversations and always just painting in the wrong picture for what we do. I think it is important for us to educate our audiences and what Center for Arizona Policy does rather than one side painting a wrong picture about who we are.

Peter Gentala: Yes, and that's changed through the years. The first time I worked at Center for Arizona Policy, we had weekly radio broadcasts which were helpful, but that was before the days of social media. Now you can get the information out just like your broadcast here has both radio and podcast components. We are blessed to live in a time when there's an information revolution occurring. It seems like every year there's a new better way to get the message out. We're excited to be able to have this platform and then the platform that will come in the future also.

Inseong J Kim: That's very exciting because it's kind of like how Jesus came down on earth to communicate with us. We have amazing messages, but it has to be communicated the way that young people understand and get engaged in. I think that's very important. I'm very excited about how it's going to be spread out to take over our conversation in a very wholesome way.

Peter Gentala: 100%. It's been exciting to watch just to watch that get faster and faster, the ability to communicate. It doesn't mean that I'm necessarily good at it, but it's that sense of this is the time that we live in. God has called us to use these communication mediums and to do everything we can.

Of course, I know who is good at it, and it's the rising generation. Young people understand how important it is to be connected by technology. I think one of my roles at my stage of life is to help them be good stewards of that and then also encourage them that it's their turn also. The Bible says that one generation praises the Lord to the next, and so the baton is being handed to them for that reason.

Inseong J Kim: Because communicating with their language, they can resonate. I think that's very critical. So there is information about Arizona Voters Dot the Prop 139 in the fall of 2024. Please share a little bit about that.

Peter Gentala: Yes. In 2024, there was a ballot measure on the ballot and Arizona voters changed the state constitution to create a personal right to abortion. This is a very concerning change. It happened by a simple majority vote in Arizona.

We have direct democracy in our state. That means every two years our laws and our leaders are on the ballot. All it takes is 51% to pass something. What passed in 2024 is known as Proposition 139. It is very damaging legal language in terms of it doesn't protect human life. It gives an individual right to destroy human life, preborn children. It's a concerning thing.

The goal for all Christians has always been respecting the image of God in ourselves and in others. This Proposition 139 is a difficult moment, but it's also time for clear thinking. We need to understand that God has called us to serve in this environment, and that means this community environment and the legal environment.

When you have a vote, it shows you where your neighbors are and shows you where the community is. A fairly broad majority decided to not protect children in the law. That means we have work to do both on the community front, changing hearts and minds, and on the legal front. As a community, it's time to focus on making sure we have a culture that welcomes all life from the very beginning to the very end and every step in between.

Inseong J Kim: I think the conversation about life sounds like we're separating mom from the baby and that tension is miscommunicating to all of us. Unborn cannot hear the voice or the messages, but the person who are pregnant can hear the messages and they are hearing the wrong messages and don't understand what that means. The only thing we hear is slogan, "it's your right, it's your right, it's your right." When women are in the crisis, they don't know how to process these slogans.

I think it's very important for all of us to know that that woman who has a child is made in image of God. Therefore she will value her own baby. That's what I think it's missing in our society, that we don't connect those people together. We kind of separate voices.

Peter Gentala: Yes. The normal joy, it's hard for some people to understand because they think about the way they were born or they think about the way they respond when someone in their community is going to have a baby. It's a time of joy, it's a time of celebration. Well, there are some women, clearly there's quite a few women in Arizona, when they discover they're pregnant, it's anguishing for them. They're concerned. They're in crisis. They can't imagine a future. They can't imagine how it's going to change their lives.

My friend Josiah Friedman, who leads the ministry Voices for the Voiceless, has said abortion is a failure of community. For that woman, she's separated from a supportive community. There might be a lot of reasons for that, but she just doesn't feel like there's going to be anyone there that can help her take the role on as mother, take the role on as nurturer for the future.

When we have a community that is resilient and strong and encourages that, it can make a powerful difference because we may have the right to choose now in our state constitution, but we can still come along and share. You can still make a choice that will be good for you and for your baby, a choice that really will help you honor the image of God in yourself and honor the image of God in your unborn child. That's really what's most important right now, to reach some of those.

I was thinking our state studies the number of abortions that happen in the state and it releases a report every year. That report has some really interesting information about who is choosing abortion and how they're choosing to have abortions, whether it's a chemical abortion or a medical surgical procedure.

One of the facts that has stayed the same ever since Arizona has been tracking this is that abortion rates are highest among women who do not have a married father in the picture, a husband that they're married to. The statistics are really strong. it's in the mid-80s, 84, 85% of abortions occur when there isn't an intact family that's there.

This question of life, making sure that our community is a safe place for everyone to protect them as people made in God's image, is inseparable from the question of family and marriage. Without strong families, there will be skyrocketing rates of abortion because abortion is the choice that gets made by people who do not have the support of a family.

Inseong J Kim: So we do have this vicious cycle. We began at eighty and then there's dysfunctional family. The children grow up in the dysfunctional family. It’s hard to difficult grasp of what is image of God means, so they don't value themselves. Man and woman both, when they don't value themselves and then on top of that sexual revolution came in, this whole formula doesn't help us to understand about this abortion issues.

I'm learning over the years that preaching that we all made in image of God, man and woman, because somehow we can separate those people who experience abortion are not made in image of God because they made a horrible choice. Bring them in, including them also young generations, Gen Z. It was millennial now Gen Z to understand themselves are made in image of God. I think that's very critical message in our time.

Peter Gentala: Oh, it's critical. This is also the message of the gospel. We are all falling short before God. There are many sins and abortion is just one of them. It's a very terrible sin because it robs, it takes away someone who is made in God's image and it robs them of their future and what God could have done through their life.

Yet there's forgiveness for that and we have so much of a rich understanding of God changing his people. His own disciples were flawed, even dangerous people before God got a hold of their lives. Think of Paul persecuting the church, trying to stop the truth from moving forward.

If you think about the modern history of the church, slavery throughout the Western world was abolished by the efforts of Christians. The Christians who made the deepest mark were Christians who themselves had been complicit in slavery like John Newton in England. He had who knows how many lives he had destroyed before God changed his heart and radically saved him. That's why he says he was a wretch in the hymn "Amazing Grace," "saved a wretch like me."

On his tombstone, he shared movingly about just how he himself had participated in slavery. It was something that was always there for him, but it also made him a more powerful trophy of God's grace. The same kind of incredible redemption is possible. This is crucial because of Roe v. Wade, the way it changed the legal landscape in the United States. I'm sure we wouldn't have voted the way we did in Arizona in 2024 without 50 years of Roe v. Wade first. It made a major cultural impact across several generations and even among professing Christians.

There's some real harm that has been done on this issue and there are many that have turned to Christ like John Newton did, but there's still more of a sanctification journey there. There's a need to experience the healing for what abortion has taken away from them and harmed them and the way the enemy has used abortion in their life in the past.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely. I think more than 80 million people are post-abortive populations. I think it's convenient for us to put the cultural guilt on them so nobody comes out and have a testimony. Like you said, there are many pro-lifers are post-abortive because they've gone through, they know what it is, and they come out and fighting against abortion.

With the legally combatting at the same time as a church, we have to bring them in to show them they are valued. They are the made in image of God and bring them in and help them to not to be in the social guilt that we placed on. I think that's very critical. That's what I'm learning more and more about this because I didn't know what was going on. I really appreciate the Center for Arizona Policy. They're on the frontline and combatting a spiritual war plus the legally fighting.

Peter Gentala: Here we are in the second quarter of 2026. The Arizona legislature's in session and our policy team is there every single day. They're there today focusing on all the bills that are dropped. This year's a state record for the most proposed legislation ever introduced in the legislative session.

Normally the bills always start with two, for example, in the House of Representatives, so it would be the first bill would be 2001 and then they just start counting up from there. Well, this year they reached into the fours for the first time. That's a lot of legislation, thousands and thousands of bills.

Our team looks at all of them and just to watch carefully to make sure. Like most legislative processes, there's a lot of technical detail there. A bill can change over time with amendment, so there's a lot there. It takes a dedicated team to really focus on that. Then it also takes the focus on supporting the men and women who serve in our legislature and their staff.

I had the opportunity for seven years to be a staffer on staff at the House of Representatives. It's just like any other workplace. There are men and women who are there, they're doing the best job that they can, and they need support and encouragement as well.

That's something that we are really excited about getting the church engaged in at Center for Arizona Policy. We have a program called the Church Ambassador Network where we're encouraging pastors to meet their lawmakers, to actually have a personal relationship with them and starting with the lawmaker for their district. It's good for them to meet all of them, but especially the lawmaker that's responsible. Our politics is designed to focus on the local area first, so why would we not also treat our ministry relationships that way? That means investing in the life of the men and women who represent your district.

Inseong J Kim: Absolutely, because there's some disconnect of what's happening in the capitol and us, that we are not connecting the dot clearly. Education is the really critical component of this supporting Center for Arizona Policy, that we want to know more about it because a majority of us, whether we are not engaged in or we don't know. Please share a little bit more about how can church again engaged and individually can be engaged in Center for Arizona Policy.

Peter Gentala: Well, we'd love for everyone who's not on our mailing list yet to go to azpolicy.org and join our mailing list. Every Friday we put out an informative email that talks about what's happened at the Arizona legislature and what key legal and policy developments and even cultural issues that have happened in the prior week.

Then we have a prayer email that we encourage people who really want to be invested as a matter of prayer in good government in Arizona to join that. Every week we have prayer points about the key issues and the key public servants that they can be praying for. We pray for everyone. We don't pray for just one side of the political aisle. we pray for everybody because they are all ministers to us, it says in the book of Romans.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you so much for being with us and thank you so much for what you do.

Peter Gentala: My pleasure, Inseong. Thank you. It's good to be with you.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you so much and thank you for listening from yesterday, today and tomorrow. Please share this message if you listen to this program and share a message about Center for Arizona Policy and be more engaged in. Thank you for being with us. We'll be back next week. Thank you.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Yesterday Today Tomorrow with Inseong Kim. You can also find more from Inseong Kim at inseongkim.org. That's I-N-S-E-O-N-G-K-I-M dot O-R-G. Thank you for listening to the show.

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