Listen to Louis Barnett and Jacob Barr talk about about the opportunity for passionate prolife people to run for political office.
Summary
This is Jacob Barr, and in this episode of the Pro-Life Team Podcast, I had an engaging conversation with Lou about his extensive involvement in the pro-life political arena. Lou shared his journey in the pro-life movement, starting from his young age and leading up to his active role in politics. He expressed his commitment to supporting pro-life candidates and his involvement with pro-life centers in Sacramento and Maryland.
Lou highlighted the importance of having conversations with people about pro-life issues rather than confronting them aggressively. He emphasized the need for pro-life advocates in political offices, not just as supporters but as leaders who can influence decisions, especially on issues like school insurance policies that could affect abortion funding.
We discussed the challenges in encouraging people to run for office and the necessity for pro-life candidates to be well-versed in various political aspects beyond the pro-life issue. Lou mentioned the importance of understanding the responsibilities and time commitment required for holding office.
Lou also touched on the role of crisis pregnancy centers in politics. He advised that while maintaining their non-partisan status, these centers can still educate their communities about pro-life political issues and encourage their networks to consider running for office.
We delved into the specifics of political action work, like preparing voting guides and the complex process of vetting and endorsing candidates. Lou highlighted the unique political landscape in California, particularly the efforts to oppose Proposition 1, which aims to enshrine pro-abortion laws in the state constitution. He stressed the need for a comprehensive campaign and strategic messaging to defeat this proposition.
Lou shared his personal inspiration and faith journey, which led him to the pro-life cause. He recounted the significant milestones in the pro-life political struggle and expressed gratitude for recent advancements, notably the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The conversation concluded with a call to action for pro-life supporters, especially in the wake of new political opportunities and challenges. Lou’s insights underscored the importance of strategic political involvement, education, and advocacy in advancing the pro-life cause.
Hashtags that match the contents of this podcast:
#ProLifePolitics, #PoliticalAdvocacy, #RunForOffice, #VotingGuides, #CaliforniaProp1, #ProLifeLeadership, #CrisisPregnancyCenters, #ElectionAwareness, #RoevWade, #ChangeHeartsAndMinds, #PoliticalCampaigns, #ProLifeEducation, #VoterEducation, #ProLifeInfluence, #CommunityEngagement, #ProLifeStrategy, #ProtectingLife, #FaithInPolitics, #DefendLife.
Transcript
The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.
Welcome to the pro-life Team Podcast i’m Jacob i’m here with Lou and we’re going to be talking about Lou’s pro-life political work. From working with voter guides to help people vote pro-life all the way to incur helping people find encouragement to run for office when they have the pro-life issue as their top priority and how they can adopt and learn about other areas of government even though those may not be the primary driving forces. So please stay tuned, be encouraged, and I hope you find this helpful. Blue, I’m excited to have you here i’m excited to hear about your pro-life work and the and the political side of things. So would you introduce yourself as if you were talking to a group of pro-life leaders? Yes, I’m very happy to do that. I’ve been involved in the pro-life movement kind of peripherally from a very young age. I’ve always been very interested in the issue i’ve always wanted to know where candidates stood if I was voting for them on this issue. I had some trouble back in the seventies being too personally involved and active because the a lot of the literature had these just gut wrenching pictures of babies that have been chopped up and I just emotionally, physically couldn’t even bear to look at that kind of stuff later in life. I’ve been involved in politics, so I’ve been interested in candidates that were going to be pro-life as one of the issues. I was going to help them get elected to office. And then I’ve also been active with the Sacramento pro-life Center. My wife was on the board we raised money for them, spent time helping them, and then when I lived in Virginia, working in DCI was active with a pro-life center in Maryland. Not as much as in Sacramento because neither I nor my late wife were on the board but we was the only one nearby and we wanted to continue our pro-life work with them. When I returned to California, I became active with the California Pro-life Committee headed by Brian Johnston, who’s also the West Coast leader of National pro-life And I’m currently serving on their political action committee helping them find the right candidates or get good candidates to run or pro-life So that’s a thumbnail on the life side. Ok, yeah, i find it similar. I had a similar reaction to the sort of like the bloody photos on the sidewalk. I sort of felt like those marked the people on the sidewalk is like the enemy. And I felt like it was better to promote free ultrasounds, free cranky tests we care for you want to provide you with care and a listening ear and be more of a positive approach. But it felt like the photos didn’t really resonate with aligning us with looking out for that young woman seeking an abortion i feel like what are your thoughts on like a better approach or alternatives when it comes to those photos. Yeah well i think you’re putting your finger on the way those materials kind of going in two different directions. 1 don’t object to them in the sense that they biographically show what’s going on. I get that and that that’s that has a value in the in the discussion. But if you’re as I’ve had to do only a couple times in my life with one of my daughter’s friends and separately with another individual, you need to be able to talk to them. And if you’re if you come across as being too harsh, not listening, being more dictatorial in terms of you know this is what you’re doing as opposed to trying to talk to people about the alternatives, how far along your baby may be, has it developed a heartbeat yet? Those are ways to actually have a conversation with people. And my experience in politics and personal life has been that people whose minds you want to change, you’ve got to have a conversation with them. You don’t get very far by starting off with your wrong. And that’s the end of the conversation yeah. So going into your the political action work of encouraging pro-life people to run for state and local you know local office, tell me like tell me what’s that like? What’s that been, what’s been the experience to try and encourage people to run for these government positions and what’s the results been like what’s the story there? Well it’s very hard to get people to run for office period and unless they have the interest to begin with. So to some degree you want to try to beat the bushes and find people who might be interested in running for office that they’d thought about it at some time in the past maybe, but not actually done it. And then you want to find out where they stand on the issues of import and then also try to walk them through the process, if they’re not political, of what a campaign looks like, how much time this is really going to take it would be a mistake to sugarcoat it and say it’s not going to take any time. It’s really easy to put your name on the ballot you don’t have to do anything else well, that’s a prescription for a losing campaign. So you got to get people who are willing to do the work that’s required. If you find out that somebody’s running and then go to them and ask them about the pro-life issue, if that’s not why they’re running in their pro-life that’s not going to be an issue that they’re going to lead with they may vote right. But we also need people in public office who are going to be leaders on the issue. No, I don’t mean that if they’re elected to a school board that they’re going to be talking about the pro-life issue at every school board meeting. But what I mean is when issues come up about whether you’re going to fund abortions through the schools or if you’re going to buy insurance for employees that includes abortion coverage, You need somebody who’s going to be a leader, not somebody who sits there and listens to the reports that staff give them about what the cost effective benefit of this particular or that particular insurance company is. You need somebody who will raise the questions, find out what’s really going on, what the implications are on a pro-life basis and make motions or second motions, as well as ask questions of legal counsel and others to kind of move the ball on those issues. So you don’t always get that just because somebody happens to be pro-life and they managed to get elected to public office and they’re doing lots of good things. If abortion isn’t a driving issue for them, they’re not even going to realize that it a vote on insurance is somehow going to potentially affect abortions. So you know, they’ve got to be plugged in enough to the issue to understand it. And we don’t need everybody on like A5 member school board to be leaders on pro-life We need at least one and then we need a couple more who are going to vote right after the issue has been fleshed out and there’s a motion made. So is it enough for someone? Is it enough for someone to run for office if they are just interested in the pro-life issue but and maybe they’re not interested in other areas, like maybe the economy is not what drives them, but it’s about making pro-life decisions is like, is that enough for someone, for you to encourage someone is like, is that not just as the primary but almost like, as in the, yeah, that, you know, just the dominant topic and that’s important to them? Good question. And that goes back to what I was discussing a few minutes ago about they need to understand what they’re getting into. If the only reason they want to get elected to office is the abortion issue or the pro-life position, that’s great, no problem. But if you’re running for, let’s say, City Council, are you willing to study and learn about the issues dealing with law enforcement? Are you willing to look and understand the issues dealing with the budget? Are you looking willing to look at the pension issues if there’s an unfunded pension liability problem? Because there are a host of other things you’re going to be voting on, and there are a host of things that people are going to be interested in your position on. And if you’re willing to do all those things even though the only thing you really the only reason you’re really running is to get on there, to have a pro-life position, that’s fine. But if you aren’t willing to do the work necessary to answer questions at candidate forums, you’re not willing do the work to understand the issues so you can be effective member of the council. One, you’re not likely to get elected. Two, if somehow you get elected, you’re not likely to get re elected despite all the energy time money that if people put into getting you there. If you just can’t play any role in the more significant issues that happen on a day in, day out basis with zoning and all kinds of issues, OK, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If someone’s willing to put in the effort to figure out those other areas while having that pro-life primary passion makes a really good candidate, who’s going to end up driving that pro-life posture stronger in public policy perhaps, yeah. And sometimes all you’re going to get is somebody who’s pro-life and they’re really good on a whole bunch of other issues, law enforcement, keeping city budgets under control, etcetera, etcetera. And at that point, it’s kind of incumbent upon you as the volunteer or maybe somebody who played a role in the campaign as a campaign chairman or a regional chairman, getting volunteers together or whatever to understand that there’s an abortion issue coming up. And to get in touch with the candidate that you help get elected and say, oh, by the way, you may not be aware of it, but this issue is coming up before your City Council recently because the state legislature just passed this bill and this is going to be before every City Council in the state. And I want you to take a look at it and get engaged on this. And if they’re truly pro-life they’re going to thank you for having brought it to their attention. They had no idea what’s going on because you’re focused on pro-life He’s not necessarily focused on pro-life to the extent of other issues that are coming before that the council. But if you know that he’s going to be seeing it and getting it to him in advance, then he or she has an opportunity to get up to speed on the issue and you have an opportunity to work with them on developing their position interesting. So I can imagine people that are listening to this podcast, several of them are going to be executive directors of Precy Clinics. And those executive directors of Precy Clinics might have a couple hundred people on their Facebook page that are pro-life you know, on the donor facing Facebook page. As well as they might have several hundred possibly more than a thousand pro life supporters on their E letter that they send out or their newsletter that they send out. So what kind of message would you encourage pregnancy clinics to state in regards to encouraging their pro-life base to consider taking political office along with being willing to become a student of other policies? Well, first of all, I’d make a couple of points. There are things that people can do in a nonprofit that are political if they’re doing it in an individual way, not through the crisis pregnancy center. The other thing is that people will sometimes get real scared about getting into politics because we’re a crisis pregnancy center. Well-being on Even the board of directors of a Price crisis pregnancy center doesn’t mean that you give up your right to participate in elections as an individual number one number two there are things that you can do even through a nonprofit organization, particularly for like you’re saying your members. You don’t have to take a political position and endorse a candidate, but you can say there are two candidates for the state legislature in our area. Candidate X has these positions on the abortion issue. Candidate Y has other positions on the abortion issue, and you can provide that information. And that’s not political. You can do that without any problem at all. Is it considered taboo to encourage your base to run for office as like a good thing to do or is that starting to, I mean, if you’re not, you know, not necessarily naming a candidate to vote for, but saying, you know, to encouraging your base to consider the idea of running for office or what? Yeah where would the line be drawn when it comes to, like, what’s appropriate as a 5O1C3 looking to keep their five O 1C3 status? Yeah, well, i think that you can do anything you want as long as you’re not spending nonprofit money. So that means that you could politically contact that list on your own and encourage them to run or ask them if they’ve ever thought about running and try to get a conversation going. If you ask people if they ‘d ever thought about running, you know, that’s a tough question so you may not really get answers to it, but you may have a conversation online with people about some people. I’ve been talking to people about running for office. People say it’s a challenge, one thing and another and what do you think? So you instead of just making a pronouncement, you kind of engage them in a process of talking about it. And out of that process, you come up with somebody who I just thought about it, but that was years ago and you know, they had their family come along and well, now the kids are out of the household you know, maybe this would be a time to look at something like that, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin, Would you? And then you’re in a position to kind of lead them towards somebody who can help them with how to get trained or how to run a campaign, maybe somebody who’s run campaigns locally before, etcetera, etcetera. The other thing for the crisis pregnancy center itself is that every campaign puts together an organization, has volunteers and donors. Now, some of those might end up being some of your own people supporting one of your own people, I get that. But any decent campaign is going to be recruiting volunteers that aren’t part of your initial friendship network, donors that aren’t part of your initial friendship network. So these are going to be resources that can potentially be capped in the future by the crisis pregnancy center, either in the normal course of events or if you’re doing a special fundraising project because you got to move to a new location or zoning is required that now your office on the second floor is going to have to install an elevator or you know whatever. So there is a longer term benefit that’s going to come back to the crisis pregnancy center out of that as long as they’re paying attention. And keeping notes, I have a line in life that if it’s not written down it doesn’t exist. So it’s good to keep track of relationships lists of people etcetera etcetera. So it it sounds like an executive director. If they’re talking to donors off the clock and talking to them individually over the phone perhaps or over dinner, that would be a really good time to encourage someone who sort of fits the profile of someone in the right capacity having capacity along with that pro-life passion. And so I thought it seems like maybe instead of a mass, you know, instead of a message going to the entire base, it might be better to have it as an individual conversation and that might be more impactful as well on the right people, yes. Particularly if you have somebody in mind who’s passionate has the bio, the credibility to be a candidate for a specific office that you may have in mind and then you know you’ve got to think through ramifications career wise for somebody. If this is a part time job, OK, it’s going to take some time. This is a full time job for three months or six months out of the year with the state legislature. That’s going to impact their business. Well, if the sessions in the spring and you do taxes for a living, that’s probably not a good match. On the other hand, if you can morph your work around, maybe being gone three months or six months at the state Capitol is not going to be a deal killer. Yeah, that’s good. That makes a lot of sense. So I guess the encouragement for those listening is to think you know who might who out of your donor base might need encouragement to run for local office or position. So one of the things that your group tell me about the publication, the voting guide that you, your group works with for your local voting area and like, is it for a certain county in California or is it for what? I mean, what’s the, what’s the geographic scope and what’s the voting guide, What’s it consist of? Yeah, it’s very challenging because it’s the state of California, it’s the California pro-life Council. So we try to do a voter guide for the whole state. Now when we reach out to candidates that we don’t know, we’re calling them, emailing them, asking them to respond. You would think that the ones who aren’t responding aren’t pro-life but it may be just that you were one of 30 emails that day and the one they didn’t get to, they meant to get to tomorrow and tomorrow they have another 30 emails they’re doing. So you’ve really got to go after people. Sometimes they’ll put a pro-life position on their website, but not necessarily in a political campaign you should be talking principally about the three biggest issues in that particular race, and the pro-life issue may not be one of them. So you’ve got a got a big job to do getting a hold of these people and getting them to respond we would like them to do a questionnaire we have a federal questionnaire. We have a state legislative questionnaire. We have a local candidates questionnaire and we try to get the questionnaire filled out and then we go through meticulously and look at them. There are people that may think that they are pro-life but they also think that old folks should have an option of killing themselves. That would not be a good pro-life position. And then there are a host of different ways that the pro-life issue can come up at different levels of government. At a City Council, for example in California, we have a law that if you have an unwanted child, excuse me, you ever want unwanted child that you’ve delivered, you can take it to a fire station and drop it at the fire station. Some fire stations basically have a box that you can put the child in and you don’t even see anybody at the at the other end, but you have left the child in a place where they’re going to be safe, they’re going to be found, they’re going to be taken care of. So there’s a ability to either push and make sure that not only is are those facilities available, but it just educate public folks that that’s an option for them. I think that some people who have an unwanted pregnancy think that they have two choices, have the baby and raise it at arguably 1622 years of age without a father or kill the child. So this gives them another option to think about, but they won’t know about it if somebody isn’t talking about it. And I see you’re nodding your head so you’re familiar with the law, but a lot of people have no idea that that’s even an option. So there are things that can be done at different levels of government and we want to try to find out who the good guys are, then we want to publicize it on our state website. And we can’t just list every race in California in one place so we have to break it down by these are your statewide races for people that live in Los Angeles County. These are also the local races if you live in the San Fernando Valley, these are the local races if you live in the San Gabriel Valley. So you’ve got to break down even LA County into more pieces because there are so many different races. You don’t want a list of candidates that would choke a horse. And people don’t necessarily know what state legislative district or City Council district they’re in if the city’s divided into districts. So you’ve got to do enough work that people can easily be able to sort out who the people are that they should be voting for. So it it’s a massive undertaking for us wow. This about a week ago I voted here in Arizona and the voting guide, you know you know with the pro-life questionnaire was extremely helpful and it was essentially I put in my address and it knew who I would be, who would be on my ballot and it was just so nice to use. I do remember many years ago we would I would there was the paper voting guides and there were probably you know for in areas for Tucson arizona they’re probably thirty five pages deep and obviously only certain pages applied and so on But yeah the online option at least for my experience recently was just it was so easy to use and I regretted any politician that just marked yes or no. I had i really felt i had a longing for them to have a sentence or a paragraph so I could really hear their voice because several people would mark yes or no or you know, yes on an issue and yet they didn’t have that text to go with it and so then I’m looking at 3 candidates that didn’t say anything they all just simply had the check box checked, and then maybe one or two would write a description and that description spoke so much more as to like someone’s passion. And sometimes I agreed with what they said and sometimes I didn’t. But I would Yeah, they yeah, I have. So it’s just really nice when someone writes more than just the check box, because it gives something to compare, because comparing yeses is really not possible. But comparing people’s paragraphs is really, it’s very easily possible, yeah. Although if you’re marking your ballot, a lot of people are very happy just getting the yeses because they haven’t any idea whether Jones or Smith is a better candidate. It’s true, and i felt that too when voting. It was hard to compare one candidate to another when they felt like they were both on the pro-life side but yeah, it was hard to tell. Yeah, Which one might be more pro-life than the other, perhaps. So moving on, will you, Will you speak to the proposition that you’re working on in California? Can you tell us what that, what the impact might be and what it is? Yeah after the Supreme Court reversed the Roe decision, the state legislature, overwhelmingly the Democrats, sprang into action to codify all of the pro abortion legislation on the books that are statutory that is, they are state laws, and turn that whole basket of state laws into a constitutional initiative to put on the ballot. What that means is that every state law would become it’s pro abortion would become part of the state constitution. Now California is a fairly liberal state I think as I would suspect everybody on your audience here would understand and most people in California are going to be pro abort. However, that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t change the law in California every time I’ve seen a poll on issues like partial birth abortion or abortions after, there’s a heartbeat, things like that. Even people in California think, oh, that’s not right. They may have a different view than you or I about when life begins, but they know that if a baby is has a beating heart, that that’s really pretty human and killing it is just not really a good idea. But if we had to use initiative in California to get rid of a statute, we would have to collect 5 % of the signatures that were or the equivalent number of 5 % of the signatures for the votes that were cast in the last gubernatorial election. The problem is that if it’s a constitutional amendment, it becomes a requirement that we get 7 % of the number of votes that were cast in the last gubernatorial election. So that means the cost of qualification, the time of qualification is 40 % tougher. And they know that this is a an issue that not everybody in California supports as completely as it is because in California the law is that you can get into the delivery room and say, you know, I’ve changed my mind, I’m on an abortion, I don’t want to deliver today. And that’s perfectly legal. As radical as that sounds, that’s the law in California. There’s even a bill before the legislature right now that I think has moved through one house. I think it’s moved through the assembly and it’s pending in the Senate that would they are already saying this doesn’t make infanticide legal in California. All it says is that if a baby dies for any unknown reason after it’s born within 20 days that there won’t be any legal investigation of the cause of its death. Well, you know, that’s really convoluted language but i think everybody on this call understands. And what that means is if the baby comes out alive and the doctor snips its neck, that you couldn’t, you couldn’t have an investigation. And if you can’t have an investigation, you certainly can’t bring charges against the doctor for having killed the baby. Theoretically, the way the Initiative is written, it notifies all the existing laws in California now into the state constitution. I haven’t spoken with an attorney on this point, but it well may be that if the legislature passes this bill that it would be codified into state at the state constitution as well because it would be existing state law at the time the initiative is voted on in November. But Even so, just the fact that they allow abortions that are late term, let alone partial birth abortion, these are things that we can go after and repeal in California, but it will be a whole heck of a lot harder to do if it’s stuck in the state constitution. So California pro-life is putting together a campaign committee to oppose this initiative. It was sprung on us like I say, the legislature ran through very quickly. There were basically 100 days between when we found out what the legislature had done and the election. So we’ve been running around trying to put the campaign committee together, get it, get the language and the forms filed with the state of California, reaching out to people on fundraising, reaching out to people to be political advisors for the campaign. Just 114 different things that all need to be done stat. I’m sorry. So it sounds like there’s a proposition to bring the pro abort, you know the pro abort laws and make them California State constitutional level. And is Proposition 10 or Prop slash Proposition 1, is that to reverse? Is that fighting up against that or is that no that’s the that’s the initiative. It was labeled Prop 10 in the legislature, but it was numbered Prop 1 by the attorney general. So it will be on the ballot in California as Proposition One and that is this awful thing that codifies all of these things into the state constitution. And so you’re encouraging people to vote no on Proposition One in California. Yeah, absolutely. And is that a statewide vote or is that means that cover every district, it’s a statewide vote in California anybody that’s a registered voter in California and vote on it will have to vote on it if they know what they’re doing. And the only benefit to us in this fight is that it’s easier to defeat an initiative in California than it is to pass one. All you’ve got to do is be able to raise enough questions about what’s going on. So there is a even in California there’s a chance that we can defeat this, but we’ve got to put a legitimate campaign together we’ve got to, you can spend 1000000$ in California on a campaign and nobody knew you had a campaign going. I mean it’s a big state, very expensive. So we’ve got a big job ahead of us in slightly under 100 days to get this done. But we’re optimistic that if we can put the pieces together that we can do it. And more than that, if they have miscalculated and we can beat them in California, the message that sends nationwide is a phenomenal message because it will be played up as abortion lost in California, excuse me, technically it won’t change the law any in California, but it will be played up big time as abortion lost even in California. Yeah, that was. So what would be something that a princey clinic in California could do? Is it, you know, when it comes to the not being, say, political, maybe just simply saying that this is, you know, the vote, You know, there’s a vote on this right now, it sounds like or when is when is this vote coming you know, when will this vote be presented to the people? Like which month will that be in the general election in November. Ok. You know what they can do. Even if they are a nonprofit, they can do comparison sheets laying out the arguments one way or another. If there are not a hostile environment, they may want to wait until the sample ballot comes out and then just take stuff out of the state. The state’s sample ballot for both sides arguments and reprint those and hand them out to people. They should certainly be talking to their staff, their volunteers and mention it at the AT staff meetings mention it at volunteer meetings. Get the word out because the legislature did this with no public hearings no debate. They just ran this thing through the legislature in the blink of an eye. So increasing the awareness and comprehension of it by, you know, by quoting the voting guide from the state in order to just simply, yeah, give a voice to this so that it’s the urgency and importance is increased. But maybe not telling, Yeah but not telling people how to vote, potentially presenting it as you should understand what’s going on here. Yes they should definitely be educating people but they should also be sensitive to this and not package it as either a Catholic, Christian, whatever position or even packaging it as a pro-life position. This should be packaged as this is an extreme package of bills in California. You can literally under this get an abortion in the delivery room if you change your mind. This is extreme. This is beyond simple abortion and that’s the winning argument for us in California. If we let them turn this into a anti Catholic thing or into a pro-life thing, then we’re going to have trouble clawing back those voters in the middle. Most Californians support abortion, but they don’t support abortion on the way to the delivery room. They don’t support abortion after a heartbeat. So that’s the place that we need to focus. So to the extent that any of your people want to start articulating a message, that’s the way they should be scoping it in terms of this isn’t just abortion, this is a radical proposal, is the bill, I think it was like 1-2-2-3 or something, the one that talks about the perinatal, you know, you’re not allowed to investigate the death of a baby in that perinatal stage after birth. Is that part of what’s being, you know, presented as being codified into the US, the state, California State constitution, Is that included? Well, it isn’t included yet because it hasn’t passed the legislature and been signed by the governor i believe it’s passed the lower house, the assembly, but I think it’s still pending in the state Senate so it needs to pass the legislature intact in other words, the version passed by the Assembly and state Senate have to be identical, and it has to go to the governor and he has to sign it. If that happens, then, well, if that happens and the effective date for the bill is before the November election, then it would be existing state law and the way the initiative is written would make that part of the state constitution. But we’re not there yet. Wow that’s really interesting that’s good for people to understand that. Yeah, ’cause it sounds, it’s almost like they wrote an equation so any of these laws that meet this criteria will be included, and we’re going to vote on anything that will fit that criteria yeah and what they’re doing is they are, they understand where the voters are. They may say that everybody’s pro-choice or pro abortion. That’s not true and they know it. So there’s a bill on the books that says i’m going to be all a little off on this, but it says something like abortions are permitted up to 20 weeks i don’t remember the exact number, but something like that. And they’re taking the position in some of their communications already to say that, well, abortions are only possible in California up to 20 weeks. Well, that’s if you look at one bill that says you can have an abortion up to 20 weeks. But there are bills that say you can have, like I say, an abortion on the way to the delivery room, but they get it so they’re already trying to argue that this isn’t extreme at all, that this is kind of common common. A modest proposal yeah if a bill says who was that came up with the idea that back between Britain and Ireland, a modest proposal was eating Irish babies, this is a modest proposal From their standpoint yeah if a bill says you can do it up to 20 weeks, and that’s not saying you can’t do it right? Right especially there’s other bills that say you can do it beyond that, right yeah. But it’s disingenuous of them to say the least, to know that you can get an abortion at any time in your pregnancy in California. And they’re holding up one law to make people think, or some of their pro abortion folks anyway, are holding up one bill and saying that it’s only up to something like 20 weeks. I mean that they know that they’re aligned. There is no conceivable way that they can’t know that. Yeah but they also know that under 20 weeks is more accepted than past 20 weeks by the average voter. Yeah, exactly. All right, Well, I hope I haven’t burdened your folks with too much stuff today. Well, before we wrap up, I want to ask you what’s how are you inspired by God to get involved in the pro-life world, or how did God pull you in or speak to you or wherever you’ve seen his fingerprints? Where’s the where’s the God story in this experience that you’ve been dedicating a lot of passion and time to Well i guess i need to go to my faith to begin with on that point I was raised by my parents as a Christian. They had me in government schools and I was printing one year then I was writing the next year I was printing again and they decided that these schools weren’t really working well. So they took me out of the government schools and put me in a Catholic school. And while I was there, besides getting a good education, I also decided to become Catholic. So i’m a convert and converts tend to be pretty militant about their beliefs that the first political thing in my life was communism. I mean these were bad people killing Christians, preventing churches from being open etcetera etcetera. So I got involved in the anti communist movement and as you’re you may be aware Marx and those folks were the first big advocates of abortion for women at a time when nobody else around the globe in government thought that was a good idea. From there as I was saying at the at the beginning we had the decision saying abortion’s legal in the United States although you know technically the Roe decision is for feminist it’s a phony decision because it doesn’t say as feminists say it says that a woman has a right to abortion no, what Rose says is the doctors have a right to perform an abortion. It doesn’t say the woman has the right to an abortion it says that doctors have the right to perform an abortion and even a lot of feminist pro abort women lawyers have always chided the that was the way the law was written but anyway that came along and all of a sudden out of nowhere abortion was an issue in not only California but in America. And I saw some of this literature some of the first stuff out was, you know, this is what an abortion is. Oh my God. I mean, I wasn’t for an abortion before i saw the pictures, but they it certainly reaffirmed to me that this was a great travesty. And we’ve seen over time that not only is the travesty, but it just has kept growing and growing and growing to the point where I think we’ve now killed 50 million Americans. And in New York, 50 % of black babies are aborted, 50 % of them. And there doesn’t seem to be any outrage i mean, if some black gets shot on the streets of New York in the middle of a robbery, people are upset that a black was shot. But the fact that half black babies are killed every year in New York, nobody seems to think that that’s a problem. So we’ve all been active in trying to support people who would make appointments to the Supreme Court i was very active and Reagan’s campaign for president. I was national political director of his political action committee, Citizens for the Republic, and we got some appointments, but we didn’t get enough good people to be able to overturn the court. Bush made some appointments, but they weren’t all that solid. So we’ve continued to go sideways for another decade certainly Clinton did not give us pro-life appointments. So finally under Trump, we got the two that we needed to have a majority and then the courses needed to perk their way up to the Court. Supreme Courts can’t go out there and grab decisions and take them up and make the decision if it’s not on appeal. So after we had a majority or what we thought was a majority, we had to wait for the cases to make their way up to the court. And thank God. I mean, literally thank God. I wasn’t a big fan of Donald Trump he was my last choice for president i ran through a whole bunch of other people. I was skeptical about him on the life issue as well as other issues. And I I’ve seen enough politicians who become pro-life when they’re running for office and then they seem to forget it after they take their hand off the Bible. God bless us with Donald Trump his appointments have been phenomenal, gave us the change that we have been waiting for many generations for. And now we just need to take advantage of those opportunities in all the states around the country and even in the pro abortion states, trim them back where we can get enough legislative or popular support to do so. And then I think that, but I saw something that I think was Family Research Council, maybe Dobson. It was ATV spot, not talking about abortion per southeast, but it showed the picture of a baby in the womb and it was just marvelous. Well, we need to do a big educational job on America and change not just minds, but we need to change hearts on this issue as well. And maybe pro-life donors are going to be more willing to write checks now that kind of activity can move voters as well as change hearts. But we need to have a fight to change hearts and minds in America yeah That’s a beautiful story of well, yeah, your beginnings and then just recently with Roe versus Wade being overturned and you know, and God’s using, you know, Trump, which you know for a lot of us we did not expect amazing pro-life victories. But it’s it was nothing short of that. But you know, you know all glory goes to God and not to Trump because Amen, god can work through Trump. And even though Trump may take credit for everything, this one all goes to God. So awesome well, I really enjoyed talking to you and I hope that this encourages those who get to listen to talk to people and draw them in to consider running for office when they have the capacity and that pro-life passion as the top, the top priority. And also I hope the people that hear this, that are running for office will fill out those surveys because it’s better, it’s better to have a paragraph than it is a checkbox, at least for me amen.