My Conversation With Franklin Graham
Franklin Graham may not agree with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on much, but apparently, they have one thing in common: they both pray for Donald Trump.
Franklin Graham may not agree with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on much, but apparently, they have one thing in common: they both pray for Donald Trump. At a press gaggle last week, the House leader surprised everyone by saying, “I pray for the President of the United States.” Of course, what she prays is another story, but that she prays means her party has no excuses. This Sunday’s invitation is for everyone — no matter which side they’re on — to join hands and pray for America.
On June 2, Franklin and 250 Christian leaders are calling on people to set aside time in earnest prayer for President Trump. When I talked to him on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch” about what prompted the idea, he says he felt an urgency in his heart. The attacks on the president are intensifying, he explained, to a level we’ve never seen before. “The politics that we have today, it’s so vicious. It wasn’t like this when I was growing up. Republicans and Democrats disagreed, but they’d go out and have dinner at night together. But that’s not the case anymore, Tony. It’s almost like we’re in some kind of war, and it’s about winning. It’s not about what’s best for the country.”
There’s a hatred for Donald Trump, Franklin went on, “that I’ve never seen before. It’s one thing to have a president that we disagree with and you may not vote for — but to have the all-out hatred… [It] distracts the president, and it weakens our country… We need to get on with the business of solving the problems in our country — and this isn’t solving them.” It’s dangerous, Franklin insisted. “And if we don’t pray, I’m afraid for the president, and I’m afraid for the presidency.”
Just because some Americans didn’t vote for Trump doesn’t mean they don’t have a stake in his presidency. “He was elected, and we should get behind him. And if he does well, then we all benefit, don’t we? Republicans and Democrats, independents — we all benefit from this. If he makes a bad decision, then we’re all gonna pay for it. So we need to be praying that God will use him to make good decisions.” A lot of us disagreed with the policies of the previous president, but we still prayed for him. Like a lot of believers, I spent eight years asking God to change Barack Obama’s heart and give him wisdom. Why? Because I trust that He can work through everyone. Even if some of these leaders don’t seek God themselves, they’re still influenced by people praying for them.
At its core, America’s problem isn’t political — it’s spiritual. “God is the only on who can fix the issues in our country,” Franklin agreed. But the responsibility, he reminded listeners, falls on us. “If we Christians don’t pray, then we’re at fault if something were to destroy our country.” And if America is sidelined or distracted from its ability to influence the world, everyone suffers. One look at today’s headlines will tell you that this is no time for our leaders to take their eye off the ball.
Look at Pastor Brunson in Turkey, Franklin said by explanation. “He’d still be in that prison if it hadn’t been for Donald Trump.” This president “wants to support and defend Christians… And he has a desire to help the church [which] I appreciate about him. Is he a perfect person? Absolutely not. Is he the best example of the Christian faith? No way. But there’s something in his heart [that God has placed there] to defend the Christian faith and religious liberty. And so, we need to try to lift him up in prayer and support them where we can.”
If you and your church want to join in, visit the Billy Graham website or Franklin’s Facebook page. “We know God hears the prayers of one righteous person,” the son of the famous evangelist reminded us. “But if there’s millions of people praying, maybe God will listen and hear those prayers — and answer [them].
Originally published here.
Supreme Showdown: Ginsburg v. Thomas
There are at least 20 abortion cases in the Supreme Court pipeline, but as Americans learned Tuesday — Indiana’s won’t be the one challenging Roe v. Wade. In another mixed bag for pro-lifers, the justices only ruled on the half of the law dealing with fetal remains. They couldn’t bring themselves to decide the more explosive issue: race-, sex-, and disability-based abortions. It’s another instance, Justice Clarence Thomas said, of "kicking the can down the road.” And pretty soon, he warns, the court is going to run out of road to kick it to.
They are the two longest-serving justices — and easily the most diverse. Justice Thomas and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have been on opposite sides of hundreds of issues over the years — so Tuesday’s battle of opinions wasn’t anything new for the duo. What it was to many Americans, however, was enlightening. As the Washington Post points out, Justice Thomas is the only one left on the court who participated in 1992’s landmark abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He’s also one of the four justices “who said they would have effectively overturned Roe if they could.”
Twenty-seven years later, the justice known for his silence during arguments had plenty to say in his concurring opinion in this case — most specifically, to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By a 7-2 vote, the court agreed with Indiana’s mandate that any bodies or remains from an abortion be disposed with dignity — either by burial or cremation. But that was just part of the question before the court. Under the bill signed by then-Governor Mike Pence, Indiana also banned women from ending their pregnancies because of sex, race, or a “potential diagnoses” like Down syndrome. And amazingly, that was part of the law the court refused to defend.
To Justice Thomas’s horror, the court essentially gave its consent to Hoosiers targeting their babies for certain traits or characteristics. “In other contexts,” he wrote, “the Court has been zealous in vindicating the rights of people even potentially subjected to race, sex, and disability discrimination.” But by refusing to uphold this law, he went on, the court may as well be “constitutionaliz[ing] the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement,” which — Thomas explains — were the vision of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger.
Thomas spent paragraphs detailing the horrible skeletons in Planned Parenthood’s closet. “Sanger herself campaigned for birth control in black communities,” Thomas detailed. “In 1930, she opened a birth-control clinic in Harlem…Then, in 1939, Sanger initiated the ‘Negro Project,’ an effort to promote birth control in poor, Southern black communities… In a report titled ‘Birth Control and the Negro,’ Sanger and her coauthors identified blacks as ‘the great problem of the South’ — the group with ‘the greatest economic, health, and social problems.’” In other words, he warned, “The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical,” he argued.
Ginsburg, meanwhile, duked it out with Thomas in the footnotes, writing that Indiana was imposing an “undue burden.” “A woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother,’” she insists. Then what on earth are they? Landlords? Hosts? What a woman does to her child has no impact on what she is to her child. Just as men don’t magically become fathers after their babies are born. Parents are created — just as children are — at the moment of conception. No wonder Thomas fired back in his own footnote that Justice Ginsburg “makes little sense.”
“It is not a ‘waste’ of our resources to summarily reverse an incorrect decision that created a Circuit split.” It’s time, he said to “confront the constitutionality of these laws… [W]e cannot avoid them forever.” The court invented a right to abortion, he argued. Now it’s “dutybound to address its scope.”
Originally published here.
A Net Loss for Netflix?
The entertainment industry loves throwing its weight around on hot topics like abortion. But there’s one thing it loves more: money. And companies like Netflix stand to lose a lot of it if they don’t check their egos at the door. Like a lot of liberal businesses, the streaming giant is trying to rattle some sabers over the flood of pro-life laws in the states. And, like a lot of liberal businesses, they stand to punish themselves more than the locations they’re threatening to leave.
For the entertainment industry, it’s a classic story. Leaders of a state pass a law protecting life or religious freedom. Filmmakers vow to boycott — but never deliver. A few months later, business in the state is never better. North Carolina knows. After leaders there stuck by their privacy law, HB 2, every celebrity under the sun vows to pull out of the state and never perform there again. They warn the economy will suffer and implode. The following year, Forbes names North Carolina the number one state in America for business.
Fast-forward to this month, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R) passed one of the strongest pro-life laws in the country. Filmmakers remained relatively quiet. Of course, some made the obligatory comments that they were horrified at the attack on “women’s rights.” But so far, Netflix is the only major studio silly enough to consider walking away from the state’s favorable business climate. As Kyle Smith points out for NRO, “Netflix is in Georgia in the first place only because of the state’s ruthless capitalism: Tax breaks for big business and right-to-work policies.”
“Netflix could signal to Lefty Hollywood, otherwise known as Hollywood, that it is onboard with the talent’s progressive agenda by backing out of Georgia. That would make the company heroes to the creative community. But what is that worth to Netflix? I can’t see too many George Clooneys making their filmmaking decisions based solely on love for Netflix’s politics.”
In fact, the only constituency the company stands to impact by the decision would be customers — who, by and large, don’t want their entertainment companies pandering to abortion extremists. Already, Americans are upset by the company’s appointment of Susan Rice, one of Barack Obama’s most radical lieutenants, to its board of directors. Over the last decade, the Free Enterprise Project points out, “corporate boardrooms and c-suites have become bastions of liberal orthodoxy.” The organization goes through a whole list of popular companies who’ve been infiltrated by the likes of Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius, Robert Gibbs, Jay Carney, and more. It’s no wonder these companies are trying to ally themselves with policies that are out-of-step with mainstream America.
But ultimately, the bottom line is their bottom line. It’s no accident these CEOs are opening up shop in Republican states with low taxes and less regulation. There’s a reason they’re moving to places like Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and North Carolina — and it’s because they have the most favorable business climates. “Taking a planned feature out of Georgia might mean adding many millions to the budget. A few million in budget is sometimes the difference between a movie getting made, or not. So pulling a project out of Georgia might mean killing it. You might even say aborting it in its early gestation. Is Hollywood willing to kill its babies because Georgia doesn’t want to kill its?” Kyle asks. “I doubt it.”
Deep down, everyone knows the bill Governor Kemp signed into law is going to be challenged anyway. So what is Hollywood trying to do? Have their cake and eat it too. Companies like Netflix get to posture as if they’re going to pull out of a state without ever really threatening their profit margin — since they know as well as we do: even if the law does go into effect, the legal battles will take years to resolve.
These companies are hypocrites, and conservatives need to call them out on it. These CEOs are going to states with sweet tax deals, but then they want to bring their onerous views with them that undermine the policies that made the state so attractive. It’s time for these governors and state leaders to say, “Look, you came here because our policies were conducive to business. And that includes our social policy. If you don’t like it, go back to the high-tax, high-regulation state that you came from. But we’re not changing our policies for you. We were doing fine before you got here, and we’ll be doing fine when you leave.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
