Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - May 03, 2022


Ep 610 | If Roe Ends, the Fight Over Abortion Just Begins | Guest: Josh Hammer


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 2 minutes

Words per Minute

186.36601

Word Count

11,648

Sentence Count

666

Misogynist Sentences

22

Hate Speech Sentences

42


Summary

In this episode, we talk to Josh Hammer, an editor at Newsweek and an attorney by trade, about a leaked decision by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that could overturn Roe v. Wade. We discuss the implications of this leaked decision, why it matters, and what it means for the future of abortion rights.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey y'all, welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. This episode is all episodes is brought to you
00:00:04.900 by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com slash Allie for American meat
00:00:09.120 delivered right to your front door. That's GoodRanchers.com slash Allie.
00:00:22.060 Man, oh man, you guys know exactly what we are talking about today. We are talking about this
00:00:27.240 leaked draft decision by Justice Samuel Alito overturning Roe v. Wade. This was reported by
00:00:37.020 Politico. I am going to tell you my reaction to it. I am going to show you some reactions from
00:00:42.600 people on the left, what this means for us as a country, what this means for us as people who are
00:00:47.880 against abortion, what this means for us in particular as Christians. We are first, before I
00:00:53.080 get to my reaction and kind of my whole monologue on this, we are going to talk to Josh Hammer. He is
00:00:59.260 an editor at Newsweek. He is also an attorney by trade. He has a background in this. He knows a
00:01:07.140 lot of people who work on the Supreme Court and he always has incredible insight into what is happening
00:01:13.280 on the court. And today he is going to give us some clarity on what this drafted decision says,
00:01:19.560 what it means, why Roe v. Wade was unconstitutional in the first place, how he thinks this leak
00:01:26.340 happened, and then what he believes the implications are, whether he believes that this decision is going
00:01:32.000 to be the decision that Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned or not. And so we are going to get
00:01:38.540 into all of that before we get into the conversation. Let me kind of set this up a little bit. So I got a
00:01:43.600 text from a journalist friend last night with the link to the Politico tweet that then linked the
00:01:50.700 Politico exclusive report. The title of that report is Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion
00:01:57.140 rights. Draft opinion shows and just a lesson in bias right away. We see what perspective they are
00:02:03.020 writing from. If you're writing from a neutral perspective, certainly if you're writing for a pro-life
00:02:07.680 perspective, you would not call this abortion rights because the right itself is up for debate.
00:02:17.440 Abortion rights is really a euphemism. The ability legally to kill your baby is what we're talking
00:02:23.220 about. And while I don't expect Politico to use that kind of explicit language, any use of euphemism
00:02:29.060 really indicates kind of where a person and a journalist is coming from. So the subheading says,
00:02:35.580 we hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. That is Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood,
00:02:40.780 the kind of landmark abortion decision, Supreme Court decisions, Justice Alito writes in an initial
00:02:46.680 majority draft circulated inside the court. So as you will hear Josh say, this is unprecedented.
00:02:53.880 This kind of drafted decision leaking is something that has not happened before. The Supreme Court
00:02:59.840 blog that reports on the Supreme Court that is one of the most read sources of journalism when it comes
00:03:09.760 to the Supreme Court and their decisions tweeted this. It's impossible to overstate the earthquake
00:03:14.480 this will cause inside the court in terms of destruction of the trust among the justices and
00:03:20.140 staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin. The document leaked to Politico is almost certainly
00:03:26.700 an authentic draft opinion by Jay Alito that reflects what he believes at least five members
00:03:33.660 of the court have voted to support over ruling Roe. But as Alito's draft, it does not reflect the comments
00:03:40.100 or reactions of other justices. Shannon Bream of Fox News, who also reports on the Supreme Court,
00:03:47.960 has said that this is a draft that possibly was circulating all the way back in February and is
00:03:52.680 not going to be the final draft. It is probably an indicator of what is going to be decided, but
00:03:59.020 things could absolutely change between now and then. And so Politico reported all of this. There
00:04:06.900 was some CNN reporting about what Chief Justice Roberts thinks as well. This was a wild night. If you
00:04:14.640 are an observer of the Supreme Court, if you are an observer of politics, if you are someone who cares
00:04:19.600 about abortion, if you are a journalist, I mean, Twitter was just wild last night with all of the
00:04:26.920 very disparate reactions. Things are about to get, I don't want to say ugly. They are about to get
00:04:34.100 perhaps more polarized than ever. You are going to be able to see perhaps more clearly than ever
00:04:39.880 light and darkness in the reactions to this decision and really in this potential decision that we saw
00:04:45.820 leaked to Politico. So before I get into too many details, I want Josh to answer our questions again
00:04:52.000 about how this happened and what this all means. So without further ado, here is our friend Josh Hammer.
00:04:59.640 Josh, thank you so much for joining us. I just want to get your initial reaction to the craziness that
00:05:05.260 has been the past 24 hours. What was your reaction at first when you saw this Politico report that this
00:05:11.860 drafted decision by Alito had been leaked? Yeah, I mean, I felt like every group chat that I was in
00:05:17.960 just start blowing up immediately. Look, I mean, you know, Ali, I like you. I'm in the conservative
00:05:23.020 commentary world, but I am a lawyer by training. This is the world that I come in. You know, I'm
00:05:27.040 friends with numerous current Supreme Court clerks. I mean, I feel like I have a good grasp of the
00:05:31.400 institution. To call this unprecedented, I think, would be an understatement. There is simply no
00:05:35.480 precedent for this, not even just in the modern history of the court. This is probably the biggest
00:05:40.720 breach of norms, confidentiality, ethics, whatever you want to call it, that the Supreme Court has
00:05:46.960 probably ever had, ever, as far as kind of the internal operating procedures as to how the Supreme
00:05:52.160 Court operates. It is a famously kind of airtight institution. Leaks of this just simply don't
00:05:57.920 happen. There is no such thing as a leak from a clerk. When you get to that office, the Supreme
00:06:02.620 Court clerks know. And I was watching kind of Laura Ingram's opening monologue on Fox last night.
00:06:06.860 Laura, of course, clerk for Clarence Thomas back in the 1990s. And she was saying how when she first
00:06:11.400 got there was a clerk, the chief justice at the time, it was Bill Rehnquist, basically said to them,
00:06:15.640 if there are any leaks whatsoever, you guys will be disbarred for the rest of your lives.
00:06:20.140 Wow. So, you know, I am hoping that we know the identity of the leaker within the next kind of 48
00:06:25.420 to 72 hours at the most. I'm hoping that he or she is disbarred. But there is simply no precedent
00:06:30.780 for this, Ali. We are in uncharted territory right now. Yes. So do we know that it was a clerk? I
00:06:37.140 mean, I'm guessing that's the only possibility, too. Would it be possible at all that there would
00:06:44.020 be a Supreme Court justice, perhaps a liberal Supreme Court justice that would have been on
00:06:48.900 board with a leak like this happening? Yeah. So my best guess, my absolute best guess
00:06:55.760 is that a rogue Sonia Sotomayor clerk gave this by his or her own volition. I having said that,
00:07:03.580 I think it's possible that the leak came from one of the other two liberal justices chambers,
00:07:07.120 Kagan or Breyer. The Breyer thing is potentially interesting, right? He's about to retire,
00:07:11.020 obviously. So maybe there's a possibility there that his chambers basically has kind of given up
00:07:15.740 on any semblance of norms. I don't think so, because he's been on the court for 30 years. He's
00:07:19.340 kind of an older guy with kind of a more slightly more traditional view of the institution.
00:07:23.880 Sotomayor, of course, substantively, as far as her jurisprudence is waged to the left of basically
00:07:28.560 anyone else up there. She totally beclowned herself at oral arguments in the Dobbs case back
00:07:32.420 in December when her kind of questions to the lawyers sounded a heck of a lot like Democratic
00:07:37.220 National Committee or MSNBC talking head partisan hacks. So my best guess is a Sotomayor clerk. But
00:07:43.480 having said that, I do not think it is crazy to think about the possibility that Sotomayor herself
00:07:48.580 leaked this. I am not alleging that because I have no direct information, obviously. There's no way for
00:07:53.540 me to know. But it would not surprise me. It really would not. And suffice to say that if we
00:07:59.520 are able to confirm that, that an actual justice did this, then impeachment proceedings should start
00:08:04.420 within an hour or two. I mean, that is what they that is in your opinion. Gosh, I mean, you know,
00:08:10.160 the Democrats obviously control the House Judiciary Committee. Right. So, I mean, it really just depends
00:08:13.900 like how big a partisan hacks they want to be. I mean, at a bare at a bare minimum after Republicans
00:08:19.000 retake the House this fall, which it seems like they probably will. That should be like day one
00:08:23.520 agenda item for the next Congress starting, you know, starting in January. But will Democrats
00:08:28.220 actually do it? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess you probably have to think not. I mean,
00:08:33.940 because honestly, Ali, when this first happened last night, my first reaction was like, OK,
00:08:38.300 this clerk threw out whoever it was, he or she threw out a Hail Mary pass. It's not going to work.
00:08:42.980 Probably I do predict a probably probably will only stiffen kind of Kavanaugh and Barrett's spines.
00:08:47.560 But the idea here was that I think he or she will then kind of self-dox, will get kind of a
00:08:51.780 flashy New York Times op-ed that leads to a book deal, the MSNBC speaking circuit. But having said
00:08:57.500 that, the blue-checked reaction from left-leaning Twitter last night from like the ACLU was unbelievable.
00:09:05.660 Right. They are celebrating this. I mean, they're already calling this clerk brave.
00:09:09.880 Like we're in such uncharted territory right now. It's really, yeah, it's calling.
00:09:14.660 Yes. That's why I think that a justice like Sotomayor, that there's no way that she would be
00:09:20.200 impeached if, of course, we don't know. But if she took part in this at all, or even if it was a
00:09:25.300 clerk, would they be disbarred? That's probably more likely than a justice getting impeached. But
00:09:29.140 where would the political pressure come from when it comes to Democrats? Because when you saw Nancy
00:09:33.460 Pelosi and other top Democrats complaining about this, they weren't complaining about the leak.
00:09:37.800 They weren't complaining about upending our democracy or our democratic norms or
00:09:42.600 violating our institutional norms. They were talking about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being
00:09:47.700 overturned. That was their concern. For all of the concern, and I saw you point this out in one way
00:09:53.380 on Twitter, for all of their talk over the past few years of Trump being the one that is the threat
00:09:59.360 to democratic norms. Of course, we see this over and over again with them when they're talking about
00:10:03.180 ending the filibuster and trying to reconfigure the Senate and getting rid of the Electoral College
00:10:08.580 and packing the Supreme Court. This is just another example of when they say violating democratic norms
00:10:14.600 or Republicans violating democratic norms, they're just talking about upholding a democracy in a way
00:10:20.580 that they don't like. They don't actually care about democratic norms because they are willing to
00:10:25.260 break and bend every single rule to do what they want to do that ends justify the means. Some of the most
00:10:30.860 disturbing but unsurprising at this point reactions that I saw from blue checkmark journalists, I'm not
00:10:37.340 just nutpicking here, when I mentioned, you know, the person who leaked this knew that there would be
00:10:42.000 threats to the lives of the conservative justices and their families. The reaction that I got from a lot
00:10:47.400 of people on the left was good, good. Their lives should be threatened. And so the ends seem to always
00:10:52.400 justify the means when it comes to the left. And I just think we're about to see weeping and gnashing
00:10:57.360 teeth like we've never seen. Yeah, no, look, I mean, I think what we learned last night is that when
00:11:03.420 the left talks about kind of tearing asunder democratic norms, what they have in mind is
00:11:08.460 capital D democratic norms, not right, right, right, because the latter they have now is now beyond
00:11:14.440 obvious. They don't particularly care about that. Look, I mean, I have been searching in vain for a
00:11:20.180 single elected Democratic Party official, a single kind of left leaning check talking head type person
00:11:26.240 who has condemned what happened here. I am literally still trying to find that. Yeah,
00:11:31.100 you know, maybe you could you could search in there and find like a former kind of liberal
00:11:35.140 Supreme Court clerk from from a different generation. But this is not your grandfather's
00:11:39.140 Democratic Party. Obviously, this is a Democratic Party that views abortion as their foremost pagan
00:11:43.820 sacrament. That is the phrase that I have used kind of over and over again. And that's exactly how
00:11:47.920 they view it. And, you know, it reminds me of a tweet this out briefly last night. There was a good
00:11:52.280 opinion that Sixth Circuit Judge Amulthapar wrote, I think it was the end of last September,
00:11:56.840 maybe last early October. I wrote a column about it. And he used the phrase in a Sixth Circuit opinion,
00:12:02.520 abortion exceptionalism, referring to kind of the idea that when it gets down to kind of the various
00:12:08.400 procedures and rules pertaining to litigation in the federal judiciary, the left and Democrat
00:12:13.020 nominated judges and Supreme Court justices so prioritize the abortion, quote unquote, right,
00:12:18.860 that there really are two sets of rules. There are the rules for every other case that does not
00:12:23.220 involve abortion. And then there are the rules for abortion. And that's what you saw here,
00:12:27.140 obviously, that the entire rulebook, the entire semblance of anything pertaining to kind of the
00:12:32.520 health institutional integrity of the Supreme Court institution was just totally thrown out the
00:12:37.100 window for the short term game of preserving the ability to, you know, wantonly slaughter an entire
00:12:45.500 subclass of human beings. So it's obviously reprehensible. I mean, at this point, Ali,
00:12:50.820 it's happened, it's done. I am just hoping that this investigation concludes rapidly and we can have
00:12:56.380 some sense of justice for the leaker. Yeah, Chief Justice Roberts, obviously, we knew that he was
00:13:02.520 going to be very angry about this. As you said, this is unprecedented. And Chief Justice Roberts says,
00:13:07.540 I'm sure all justices are, but it seems like in particular, Roberts is so concerned about the
00:13:11.680 integrity of the court. I just can't imagine his reaction when he found this out. And of course,
00:13:16.760 he is going to conduct a leak investigation. I think your prediction is right, that whoever
00:13:21.360 did do the leaking will find themselves with some kind of fancy contributorship. They will be hailed
00:13:26.480 some kind of hero from the left. You're seeing plenty of blue check marks on the left
00:13:31.000 say things like that already, you know, congratulating this person on their heroism.
00:13:37.760 Um, I do want to hear you kind of articulate or at least highlight some of the arguments that Alito
00:13:46.320 made. Now, this is a drafted decision. Roberts has also said this is not going to this is not the
00:13:51.520 final version. CNN actually came out and said, Oh, no, Roberts is not trying to overturn Roe v.
00:13:57.440 Wade entirely. I'm not really sure what to believe just so many, so many opinions and reports and leaks
00:14:03.560 at this point. But, um, so we know that this is not the final version, but tell us a little bit of
00:14:08.920 what Alito argued in this draft. Yeah. So before we get to that, I do want to say one thing about
00:14:15.360 Chief Justice Roberts, and I'm happy you mentioned him because we all know any kind of cursory observer
00:14:19.820 of the court knows that the chief cares preeminently first and foremost about the alleged institutional
00:14:24.620 integrity of the court. That seems to kind of guide the way he moves even more so than his
00:14:29.040 substantive consideration of jurisprudence, which suffice to say is not how a justice should go about his or her
00:14:33.240 responsibilities, but that is what has motivated him. But, you know, my friend Josh Blackman, who is a law
00:14:37.980 professor in Houston, Texas, had a fantastic blog post last night where he basically said that the fact that
00:14:43.300 this happened shows the fallacy in John Roberts' entire long game of being able to kind of be a neutral
00:14:49.480 arbiter and kind of a steward of the court's integrity. The fact that the very fact that this happened
00:14:54.180 showed that one man or one woman obviously does not have the ability to control of that nature. So I thought that
00:14:59.320 was a very insightful point that Professor Blackman made. But to your question, Ali, look, the opinion,
00:15:04.780 you know, I've read through most of it. I'm still kind of getting through some of the details.
00:15:08.560 It's very good. Justice Alito does not pull any punches in this opinion. He says what I think a lot
00:15:14.000 of us in kind of the pro-life community and the conservative community wanted this opinion to read
00:15:18.040 like. I will be honest with you, after Dobbs' oral argument happened back on December 1st, I was honestly
00:15:23.280 not personally optimistic that we would get kind of a forceful opinion of this nature. I think my final
00:15:28.840 prediction was that it would be kind of a murky 3-3-3 split, not kind of a 5-just-as-clean overrule.
00:15:35.420 Specifically, I kind of thought there's a possibility that there might be like a 4-3-2 situation where Roberts
00:15:40.460 could peel away either Kavanaugh or Barrett. It seems like, you know, that still could happen, to be clear.
00:15:45.720 I mean, Roberts still could potentially peel away Kavanaugh or Barrett, in which case we would get a very narrow
00:15:51.000 controlling plurality opinion. The chief, like the chief always does, is clearly trying to kind of
00:15:55.040 split the baby here. That's a terrible pun in this situation, obviously. But what he's literally
00:15:59.240 trying to do is to find, like, a very narrow way to uphold the Mississippi statute, the 15-week ban,
00:16:05.300 but, you know, preserve Roe and Casey. The problem, of course, is that that's intellectually
00:16:08.780 indefensible. There is no actual principal way whatsoever to do that. All he would be doing is
00:16:13.460 kicking the can down the road for this case to kind of come up through the judiciary yet again
00:16:16.880 three, four, five years from now. So I obviously hope and pray that he does not do that, that he's
00:16:22.240 unsuccessful in those efforts. But my reading of his statements that came out just this morning is that
00:16:26.500 he is still trying to do exactly that. He's still trying to peel away Kavanaugh or Barrett.
00:16:30.500 So at this point, you know, I think what conservatives have to be doing, obviously, is pray
00:16:34.020 that Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett have the backbone to not fall prey to the chief justice's
00:16:40.140 delusions. And I do think, though, that this leaker, whoever he or she is,
00:16:44.640 has inadvertently made a huge mistake. I do think that having done this will probably stiffen the
00:16:50.520 spines of Kavanaugh and Barrett. So at this point, yeah, I do. I do. So at this point,
00:16:55.460 my prediction is that we is that it is kind of a five justice clean over rule of Roe and Casey.
00:17:00.020 I could be wrong about that, but that is my prediction.
00:17:06.200 I think that's that's the fear that someone like Kavanaugh would kowtow to public pressure.
00:17:12.080 And I'm guessing that was the motivation of this leaker. I'm hopeful like you. I'm optimistic that
00:17:17.300 that's not going to be the conclusion because now they also if they do go back, if they do kind of
00:17:24.460 change their mind, of course, we don't know exactly what their arguments were, but everyone's going to
00:17:30.760 know it's because of political pressure. It's because of the leak, which would cause its own
00:17:35.220 problems. But I'm guessing the motivation and I just want to hear your opinion on that and leaking
00:17:39.900 this was for that public pressure, was to try to help Roberts possibly peel away someone like
00:17:46.360 Kavanaugh or Barrett. Is that what you think? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, my two best
00:17:50.300 guesses as to what's going on here. One is, again, we're probably talking about a Sotomayor
00:17:55.780 chambers operation here, whether it's the justice or one of her clerks. Again, I'd have no way of
00:17:59.680 knowing just my best guess. But assuming that is the case, we're talking here about a far left
00:18:04.060 chambers, right? So I think it is totally not crazy that, assuming that it was a Sotomayor clerk
00:18:09.840 who did this, that he or she was actively hoping to basically sick Antifa thugs outside the personal
00:18:17.100 residence of a Brett Kavanaugh or an Amy Coney Barrett. I really do not think that when it comes
00:18:22.140 to the left's foremost pagan sacrament abortion, that something like that is too low. The other
00:18:26.660 thing happening here, though, is that, you know, we have midterm elections this fall. Congress is about
00:18:30.620 to go to recess this August. So I think what they're probably trying to telegraph is try to
00:18:35.280 try to send a message to Chuck Schumer, who seems to have received this message immediately, as his
00:18:39.780 statement Nancy Pelosi indicated last night, the message that they have to, or, you know, from their
00:18:44.860 perspective, they should at least nuke the filibuster and statutorily codify Roe versus Wade into law,
00:18:50.800 right? So I think that's the other thing going on there. That's not going to happen, obviously,
00:18:54.380 right? Because Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, they will not nuke the filibuster. Even Lisa Murkowski or Susan
00:19:00.200 Collins, who obviously are not exactly solid on the abortion issue, to put it mildly, they still
00:19:04.360 care about the filibuster as far as kind of a norm of the Senate. I have a question on that. Even if
00:19:09.120 they codified Roe into law, if that is found unconstitutional, would you not have to pass a
00:19:15.500 constitutional amendment that said that abortion is a right? So how exactly would that work? Would a law
00:19:20.960 like that be upheld if they did try to say that abortion is now, access to abortion is now the law of
00:19:27.300 the land federally? So what they could do is, so the court, the Alito opinion says that abortion is
00:19:34.460 not a 14th amendment substantive due process, right? Which is what Roe v. Wade ruled back in 1973.
00:19:39.100 That's what Roe v. Wade ruled. Right, exactly. That there is no constitutional right to abort an
00:19:43.420 unborn child. But you obviously can have a statutory right in place of a constitutional right. So that's
00:19:48.960 kind of what the Democrats have been talking about when they talk about, I think Kamala Harris back in
00:19:52.860 the primary back in 2020 was big on this issue, right? Kind of Congress passing a statutory right
00:19:57.880 to Roe v. Wade. Now the remedy for that, if God forbid they pass that, and again, I do not think
00:20:02.620 they will, but the remedy for that would be either constitutional amendments to codify the right to
00:20:07.180 life, as you mentioned, or alternatively, this kind of alternative equal protection clause,
00:20:12.860 14th amendment approach jurisprudentially that I've advanced, Professor John Finnis has advanced,
00:20:17.720 my friend Josh Craddock has advanced, which basically argues that the 14th amendment, contrary to what
00:20:22.860 originalists and conservatives have said, is actually not silent on the issue of abortion.
00:20:27.420 But if you actually read the words of equal protection clause seriously, that clause speaks
00:20:31.580 of protecting all persons equally. And if you go back and look at the writings of the time,
00:20:36.540 I think it was actually understood that persons encompass both born and unborn persons, thereby
00:20:42.620 making an equal protection clause violation for a state to protect born life under homicide laws,
00:20:48.540 but not unborn life. So that's an argument that I personally made. The Alito opinion obviously does
00:20:53.420 not go there to be clear. I'm not even sure we have a single vote on the current court for that
00:20:57.740 proposition, but Congress could also under his 14th amendment, section five enforcement power
00:21:02.780 could actually legislate that into law as well. So this is a thing that really conservatives don't
00:21:07.820 talk about very often, Ali, literally tomorrow, literally tomorrow, Josh Hawley, Tom Codd and Ted
00:21:13.420 Cruz, one of our pro-life stalwarts could literally introduce a bill that says that the US Congress
00:21:20.140 under its 14th amendment, section five power to enforce section one of the 14th amendment is declaring
00:21:25.980 abortion illegal nationally. They could do that tomorrow. They just haven't done so.
00:21:30.620 Why do you think that is?
00:21:33.260 A lot of reasons. One is that the specific legal argument I'm making on the equal protection clause
00:21:38.540 is admittedly somewhat of an outlier. It's not crazy. I mean, John Fennett had a cover in First
00:21:44.380 Things Magazine a year ago, kind of making this argument. Robbie George, actually the Princeton
00:21:48.140 professor, maybe one of the most esteemed social conservative intellectuals in the country,
00:21:51.580 his amicus brief in the Dobbs case advanced this argument. So it's not crazy. It's definitely
00:21:56.460 not crazy, but it's not popular. So what Congress would have to do to do that would be to kind of
00:22:02.620 seize onto that argument as step one, and then step two, actually rally around a bill to then
00:22:09.980 actually act on it using their section five power. The other problem there is that Congress does not
00:22:13.660 frequently act on its 14th amendment section five enforcement power to kind of get in the legal weeds
00:22:18.140 a little bit. There's a 1997 case out of Texas called City of Bernie, which kind of impinged upon
00:22:24.300 Congress's 14th amendment section five enforcement power a little bit. It's kind of a very mealy-mouthed
00:22:29.100 Anthony Kennedy opinion, not a particularly good one in my estimation. So there are some kind of
00:22:33.100 presidential bars to that as well. But you know, I personally have been hoping that like Josh Hawley,
00:22:38.860 of all people, would actually introduce that bill. So maybe he will. I'm not sure.
00:22:41.820 Yeah, let's hope so. I do see some people who call themselves, I don't know, maybe libertarians,
00:22:47.340 or maybe they consider themselves on the right saying, oh, this is going to put the midterms in jeopardy.
00:22:52.220 Of course, that's not really what this is about. I think that's kind of an inappropriate observation,
00:22:57.100 although it may be. I'm not so sure that I predict that. I think all of the people that
00:23:03.100 were going to vote Democrat because of abortion are still going to vote Democrat. I don't think
00:23:07.580 any people in the middle are necessarily going to vote Democrat because of this. Although I do think
00:23:13.500 that Democrats obviously have a pattern. If you think back just two years to May, they have a pattern of
00:23:18.860 trying to stir up chaos and anger and even rioting and violence to push radical legislation and to
00:23:25.340 try to influence the outcomes of elections. We saw that a couple of years ago with a crisis and
00:23:31.020 we're probably going to see that now. It's going to be an interesting and a little bit of a frightening
00:23:38.220 summer because of that. But what I'm hopeful is that people will see, people who are in the middle,
00:23:44.060 especially Christians who, gosh, consider themselves pro-life but don't vote against abortion.
00:23:49.260 I'm hopeful that they will actually see that the people screaming like banshees, that as you said,
00:23:55.100 this really is their pagan sacrament, that they really worship abortion. They worship the so-called
00:24:01.740 right to kill an unborn child and that they will actually be horrified at what they see as far as
00:24:08.220 what I think is demonic activity coming from the supporters of abortion and that it is not going
00:24:14.140 to lead to these people in the middle suddenly voting Democrat because of the abortion issue.
00:24:19.580 I just don't think it's going to go that direction.
00:24:22.940 Yeah. No, look, I mean, the Democrats, to say that they have gone off the deep end when it comes
00:24:28.300 to the abortion issue, we'll be putting it mildly. You know, I saw David Harsany of National Review
00:24:32.300 just this morning tweet out, apparently back in 1982, when he was a relatively young US senator
00:24:37.580 from Delaware, Joe Biden, who at the time, I think, was still a self-proclaimed pro-life Catholic
00:24:42.700 senator, obviously, in Delaware. At the time, he introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn
00:24:47.340 Roe versus Wade and return it to the states. Wow.
00:24:49.820 You know, I think, I think the late Ted Kennedy, I think, I mean, earlier in his career, certainly,
00:24:54.460 he was, you know, he was also of the opinion that Roe versus Wade was incorrectly decided,
00:24:57.900 should be overturned. The Democratic Party for years and years, which obviously was kind of like a
00:25:02.060 pro-labor union kind of working class, you know, Rust Belt Catholic Party, they were not crazy
00:25:08.140 on the abortion issue. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, obviously. I mean, famously,
00:25:11.980 Bill Clinton, of course, over and over again, referred to abortion as safe, legal and rare.
00:25:16.700 Look, I mean, I remember my second year of law school, I guess this would have been at this point
00:25:19.980 kind of seven years ago or so. I remember going to this book talk that the pro-abortion student group
00:25:25.500 was holding about some book that at the time was relatively new called Shout Your Abortion,
00:25:30.140 you know, basically saying that this is that is no different from clipping a toenail. It's the same
00:25:33.580 thing. So in a roughly 20 year period from the mid 90s to the middle of the last decade,
00:25:38.780 we went from the Clintonian formulation of safe, legal and rare to Shout Your Abortion. I can't
00:25:43.980 pinpoint exactly when that inflection point happened. I think the Obama presidency obviously was kind of
00:25:49.660 a major kind of shift to the left in many ways, the abortion issue. Yes. Yeah. The abortion issue
00:25:55.180 included. But this obviously is very, very, very fertile ground for Republicans. The interesting
00:26:00.700 thing, I think, assuming assuming the court holds through, obviously, OK, assuming that the court does
00:26:06.300 this and, you know, thank God we get back to kind of a pre-Rogue constitutional regime. The real question
00:26:11.500 then is what is going to happen in the red states? What is going to happen in Texas, Florida, Tennessee,
00:26:17.740 your kind of big red states? Are they going to lead the way? I honestly am not confident predicting
00:26:23.660 that more than five to 10 Republican states will actually fully ban abortion. I think we'll start
00:26:28.540 There are trigger laws in some states, correct? There definitely are. But a lot of them are kind
00:26:33.660 of like eight to 12 week bans. You know, some are heartbeat measures, which these are good laws,
00:26:39.100 to be clear. But, you know, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming, there are some very red states that I think will
00:26:45.180 truly ban it from conception. But we'll see. I mean, that assuming that this actually takes place,
00:26:49.900 that is where the pro-life fight moves. It moves to the moves to the 50 state legislatures.
00:26:53.660 Yep, absolutely. And just to end this, if you could kind of summarize, you've already touched
00:26:58.220 on it. But if you could kind of summarize why Roe v. Wade was not constitutional, because one thing,
00:27:04.460 the one thing that you will not see in all of the reactions from the left, or I'll say most,
00:27:08.220 I'll leave kind of the exception out there as a possibility in the reactions from the reporters or
00:27:12.700 activists or whoever they are on the left, you won't hear an argument about why Alito is wrong,
00:27:19.340 about why Alito logically or constitutionally gets his argument wrong. They're not really
00:27:24.620 interested in that at all. They're just interested in whether or not they can easily access abortion.
00:27:29.900 Doesn't matter if it's constitutional or not. But if you're making a decision like Alito has
00:27:36.220 articulated a decision about why Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, what would you say?
00:27:42.940 So look, I mean, having gone to a pretty good law school, I had a lot of liberal classmates.
00:27:47.500 There are very few smart liberals. I'm trying to choose my words carefully here. But there are very
00:27:53.820 few smart, like constitutionally literate liberals who are willing to give like a fulsome,
00:28:00.460 full spectrum defense of the purported constitutional law that underlaid the Roe v. Wade decision.
00:28:07.660 As John Hart Eli, the late constitutional law scholar and a Harvard Law professor and himself
00:28:12.300 a personal proponent on a policy level of abortion rights, he famously said that Roe v. Wade, quote,
00:28:17.980 was not constitutional law and did not even pretend to be. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, obviously,
00:28:22.940 the leading ACLU attorney, the feminist trailblazer. She over and over again, at least kind of earlier
00:28:29.980 in her career, said that Roe v. Wade was probably wrong because it did not lay on a solid constitutional
00:28:35.260 law foundation. And also as a pragmatic level, it foreclosed debate on this very contentious issue.
00:28:40.860 It only inflamed tensions. It didn't do anything to kind of calm tensions. So there were very few
00:28:45.740 people willing to actually defend Roe v. Wade, to be honest with you. The basic argument against Roe,
00:28:50.620 the strong form version of the argument against Roe is what I just said, that the protection clause
00:28:54.620 actually, if you read it properly, actually bans abortion. The weaker form version, which I think
00:28:59.260 is kind of the more mainstream version that has existed for the past, you know, four decades or
00:29:03.340 so since the founding of the federal society and kind of beginning of the modern conservative
00:29:07.020 legal movement that I'm very much a part of, the more mainstream argument would be that 14th
00:29:11.660 amendment section one, whether it's a due process clause or the equal protection clause,
00:29:15.420 says nothing whatsoever about abortion, specifically the due process clause. Liberals love this doctrine
00:29:21.260 of so-called substantive due process, where the due process clause in their minds speaks not only of
00:29:26.780 process, but actually has kind of substantive unenumerated liberties embedded therein. But if you,
00:29:33.420 there is really very, very, very little, historically speaking, to kind of ground that claim.
00:29:38.780 Specifically in Roe, what the court did, Roe was 1973. It built upon the case Griswold versus
00:29:43.660 Connecticut eight years prior, which was a case out of Connecticut, obviously, where the court first
00:29:48.300 kind of promulgated a so-called right to privacy. The problem with the so-called right to privacy as a
00:29:53.660 constitutional right was that it's just, it's not in there. I mean, they literally said they found it
00:29:58.380 in the emanations of the penumbras of the ninth amendment. Most people don't even know what that means.
00:30:03.180 Exactly. It was the most ludicrous legalese you could ever think of. It was total, total nonsense.
00:30:09.500 So Roe versus Wade took this totally fabricated, quote unquote, right from Griswold and then extended
00:30:14.780 it to the willful and wanton slaughter of an entire subclass between beings. I mean, it's beyond
00:30:19.340 indefensible. And, you know, just thank God that as of now, it looks like the court is finally going
00:30:23.980 to do the right thing. Yeah. Thank God we still have a ways to go. It looks like we still have some
00:30:28.540 prayers to pray. I'm very thankful for your voice and for your insight on all of this.
00:30:32.860 Thank you so much for always arguing so persuasively and speaking so clearly.
00:30:37.660 You bet, Ali. Thanks for having me. Thank you.
00:30:44.060 All right. Now that we've had Josh kind of tackle the legal side of this, I want to talk a little
00:30:48.780 bit about the reaction to this. As I mentioned, number one, you are not seeing any arguments that
00:30:55.740 I have seen from the left about why Alito was wrong. Articulate to me why, how abortion is
00:31:02.620 constitutional right? Like, let's make it as clear and as coherent as possible. Let me hear
00:31:08.300 really your argument. Of course, we know that there is no moral or logical or scientific argument.
00:31:13.020 How many times have we been through every single argument that tries to defend abortion, whether
00:31:18.460 it's bodily autonomy, whether it's that the child isn't developed enough or the child is too small or
00:31:23.660 the child isn't sentient? All of those arguments are not only immoral, but they are entirely inconsistent
00:31:29.820 with someone who believes that murder should be illegal outside of the womb. Why do all of the
00:31:34.940 principles that leftists say or pro-choice, pro-abortioners say justify abortion of someone
00:31:40.620 inside the womb, murder of someone inside the womb? Why can't you apply that to people outside of
00:31:44.540 the womb? It's entirely inconsistent unless you have some superstitious idea that the birth canal
00:31:51.900 transfers rights into a person. Otherwise, when does a person have rights if not at conception? How
00:31:57.980 old do they have to be? How developed do they have to be? What kind of abilities do they have to have
00:32:04.220 for you to say that that person has a right not to be murdered? Is it outside of the womb? Okay,
00:32:10.220 well, there are babies outside of the womb who are born premature at 23 weeks, and then there are
00:32:15.420 babies who are still inside of the womb at 23 weeks. The only difference between those two babies
00:32:19.900 is location. So you are arguing that abortion, murder, is something that is justified by mere location.
00:32:27.340 Does that apply to people outside of the womb? Are people who are smaller, who are less developed,
00:32:32.220 who have fewer abilities, they have more disabilities, who are poor, who are abused, who might grow up to
00:32:38.940 live some kind of hard life, or any of those justifications for murdering people outside of
00:32:43.740 the womb? If not, which I would say the vast majority of people would say no, you shouldn't
00:32:50.620 be able to murder someone outside of the womb because they're poor, or they're young, or they're
00:32:54.140 small, or they're less developed than an adult, or because they don't have the ability to speak for
00:32:59.100 themselves, or because they're inconvenient to their parents, or because their parents are financially
00:33:03.260 burdened, or they decided they don't want kids anymore, or this child isn't wanted in general.
00:33:09.020 You wouldn't use any of those reasons to justify the murder of a child or a person outside of
00:33:13.580 the womb. So again, you need to be able to explain why those are reasons to murder someone inside the
00:33:19.500 womb. And the only reason is because you're able to get away with it. There's no moral, or logical,
00:33:25.180 or legally consistent, or coherent argument for abortion. As I've said before, I testified before
00:33:30.780 Congress, and I expected to hear some more sophisticated arguments from the Democrats who support the
00:33:37.180 ability to legally access the slaughter of unborn children. I expected some kind of intellectual
00:33:47.260 response to what I had to say about abortion from these Democrats, and I didn't hear it. I heard
00:33:52.860 nothing more sophisticated, nothing more interesting, nothing more intellectual from these Democrats in
00:33:57.900 Congress than I've heard from your average Twitter troll. I have never, ever heard a good argument for
00:34:03.620 abortion. That's what you're going to be hearing over the next few weeks, over the next few months,
00:34:07.300 certainly up until the midterms. You are going to be hearing all of these sob stories from women who
00:34:13.060 say that they had to get an abortion. They had to get an abortion because of their career. They had
00:34:17.300 to get an abortion because they were in a bad situation. And this is violating a woman's rights.
00:34:22.020 This is violating a woman's bodily autonomy. This is going to set women back. What the left
00:34:28.660 conveniently leaves out is what an abortion is. What are we talking about when you're talking about
00:34:34.180 a woman's right? What are we talking about when you're talking about reproductive justice? What are
00:34:38.580 you talking about when you are saying something like forced birth? What are you talking about when
00:34:43.780 you're using these euphemisms? As I've said before, if you have to use euphemisms to make your side of
00:34:49.780 an argument palatable, in other words, if you have to lie to make your side of the argument palatable,
00:34:54.820 you're on the wrong side. Whereas when it comes to abortion, all we have to do, all the anti-abortioners
00:35:00.840 have to do is tell the truth. What we're talking about, and I think it's so important, I always bring
00:35:05.180 us back to this, what we're talking about is the murder of babies. That's what we're talking about.
00:35:10.520 We're talking about the murder of babies. We are talking about poisoning a baby with pills.
00:35:15.500 We're talking about dismembering a baby inside the womb with forceps. We're talking about in second
00:35:21.980 trimester abortions, taking a needle that is filled with the same combination of chemicals that is used
00:35:27.500 in lethal injections of murderers on death row, inserting that needle with that poisonous chemical
00:35:34.160 into a woman's womb, into her uterus, and if the baby isn't wiggling too much, into the baby's heart,
00:35:40.300 and inserting the poison into the baby's heart to cause a fatal heart attack until that baby dies
00:35:46.480 and can be removed from the mother's womb. That's what we're talking about. And of course,
00:35:50.720 there are even more, if you can imagine it, grotesque forms of abortion that are being performed.
00:35:55.860 We talked about a couple weeks ago with Lila Rose, these five second, third trimester babies,
00:36:02.500 their bodies were disposed. They were found outside of a Washington abortion clinic.
00:36:07.020 They were being thrown away as waste. And we saw pictures of these little babies. And
00:36:11.860 one little baby girl, she was probably close to 30 weeks gestation. So we're talking third
00:36:17.640 trimester here. Her skull was crushed. Her brain had been sucked out. Now, technically,
00:36:22.320 that form of abortion is illegal. That's considered a partial birth abortion, where the doctor,
00:36:28.020 the abortionist actually induces birth, takes the child's head, the living child's head out of the
00:36:34.580 birth canal, inserts a tube into the back of the child's skull, and sucks the brain out until the
00:36:39.960 skull collapses. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about abortion. So when you see
00:36:45.360 these people screeching, when you see the people on the left talking about, oh, this is going to set
00:36:49.960 women back. Oh, we're talking about women's rights here. Oh, this is so unjust that our right to abortion
00:36:55.340 is being taken away. That's what they're screeching about. This is not about left versus right.
00:37:00.700 This is not about Democrat versus Republican. This is about light versus dark and right versus wrong.
00:37:06.460 I didn't know yesterday when I talked about Tim Keller's soft, morally relativistic, and just
00:37:11.620 intellectually inept attitude and argument about abortion yesterday that we would be talking about
00:37:19.220 this today. And I'm not surprised at all that Big Eva and the sophisticated intellectual evangelicals
00:37:24.480 that are always chastising us Christians on the conservative side for being too into the culture
00:37:31.400 wars. I'm not seeing a whole lot of reaction from them. Karen Swallow Pryor, who I would consider kind
00:37:36.340 of in that group, she is a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
00:37:45.300 She, I'm hoping that I misunderstand. I'm hoping that I misunderstand. She does vote Democrat.
00:37:51.320 Of course, she was very anti-Trump. She said she tweeted yesterday. Someone tweeted at her and said
00:37:58.760 that someone tweeted at her and said that that if it weren't for or she can't really talk about this,
00:38:07.740 what's going on, because she basically voted against this because she voted for the party that
00:38:12.440 is pro-abortion. And she responded by saying, yep, I was for the slow, right way of doing things.
00:38:17.660 That's why I said 50 years, meaning that we're responding to an earlier tweet, meaning that in 50
00:38:25.140 years, abortion will be unthinkable. She said, I'm not big on shortcuts. So I'm hoping I'm
00:38:30.540 misunderstanding what she's saying, but it sounds like she is saying this Supreme Court decision,
00:38:35.540 if it is upheld, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, that that's a shortcut and that it should take another
00:38:42.240 50 years for abortion to be unthinkable. Is that the holistically pro-life decision? Is that the pro-life
00:38:47.300 for pro-life evangelicals for Biden position that we need a hundred years of unfettered slaughter of
00:38:53.180 unborn children before we do something about it? Is that the way to win the culture war? Like, is that
00:38:59.720 what godly biblical justice looks like? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what she is saying. I somehow don't think so
00:39:05.700 because she is openly advocated on behalf of Democrats who are the pro-abortion party. They're
00:39:12.680 the pro-abortion party. So all the nuance that these sophisticated intellectual evangelicals try
00:39:18.940 to strike, all the tension that they say exists that, oh, we don't know, as Tim Keller said, which
00:39:23.860 side of the aisle has the better solutions for ending abortion. This is not a debate on the left and
00:39:28.600 right about how to end abortion. As you see, and I'm about to play some, as you see in the reactions
00:39:34.280 to the news that Roe v. Wade might be overturned, which just means it'll go back to the states. It
00:39:41.080 doesn't mean that you're not going to be able to access abortion, unfortunately. You'll see that this
00:39:45.940 is not a debate about whether or not abortion is evil. The debate, or it's not a debate about whether
00:39:52.560 or not Republican or Democrat policies and abortion. It is a debate about whether or not abortion is good
00:40:00.660 or whether or not abortion is evil. The left, by and large, thinks abortion is good, that it's morally
00:40:06.060 right, not just that it's a necessary evil, but the platform, the main agenda, the sacrament of the left
00:40:12.920 and of the current Democratic Party that is different from the Democratic Party of just 10 years ago, as you
00:40:17.460 heard Josh say, is that abortion must be accessible, available through nine months without apology and
00:40:26.540 free and totally subsidized by the taxpayer. That is the current Democratic position. If you want to
00:40:32.220 debate which policy, whether it's restricting abortion or making abortion totally free and
00:40:36.680 accessible, is going to end or decrease abortion, I think the answer is obvious. But that's not really
00:40:41.560 the question on the table. The question on the table is whether or not you think slaughtering and
00:40:45.560 dismembering and sucking the brains out of babies is right. Do you think the Constitution speaks to
00:40:51.340 that? Do you think the Constitution speaks to that being okay? And if you as a Christian thinks that
00:40:55.860 maybe we should just have a slow crawl for the next 50 years to try to make that unthinkable, that
00:41:02.240 the law shouldn't speak at all to the dignity and the right of an unborn child not to be brutally
00:41:07.100 murdered, then you're on the wrong side. You know nothing of justice. You know nothing of the God who
00:41:11.820 created justice, might I add. As R.C. Sproul said when he was alive, if he knows anything about
00:41:18.480 God, the God that he studied for his many years in ministry, if he knows anything about the God of
00:41:24.460 Scripture, the God who created the heavens and the earth, the God who established justice, who alone
00:41:28.840 is the arbiter of right and wrong and the creator of truth, if he knows anything about that God, he knows
00:41:33.520 that he hates abortion. Now, that does not mean that he hates women who have had abortions. There is
00:41:40.520 abundant grace for women who have had abortions. There's abundant compassion. We, the church, should
00:41:45.140 be the first ones to show up, both for women who are struggling with shame and guilt and the after
00:41:50.620 effects of abortion and women who have an unplanned pregnancy. And I'll get more into that in a second,
00:41:56.740 but I just wanted to make sure that I at least give you that, that God hates abortion. There's grace for
00:42:02.560 women who have had abortions, but let us not, because we want to show grace, shy away from the truth that
00:42:08.500 God hates abortion. We should be celebrating the fact that Roe v. Wade might be overturned. That is the
00:42:15.520 right side. That's the right side. How you can judge if you're on the right side of this issue is how
00:42:22.840 happy you are to hear that it might be harder to slaughter an unborn child. If that makes you sad or scared
00:42:27.800 it all, then I would do some serious soul searching. And I pray that God would soften your heart and
00:42:33.160 change your mind. I genuinely mean that. I don't mean that in a condescending way. That's what I'm
00:42:37.260 praying, that your heart would be changed, that your mind would be changed, that you would see that
00:42:41.220 this is the greatest moral atrocity of our time. That yes, it is exactly akin to slavery, because what
00:42:48.060 you are doing is you are deciding that an entire class of human beings that is scientifically what they
00:42:52.740 are, you can say that they shouldn't have rights if you want to make that argument, but they are human
00:42:57.120 beings. So you need to explain why some human beings shouldn't have rights and some should.
00:43:01.440 What you are saying is that a class of human beings, because they are not politically useful,
00:43:06.160 because they don't have a voice, because they can't physically fight back, that they are subhuman
00:43:11.160 or that they shouldn't have personhood rights. That is exactly the justification for every single
00:43:18.760 human rights atrocity that has ever existed throughout history. Only ruthless tyrants and barbarians
00:43:26.580 and evil, wicked dictators take away the personhood status of a group of people to justify killing that
00:43:36.600 group of people. When you're talking about people who justified slavery by saying that black people
00:43:43.420 aren't fully human, when you're talking about people who have justified all forms of genocide,
00:43:49.580 when you're talking about the Holocaust. I know people get really touchy when you make those
00:43:54.380 comparisons, but it is the exact same logic. You decided completely arbitrarily that one group of
00:44:00.940 people doesn't have a right to life. And no matter how much you kick and scream and yell in front of
00:44:07.720 the Supreme Court, you're not going to be able to come up with a morally or legally or logical,
00:44:13.700 coherent defense of that. You're just not. The only coherent and consistent argument that you can make,
00:44:21.480 it's not even coherent, consistent, but at least it's honest. If you just say that it's okay,
00:44:27.520 that you believe that some, that killing some people is okay, if society decides that they're
00:44:32.060 not useful, just know that that principle is going to then apply to lots of people outside
00:44:36.560 the womb and you are going to have been a part of that. So here are some reactions from people.
00:44:45.440 Here are some reactions from people who, like, I wish I could say that they're demons. Like,
00:44:51.680 honestly, that would be a better explanation for what's going on. But they're human beings.
00:44:56.640 They're human beings. They're made in the image of God. And here is their reaction in front of the
00:45:00.520 Supreme Court to the fact to, that they might not be able to access abortion quite as easily.
00:45:06.440 All right. So there were hundreds of people, if not more than that, in front of the Supreme
00:45:36.220 Court, there were back and forths between pro-lifers and pro-abortioners about this. And again,
00:45:44.200 just the dichotomy here of light versus darkness is so obvious. And then Libs of TikTok, who always
00:45:50.060 comes through for us in showing just the most inane reactions from the left when it comes to things
00:45:55.100 like this. Here is a montage that they put together of some, I guess, feminists on TikTok reacting.
00:46:06.220 This abortion law goes beyond a woman's issue. And it goes beyond anything you could ever imagine.
00:46:21.420 The societal implications of this are going to be insane. The amount of, uh, just pain and damages
00:46:28.300 is going to cause. And the full ability to tell a woman what she can and can't do with her body.
00:46:33.100 And we're going back into a handmaid's tale society here.
00:46:36.500 All of you women who sat home, all of you young girls, adults over 18 years old, who did not go out
00:46:48.800 and vote, who did not think that you need to protect your womb. We're now back in the dark ages.
00:46:58.440 Um, brace yourselves, ladies. I'm with you. My heart is just broken. I don't understand why this country
00:47:09.460 hates women so much. I just don't understand it. We'll get through this. We'll figure out a way.
00:47:19.360 No more joking about it being a handmaid's tale. It will be.
00:47:31.220 Oh my gosh. All right. Let us remind ourselves again, again, that we're not talking about
00:47:42.960 women's bodies. No one's trying to regulate your body. There is a choice. You have a choice of
00:47:50.280 whether or not you get pregnant. Yes, there are situations, unfortunately, tragically,
00:47:54.540 and which women get raped. That accounts for less than 1% of all abortions, of all reasons for
00:48:01.240 abortion. And if you asked a leftist, by the way, are you okay with restricting abortion just to the
00:48:09.020 cases of where someone gets raped? Of course, they'll say no. So they bring up, well, this is
00:48:13.760 about women's bodies because they're not always making a choice to get pregnant because some women
00:48:18.220 are raped. Rape is very serious. It shouldn't just be a political talking point, by the way,
00:48:22.180 but they just bring it up because it's a talking point. They don't actually mean that abortion
00:48:26.160 should only be available in cases of rape. They just bring it up because they're trying to morally
00:48:30.620 extort you into saying, well, maybe in that case, but not even in that case. Because look,
00:48:35.660 someone's conception, the circumstances surrounding someone's conception does not justify murdering
00:48:40.940 them. Again, does that justify murdering someone outside of the womb if they were conceived in rape?
00:48:45.320 Of course not. Then why does that justify murdering them inside the womb? So just remember that when
00:48:50.540 you're seeing all of these tears, when you're seeing all of these arguments being made, just
00:48:54.620 bring it back to what abortion is and ask the person that you're talking to, why do you think
00:48:59.740 abortion is right? Do you know what an abortion is? What do you think about this? Do you apply the
00:49:04.780 same principle to people outside the womb? Get them to define their terms and really try to explain
00:49:10.060 their defense of it. And then as we've talked about this argument for, oh, well, this is just going to
00:49:15.260 make abortion less safe. And so we don't need to get the law involved in it. That's just silly. Then
00:49:22.540 you could apply that to anything. Like, do you believe that murder of people outside of the womb
00:49:27.240 shouldn't be illegal because it might make it less safe? That's not why we pass laws. It's not just
00:49:32.620 about that. It's not just about decreasing the number of crimes that might be part of it. But it is
00:49:36.700 because you want to legally recognize a human being's right not to be murdered. A human being's
00:49:43.420 humanity, a human being's personhood. And so that's what this is about. That's what this is
00:49:50.060 about. And for this argument that you hear, once again, that, oh, well, y'all are just pro-birth.
00:49:57.140 Y'all are just pro-birth. You just want to force women to give birth. Again, no one forced her to
00:50:02.200 become pregnant in 99% of these situations. Everyone knows what leads to pregnancy, all right?
00:50:08.520 Everyone knows what leads to pregnancy. And yes, consent to sex is consent to pregnancy.
00:50:12.700 Like people say, I just have to pause. People say, well, consent to sex is not the same thing
00:50:17.160 as consent to pregnancy. And so it's like you're getting pregnant. It's violating your consent,
00:50:22.860 which is just wild. That is like saying that eating food is not consent to digestion. Like you
00:50:29.920 understand that one leads to the other. That's how human biology works. And I understand the left is
00:50:34.340 very confused about human biology because they deny the existence of male versus female. But
00:50:38.680 that is how it works. That's how we're all here because of male versus female and the anatomy and
00:50:44.600 the parts that play together to create a pregnancy. And so yes, consent to sex is consent to pregnancy.
00:50:50.460 And so you absolutely have a choice. You have autonomy over those choices. You have autonomy over
00:50:55.140 your body. And if anyone violates that through something like sexual assault or rape, I think that
00:50:59.340 person should go to prison for the rest of their lives. So like we're on the same page with how wrong
00:51:03.720 that is. I just don't think you should murder someone because of a choice you made or because
00:51:08.460 of any circumstance surrounding conception. We're talking about killing babies. I believe that
00:51:12.920 killing any innocent human is wrong. If you are pro-choice or you are pro-abortion, even if you
00:51:18.600 consider yourself personally pro-life but politically pro-choice, which again is logically inconsistent,
00:51:24.560 then you believe that killing some innocent human beings is okay. I don't. You believe that killing
00:51:29.660 some innocent people is fine and acceptable and should be legal. I simply don't. And I think
00:51:36.220 that's really clear cut about who is on the right side there. We are about to see so much darkness
00:51:43.480 and so much demonic activity, so much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Like if you want to know
00:51:48.580 what hell sounds like, if you want to know what hell looks like, look at the vitriol and the screeching
00:51:55.020 like banshees from people who are crying about the right, who are screaming about the right, who are
00:51:59.400 threatening death toward people who don't believe in the right to slaughter unborn children. I mean,
00:52:05.640 you can look at some of the quote tweets. When I tweeted last night that the person who leaked this
00:52:10.880 knew that Kavanaugh and Barrett and the other conservative justices and their families were
00:52:16.160 going to get threatened with death. I had blue check journalists from left-wing outlets like
00:52:23.600 the nation and other left-wing activists and people on Twitter saying, good, that's a good thing.
00:52:31.000 So they actually, these people, they actually believe that they're on the right side. They
00:52:34.800 actually believe that it is worth threatening the lives. I mean, Kony Barrett has young children.
00:52:39.780 Kavanaugh has young children. They're saying that it's okay. They would actually, I guess,
00:52:44.840 be okay with what they're saying is these people on Twitter would be okay with Kavanaugh and his
00:52:50.020 family, Kony Barrett and her seven children being murdered because they don't believe that there's
00:52:57.760 a constitutional right to killing a baby. Just think that you're sharing the side with that people
00:53:03.760 if you believe that abortion should be legal. It's a demonic side. It's really clear cut. It is light
00:53:10.380 versus dark. And look, we absolutely care about these babies and their mothers and their fathers
00:53:17.500 long after birth. That is the majority of pro-life anti-abortion work, as I have said so many times.
00:53:24.820 If you doubt that, then why don't you go to your pro-life pregnancy center and volunteer there?
00:53:29.480 Like if you care so much about what happens to women and their children after birth, then are you
00:53:35.680 volunteering at your local pro-life pregnancy center, at your local pregnancy resource center? I mean,
00:53:40.880 these people are offering free sonograms, free STD checks. They are offering free parenting classes.
00:53:47.780 They are offering free help with education, even the immigration process, even the welfare process.
00:53:53.340 They are helping these people, these women get housing. They are helping these women get jobs. They
00:53:57.960 are helping these women with all sorts of things that actually help them get on their feet and take
00:54:03.660 care of their family. They let those women know that they are not alone. They provide those women with
00:54:07.880 resources and with community that is far more than Planned Parenthood or any abortion facility could
00:54:12.620 ever say. And so before you say that we are just pro-birth, why don't you go to your local pregnancy
00:54:17.860 resource center? And then you can come back to us and tell us if that's true. There's so much time,
00:54:22.720 so much energy, so much prayer, so much money that goes into this, that goes into helping these families
00:54:29.720 so that they are not alone, so that they are not in crisis. The legal work that we do and pushing for
00:54:35.480 good legislation that restricts abortion, that's really important. But that's just one piece of
00:54:40.580 the pie. What we understand as Christians, guys, what we understand as Christians is that this is
00:54:45.900 really the start of a new phase of the pro-life fight. This is really the start of it. And like,
00:54:53.920 I just want to end on some encouragement here. What you do and what you say over a long period of time
00:55:02.260 matters. Man, this is the greatest example of what we, of two of the things that we say. Politics
00:55:08.080 matter because policy matters because people matter. Politics affects policy. Policy affects
00:55:12.260 people. Who you vote for matters. Let's just be honest, without Donald Trump, without Mitch McConnell,
00:55:17.900 whatever you think about them, we would not have this potential decision that could be monumental in
00:55:23.220 saving the lives of thousands and maybe even millions of babies. And so for all the people who
00:55:28.860 talked about Donald Trump being such a wrecking ball for all the people, John Piper, who I like,
00:55:34.780 by the way, in so many ways and appreciate in so many ways, he wrote an article before the election
00:55:39.900 saying that the pride of Donald Trump is just as deadly as the pro-abortion position of the left,
00:55:46.280 of Joe Biden. I'm wondering if he still believes that. I'm wondering what a lot of people who I would
00:55:52.060 consider in big evil. What do they think about all this? Who you vote for matters. And yeah, Donald
00:55:58.000 Trump, imperfect person. I think we would say Mitch McConnell from a conservative perspective. He
00:56:03.040 doesn't always say and do the things that we like to do. But man, this was consequential. And in this
00:56:08.540 case, voting for a Republican can have an amazing generational positive impact and preserving the lives of
00:56:15.500 people and the dignity and the rights of our most vulnerable and most marginalized class of people in this
00:56:21.760 country and in the world. Number one cause of death, by the way, in the world, if you didn't already know
00:56:25.840 that. What you do politically matters. What you care about matters. What you speak up about absolutely
00:56:31.840 matters. And look, this was a long game. It's been 50 years of this unconstitutional, abhorrent
00:56:37.580 decision. It's been 50 years of unfettered, basically slaughter of unborn children. This has been a generational
00:56:45.200 torch passing of advocates and activists speaking up on behalf of unborn children. This has been a long
00:56:52.720 game. And only now, half a century later, are we possibly seeing Roe v. Wade overturned? Let us keep
00:57:00.200 that in mind as we are looking at the darkness that's in our world, as we are looking at all of the other
00:57:04.820 political issues, which, as I say so often for Christians, they're really theological issues, whether it
00:57:11.220 comes to the gender indoctrination of children, all kinds of confusion and chaos and darkness that we
00:57:16.340 see in this world. We're playing a long game. And God is in charge of the timeline. God is in charge of
00:57:22.260 the justice that he is going to dole out. Man, we are deserving of so much wrath because of this as a
00:57:30.800 country. There have been many injustices perpetuated by all kinds of countries, including America, over our
00:57:36.240 history. This possibly being the foremost right up there with chattel slavery. I mean, we deserve so
00:57:43.520 much wrath for allowing this to endure for there being people and organizations of political parties
00:57:49.520 that celebrate the slaughter of unborn children. And if this is overturned, it will be an act of
00:57:54.420 incredible mercy. So, gosh, we need to be praying. We need to be on our knees praying that these
00:58:01.540 justices would stay courageous, that justice would be doled out, that unborn children would be protected.
00:58:08.360 It is good that the law could change in many states. But as I said, that means our work begins.
00:58:14.700 We want hearts and minds to be changed. We want hearts and minds to be changed. I want especially
00:58:20.020 for the church to wake up, for people who profess to be Christians, who have been wishy-washy on this,
00:58:24.820 who have been on the wrong side of this. I want you to be so clear. I want you to be so wise. I want you to be
00:58:29.680 so bold and so brave and realize that the God who made us intricately and purposely in our mother's
00:58:35.980 wombs hates abortion and we should too. Even as we love those who have had abortions or who are
00:58:41.720 considering abortions, we speak the truth in love, realizing that truth in love, that holiness in
00:58:47.060 love, that righteousness in love are inextricably intertwined. And that is how we move forward in
00:58:51.440 faith. And so we pray for the courage to speak up about this. We pray for the justices to stay
00:58:57.160 and to stand firm in this. This is our moment. This has been the long game. We keep pushing
00:59:04.160 forward like never before, even if and when it is overturned. We keep on doing the work of helping
00:59:09.840 mothers and their babies and changing hearts and minds. That is what the gospel does. That is what
00:59:14.680 the truth does. And that is our role. Let's pray for the protection of the justices. Let's pray for the
00:59:20.080 protection of anti-abortion activists. Let's pray for people to see light versus dark, right versus wrong.
00:59:26.160 That's what I think is going to happen in all of this. And gosh, God is sovereign. God is sovereign
00:59:32.780 and he is good and he is faithful that no matter what happens with this, justice will come once and
00:59:41.620 for all when Jesus comes back and every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is
00:59:46.720 Lord. When you see the darkness that's articulated and expressed from the other side, the pro-abortion
00:59:51.500 side, read Romans 1, you'll know that this is not new. That child sacrifice, unfortunately it happened
00:59:57.280 in the Old Testament. God demanded the death penalty for it when people in Israel were sacrificing
01:00:06.180 their children to Malak. God hates child sacrifice. There has always been child sacrifice. It is just in a
01:00:13.780 new kind of sterile and celebrated in different form today through abortion. And so God promises
01:00:23.440 one day that justice will absolutely come, that he will rule in perfect peace, that evildoers, that
01:00:30.940 those who do wicked and perpetrate this kind of injustice will be no more, as Psalm 37 says. So even
01:00:37.780 if politically, legally, we don't get what we want and what we pray for, which I'm hopeful that we do,
01:00:45.000 we still trust in heaven and we trust in God's justice and we trust in his sovereignty over this.
01:00:51.940 Man, we have so many reasons to rejoice. We have so many reasons to be bold and to be courageous and
01:00:57.700 to be clear right now and so many reasons to pray and so many reasons no matter what to trust
01:01:03.260 in the God who's got this, who knows exactly what's going to happen and who promises that the gates of
01:01:10.500 hell will not prevail against his church and that the church has the same role that it always has to
01:01:16.480 make sure that God's will is done here on earth as it is in heaven. So let's go forth with that kind
01:01:21.840 of courage. Just FYI, I am on Megyn Kelly's podcast today talking about this. I am also on,
01:01:29.740 I don't know if by the time this comes out, if you'll be able to catch it, but I'll be on Martha
01:01:32.800 McCallum's show on Fox News talking about this. I am speaking tomorrow to a church talking about this
01:01:41.060 and I'm so thankful to God for the opportunity to get to talk about this so much. I'm obviously
01:01:45.340 very passionate about it. Thank you to all of you who have been so clear and so courageous. Oh,
01:01:50.220 the second phrase that this all speaks to, as I said, politics matter, policy matters, people matter.
01:01:55.480 I'm wearing my shirt today that of course you can get online. We'll link it. Raise a respectful
01:02:00.040 ruckus. This is 50 years, 50 years of people raising a respectful ruckus may conclude, hopefully
01:02:08.100 include in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And we'll keep on raising a respectful ruckus because these
01:02:12.440 babies are worth it. All right. We will be back here tomorrow with a really fascinating interview.
01:02:16.680 I know that you guys are going to love it. It's going to be about how wokeness and progressivism has
01:02:21.680 infiltrated and destroyed the therapy and the really the medical industry in general. You're
01:02:28.880 going to love it. I'll see you guys then.