Join us on this episode of Family Talk as we delve into the complex landscape following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Our guest, Gary Bauer, provides an insightful analysis of the states’ reactions, the legal ramifications, and the escalating cultural battles that loom large. From increased pro-choice campaigns to the challenging discussions on transgender rights, we tackle the tough issues that impact families across America.
Hello, everyone. You’re listening to Family Talk, a radio broadcasting ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and thank you for joining us for this program.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, welcome to another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you can still trust for the family you love. I’m Roger Marsh. And today on the broadcast, Gary Bauer with me once again, as we continue our conversation, as we are commemorating the 53rd year that we had to note the passing of Roe versus Wade that took place. Yesterday, January 22nd, 1973. But today, when we see where the battle lines are drawn, where we have moved from the anti-abortion conversation to pro-life to pro-abortion, or pro-life versus pro-choice, if you will, Gary has some very insightful things to share on this. Gary, of course, is the host of the Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom podcast that you can get at JDFI.net. You can also… read the works that Gary writes for us as the Senior Vice President of Public Policy, as the Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dobson Policy and Culture Center. Gary Bauer, welcome back to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. It’s always a pleasure to kind of mix it up with you in these conversations.
SPEAKER 01 :
Same here, Roger.
SPEAKER 03 :
Great to be with you too on this important subject. You know, it’s interesting. At the end of our last discussion, you mentioned something that just kind of lingered a little bit, but I thought, what a great teaser for the next program. And that is the fact that yesterday was January 22nd. This used to be a day we’d have the March for Life. We would go out and, you know, pray to end abortion and have Roe versus Wade overturned. And then on June 24th, 2022, Roe versus Wade was in fact overturned. But then the battle lines really began to become more clearly pronounced. As we saw, I remember that day very clearly. I was having some work done on my car. And as I pulled out of the driveway, I was living in California at the time, so I pulled out of the driveway of the car repair place. There was a big sign that had California. It was written in kind of like the Hollywood sign letters. And it said, California will always be a safe haven for abortion. And they had that put up. They knew this decision was going to come down. It was there prominently. And, of course, people were cheering and applauding in this area, in the People’s Republic of California, where I lived. at the time. And I thought, this is just so sad to think that, you know, now that we have Roe versus Wade, finally, the Supreme Court, horrible ruling that made abortion a federal issue. Now it’s back to the states. Here’s one state of many that’s actually going to double down. And you’ve seen a lot of these states where, you know, where’s the pro-life laws, you know, the people were saying, oh, oh, we’ll never be able to get an abortion again. Actually, the number of abortions has gone up a little bit because more states are codifying this into law. Give us a little bit of background here as to what’s been going on since Roe v. Wade was overturned June 24, 2022.
SPEAKER 01 :
Sure. Well, back to the immediate aftermath, the weeks leading up to the decision, which were filled with intimidation, and then the weeks immediately after the decision, it was very telling and very disturbing to see what happened. One of the things that happened in Washington, D.C., you know, there aren’t a lot of groups in Washington that defend faith, family, and freedom. But every one of them experienced vandalism in the immediate aftermath of the decision. Concerned Women for America had vandalism at their office. In the building that I’m in right outside of Washington, D.C., the Susan B. Anthony Liss headquarters is in our building and they had some things I can’t even describe on the radio happen to them. I went down to the parking lot to get in my car and somebody had driven boats into my tire. And there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was an intentional act. We saw all across the country churches and crisis pregnancy centers vandalized, in some cases set on fire. Roger, it was another one of these reminders. I mean, the most violent thing that happens in America every day is abortion. Every act of abortion is an act of violence against the unborn child, defense of some born child. And it’s an act of exploitation against a woman who – It’s forced into the situation, either being abandoned by the father of that child or being abandoned by other circumstances that ends up being exploited in abortion on demand. So all these things are important. really very revealing about how abortion is a fundamental threat to all of our liberties and all of our rights. Now, in the time that’s passed since then, as you said, a number of states have gone out really with ad campaigns that are lies they’re telling people if your daughter gets raped and gets pregnant the right wing and conservatives and christians are going to make your daughter carry that baby all the way through the pregnancy things like that you know and uh And and so in quite a few states, they have amended their state constitutions to to to implement abortion on demand all nine months of the pregnancy. And, Roger, this has been underreported. It’s even worse than that. The way these referendum have been written. Almost no one realizes that not only in these states did they make abortion on demand the law in that state, but there’s wording that makes it very difficult for those states to restrict the transgender movement’s demands of men being allowed to go into women’s bathrooms, of being required to use the wrong pronouns in order to promote a lie. It’s too complicated to explain it on the air, but they use gender language in such a way that keeping a biological man who claims he’s a woman out of your daughter’s bathroom would be a violation of these referendum guaranteeing no discrimination based on sex. which then makes – which then guarantees that abortion on demand will continue in those states and the transgender ideology will continue to grow in those states.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s interesting, Gary, when you mention the LGBTQ community, especially with the transgender rights as they are – fighting for them very passionately. One of the places that they go after really hard and just fast and furious is after children, young children, very impressionable children. And I know you and Dr. Dobson wrote a book. You told us this day was coming. Back in the early 1990s, you wrote a book called Children at Risk. I’d love for you to take a moment and kind of, without saying I told you so, you did tell us that this day was coming. Did you think it would be as bad and as crazy and as convoluted as it’s become with these people wild requests and these attempts to destroy the family even further?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. So right after I left the Reagan White House, at the end of his eight years, Dr. Dobson and I worked together to start the Family Research Council as a major lobbying force for Family, Faith and Freedom here in Washington. And we also agreed, he agreed when I asked him to write, co-author a book, which we did, Children at Risk, The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Children. And in that book, we tried to outline for America that there was this chasm in our country. And on one side, there were a whole lot of people who, broadly speaking, Not all of them, but broadly speaking, millions of them believe that God isn’t. And believing that God isn’t, they take the positions they take on life, on marriage, on family, on all sorts of other issues. And on the other side of that divide in America, there are millions of people like you, Roger, and me, and like our listeners and all of the supporters of the James Dobson Family Institute that believe God is. And believing that God is, we are required to take the positions we do on the freedom of religion, on the sanctity of life, on the meaning of marriage, and a host of other issues. And Dr. Dobson and I argued in this book that in this debate, great clash between these two worldviews, only one side could win. These are not things that you can find a middle ground on. I mean, what, a baby is a human being on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but not on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday? I mean, somebody wins this, and the winner gets our children and their right to teach them what to believe about life and death, love and sex, freedom and slavery, a whole lot of other issues. Well, when we wrote the book, I remember distinctly that Dr. Dobson and I would say, ah, you know, that, I don’t know, Gary, should we tone that down a little bit? Or I would say to Jim, I don’t know, Jim, that might sound a little alarmist there, you know. So we would talk about it. But then the book came out, and here was the most depressing thing, Roger. All the left-wingers attacked the book, but we got a disturbing number of phone calls and letters from Christian leaders saying, what are you guys trying to do? I mean, this is alarmist. You’re exaggerating. This is why Christianity gets a bad name in America. I mean, it just went on and on and on. And I know how disheartened Dr. Dobson was about that. Before Jim went on to be with the Lord and a couple of our conversations in the last year or so, we both went back to the book and he had gone through it again and I had gone through it again. We did predict some things, but even in our edgy book, We could not anticipate some of the stuff that has come, mainly the transgender movement and this whole rejection of not only the Bible, but of the natural law of biology that all of humankind is divided between men and women. There are not 57 genders. There are two. And you can’t willy-nilly go back and forth between one and the other. This biological fact, Roger, which I find that we have to remind people of, you could take a cell off of the bottom of a human being’s foot, one little microscopic cell. and give it to a scientist and say, this is the only thing I have from a person. I want you to tell me, is that a male or a female? And that scientist would be able to put that cell off the bottom of your foot and put it under a microscope and say, that came from a man or that came from a woman because our DNA is written in to every cell of our body. You can lop things off and put fake things on. It does not take change to make up of the body you were born with.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, it’s interesting, Gary, as we have this conversation here, as we’re commemorating the Passage of Roe versus Wade on January 22nd, 1973. And then, of course, the shift back and what happened over the next 40 years to get us to the point where Roe was overturned. It became a state’s issue. And now more states are passing even more draconian laws, basically enshrining abortion on demand without exception all the way up through birth. And then you see where the LGBTQ community is coming in, especially with the issue of transgenderism. And you wrote an article recently about children at risk and, you know, 40 years after the fact. And we’re talking about something that I had heard of, but I did not realize they now had a book out on. There’s an organization called Shout Your Abortion. that has been getting some headlines because they’re encouraging young women to say, hey, look, if you had an abortion and it was the best thing that ever happened to you, tell everybody because you’ll find a million or so people on social media that will agree with you, which is kind of the new standard, right? That’s the new morals and the standards that we grew up with that were biblical are being rejected. And now it’s the populism of TikTok or Instagram or wherever, where you find enough people who like what you do, they will affirm your decision. And that’s all the affirmation you need. And that’s why the scientific world is such an enigma, Gary. I mean, the same people who were telling us, trust the science during the COVID pandemic are also saying, well, you don’t need a doctor’s to tell you what gender you are. If you’re four or five years old, you get to pick based on the way you feel. And now that’s kind of those values are colliding in this Shout Your Abortion campaign with a new, I can’t even call it a children’s book, though it is written for children. But you talked about it in a recent article. I’d love for you to kind of unpack this for us. And I want to warn parents who are listening right now, what Gary’s about to share really is happening. It’s not Gary’s idea, but it’s a book that he brought to my attention and we wanted to share it with you too as a warning as to what’s happening. in this battle for the hearts and minds of your children.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, Roger, that’s exactly right. And, you know, as we were just talking about, Dr. Dobson and I both believe children were the ultimate target here. And, of course, we’ve seen an effort by the often sadly successful by the LGBTQ movement to to get really graphic information about sodomy and other things in that world into our schools at earlier and earlier years. So they’re literally aiming at second and third and fourth graders Really, those children are at ages when they shouldn’t be hearing about any kind of adult sexuality, whether it’s heterosexual or homosexual. So you’ve got that problem. And then there’s this issue of how do you address the question of abortion with children? Well, this group Shout Your Abortion said, has written a book. This book is aimed at five to eight-year-olds. It’s 32 pages long. It’s described as being beautifully illustrated. And what the book tells these little children is—and it’s both boys and girls— that abortion is a superpower. You know, little kids like seeing movies about Superman and all that kind of stuff. Well, the book teaches the right to kill a baby in the womb is a superpower because that means you as an individual get to decide the kind of life you’re going to live and when you’re going to have a family and what decisions you will make about how You raise your family and all the rest of it. And they’re aiming this at five to eight year olds. Roger, I mean, look, I’m old enough that if somebody tried to show me a book with that kind of junk in it, my dad, whose nickname was Spike, would have taken care of that guy forever. And Spike would have probably ended up in jail as a result.
SPEAKER 03 :
And he wouldn’t have minded it either because he was standing up for something that was right, not just what he believed in, but it was actually right and good.
SPEAKER 01 :
Absolutely. So when I first heard about this, and I checked it out, and it’s all true. If you’ve got the stomach for it, you can Google it. Okay, a child that’s five years old, they’ve only been out of the womb. for 60 months. And they’re teaching a child that 60 months ago was able to live only because that child’s mother didn’t decide that abortion was a superpower and they used that superpower to kill that child. So that child escaped and got into the world a living human being, and the pro-abortion movement doesn’t want that mistake to happen again. So they want to be sure this little five-year-old boy or this little five-year-old girl is taught that destroying an innocent human life is one of the most important things that you can do in your life. I think this is the worst kind of child abuse ever. And I hope we can come up with some way to shut it down.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, Gary, I’m glad you brought this book to our attention because this is – you want to talk about the antithesis. For those of us who are of a certain age, and my brother and sister and I are boomers. I’m kind of a Gen Xer. My younger brother is a full-on Gen Xer. But I was thinking as you were talking about this children’s book, how much my sister loves to read. My mom was a school teacher and when she was, she gave birth to my sister and then I was born literally 730 days. They wanted a boy and a girl two years apart. We are exactly, boy and a girl, two years apart, almost to the hour. I mean, they were very scheduled people. But when my mom was expecting me, my sister used to climb up in her lap and she’d snuggle up on what she called her pillow. which was, you know, the largest. And my mom would read to her for hours, hours. And then when my brother was coming along years later, we would both get up there. We understood at a very young age what was happening to mom, what was happening in our family. And the idea now that you have a book like this where you’re telling kids, and there’s a pull quote from a book that just made my skin crawl, that basically said, abortion is a tool that allows human beings to shape our destinies and which has shaped the entire world around us. And I thought to myself, in what reality is that a message you want? I have a grandson who’s eight years old, who’s in the second grade. I have a granddaughter who will be five in a couple of months, who’s about to go into kindergarten. And there is no way you’re getting this book anywhere near Isaac or Zipporah. No way possible. And yet this is normal because now someone would look at me like they would have looked at your dad and said, gee, Roger, you’re getting a little hot under the collar there, don’t you think? But this is the world we’re living in.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, you know, Roger, I mean, look, we used to, lots of families read to their kids, right? I mean, sometimes it’s Bible stories. Sometimes it’s just, you know, things like Aesop’s fables, little things that taught lessons about courage and bravery and courage. standing up for the weak and defenseless and perseverance and so forth. And we now live in a time when we’re telling children that your superpower or the most important thing you can know and the way you can shape your destiny is to murder a little defenseless baby. And, you know, it really does fit in with all this trans ideology in which you’re telling little boys and girls who are confused about their bodies and so forth, that they’re probably a mistake. They’re a girl trapped in a boy’s body or a boy trapped in a girl’s body. And then you have these medical societies that have often been taken over by the radical left, and they’re supporting this junk. that has no basis in science or biology. So all of which is to say, Roger, that every one of our listeners needs to understand the reason we keep harping about being a Christian citizen is that you can’t ignore government and politics because your children and grandchildren are going to grow up in a culture and a society where other people, like the ones we’re describing who produced this book, Those people are going to decide the kind of nation your children and grandchildren grow up in and what their future is going to be. God gives us these children. They’re his children. And he gives us the responsibility of raising them up in an upright way with the values that they should be taught. And we cannot walk away from that. This is a battle not only for our country. It is a battle for our future and the future of our children and grandchildren.
SPEAKER 03 :
I mentioned a resource at the start of our conversation that was just published by Dr. William Lyle and the team here at the James Dobson Family Institute. It’s a blog post called Dr. James Dobson, A Modern William Wilberforce in the Long Crusade for Life. And I highly recommend you read that because- It encapsulates a lot of what Gary And there are other ways you can contact Gary as well that we’ll put linked up at JDFI.net. Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dobson Policy and Culture Center and the host of the Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom podcast. Gary, always great to get your insights, but especially thank you for bringing to our attention the awareness about this insidious book that’s targeting children and telling them that abortion is a superpower. That is definitely not the message here. the kids need to hear. But thank you for defending faith, family, and freedom for the JDFI as you’ve done for many years and will continue to do in the years to come.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s great to be with you as always, Roger, and to be with this great JDFI team. And we’re just going to have to keep slugging away and speaking the truth and knowing that in the end, God will take care of it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Amen. Well, you are listening to a special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk and the conclusion of my conversation with Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the James Dobson Family Institute and the Dobson Policy and Culture Center. We’ve been discussing the ongoing battle for our children’s hearts and minds. As parents and grandparents especially, we need to remain vigilant about what’s being taught to the next generation. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast, or if you’d like to hear this along with the program from last time, visit jdfi.net. Once you’re there, you’ll find both episodes of our conversation about living in a post-Roe world, along with Gary Bauer’s article discussing the dangers of the Shout Your Abortion children’s book and the broader assault on innocent life. And you can also subscribe to Gary’s podcast, Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom, as well as signing up to receive his regular blog posts as well. All that information is waiting for you at jdfi.net. here at the dr james dobson family institute we remain committed to the principles that dr dobson championed throughout his life including the sanctity of human life and the protection of children these daily broadcasts are made possible through the generous support of friends like you who share our commitment to defending biblical values in our culture and your partnership helps us continue speaking truth on critical issues affecting families all across the country Now, if what you heard today concerns you, if you are troubled by the assault on innocent life and the targeting of our children with these dangerous messages, then I urge you to stand with us. Your gift of any amount helps us continue shining a light on these issues and broadcasting biblical truth that protects children and defends life. To make a secure donation, visit jdfi.net or to speak with a member of our constituent care team, call 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. Well, I’m Roger Marsh and from all of us here at Family Talk and the JDFI, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you can still trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. With today’s Dr. Dobson Minute, here’s Dr. James Dobson.
SPEAKER 02 :
Recent research confirms that the consequences of any parent-child separation are severe. In fact, I experienced it for a short time when I was six years old. My mother and father left me with my aunt for six months while they traveled. Even today, I can remember vividly the evening they left. I sat on my mother’s lap while she told me how much she loved me and how she and my father would come back for me as soon as they could. They drove away as the sun was going down and an overwhelming sense of sorrow and loneliness settled over me. That feeling was so intense that its pain can be recalled instantly today. In short, even when parent-child separation occurs for valid reasons in a loving home, the boy or girl frequently interprets parental departure as evidence of rejection. and rejection is dangerous any way it goes down.
SPEAKER 03 :
For more information on this topic, visit drdobsonminute.org. This is Roger Marsh from Family Talk. The freedoms we enjoy today were hard won by those who came before us, and it’s up to all of us to protect them. Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we’re committed to defending religious liberty and the timeless values that shaped our nation. Through our broadcasts, articles and resources, we equip you to stand for godly principles in your own community. So thank you for partnering with us to protect faith, family and freedom for future generations.
