Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture, it's the WallBuilders Show and it's Friday and we finally get to get to some good news. I mean, it's felt like for a few months that every day of the week was was good news. But but it's tapered off a little bit. I think it's all still out there. We just had a lot of other topics that had gotten away from us that we had to had to catch up on. So we'll we'll get back to some good news today. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton. Be sure and visit our websites. Wallbuilders.com and wallbuilders.show  .show, of course, being the radio program. Catching up on your programming from the last few weeks and then .com. Wallbuilders.com is where all of our other tools and resources can be found. Making it quick, guys, because I want to get as much good news in as we possibly can. David, get us started. 

David Barton [00:00:46] Well, start, we're all good new starts and that's Texas. So this is out of Texas

Rick Green [00:00:52] Of course! Tim, that's your turn now. That was mentioning Texas. That's good news. 

David Barton [00:00:57] Actually, this is a story that befits Texas, particularly a Texas attitude. I know Alaska's bigger, but we think we're bigger than Alaska. They're twice as big as Texas, but we have a better attitude about things than they do. We just got a bigger attitude. So we think were a lot bigger. I know they try to make fun of us, but there's not enough of them to make of us. They got what, two congressmen and we've got 36. So we got 18 times more people than they did. 

Tim Barton [00:01:26] In fairness, that is why I like Alaska so much because they have so much less people than we do. 90% of their state is undeveloped. Like that is the final frontier. If, we had to go somewhere else, I mean, guys, like in, in full fairness to Alaska, we are super prideful of Texas. We love Texas. So glad to be Texans, but Alaska is one of my favorite places to go. And so absolutely, if,  could just like have Alaska be the the like Texas 2.0, like let's just, if we could adopt Alaska, I would love to do that. 

David Barton [00:02:00] Yeah, I've got to tell you, I love Alaska to love the legislators up there and great pastors and others, but this article is Texas finally has school choice after literally decades of working for school choice in Texas. It gets signed governor Abbott signed it into law and it's an educational savings account that sets aside $1 billion and grab that. This is a, a state budget. We're talking on billion dollars set aside just for this program. And this program would provide about $10,000 for most students. A special needs students will get about 11,500 a year and homeschool students are eligible for about 2,000 a year. You get to choose your curriculum. There's a state approved list of curriculum, but you can apply for and get other curriculum as well. So it's not just the state telling you what to do or how to raise your kids. And so this thing will cover 100,000 kids and grab it here. Here's what I think is entering about the headline. This is the largest school choice program in the nation by far. Texas now has the biggest school choice program in the Nation. Now, having said that, here's my footnote on this story. The largest school-choice program in the nation now in Texas only covers less than 2% of Texas students. So even though it's $1 billion, it's 100,000 students, we got between six and seven million students in Texas. So you're talking about 1.2 to 1.4% of Texas, Texas students can get this, the school choice, but it's a great start. So it's good to have this, we need more school choice. But that tells me a lot about the other 32 localities and regions that have school choice they have it there. All the school-choice programs need to grow. At this point out of 32 other entities, Texas I guess is 33 now, out of the 32 others, everywhere we've had school choice scores have increased. So I expect the same here, but man, the fact that this cover is the biggest in the nation and it covers only 1% of Texas students, we need a lot more school choice, but this is a huge breakthrough in Texas. We've been working on this for decades and it's good news. 

Rick Green [00:04:05] Yeah, guys. we would it'd be hard to count how many times we've talked about school choice on WallBuilders and just educating people on competition being a biblical value and and how the monopoly has you know destroyed was led to the destruction of public education and it being so bad and why competitions good and how it's worked. Anyway, we talked about it so many times had so many guests and and talked to so many legislators and people that have been Involved in it. It's just I feel like we need to just stop, thank the good Lord. Catch our breath and go praise God. What a great victory. I mean, this was like one of my two reasons for running for the legislature 25 years ago. And finally, here we are. It's just a wonderful, wonderful victory. Like you said, David, it's a small step, but it's, it a huge step in the right direction. It's a smaller step overall when you look at the total number of kids. But this will begin to break the back of that monopoly and open doors for so many kids that are trapped in bad schools. Super, super, super good news. Tim, good luck topping that one, bro. 

Tim Barton [00:04:59] Well, this is another one taking a step in the right direction. When you look at June, June for decades has been known as Pride Month. And there was always levels of irony when the LGBTQIA plus community decided that they wanted to choose what used to be known as one of the deadly sins. And say, this how we will now identify ourselves. When you study the Bible, it's quite interesting. That there's not a lot of things in the Bible that it says God specifically directly opposes those people, but you know what one group God directly specifically opposes, God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. And the idea that we want to position ourselves, we celebrate pride and pride in not having sexual boundaries and doing things a biblical way in relationships, no, we're having pride that we are rejecting biblical standards that we are pursuing courses diametrically opposed to the dynamic of how God made the family and human sexuality, etc. All that to be said, what is now fascinating, this headline says family month is beginning to replace pride month and what the article points out, there is a move growing in the nation where people are saying, we're not going to celebrate pride month anymore. We're not celebrating it that way. One of the really great indications. I think we've probably mentioned it on the show already in the last couple of weeks is how many of these major corporations, their logos are no longer the rainbow in the month of June, that they're no longer pushing and promoting June as pride month. And one of the other really cool things is representative Congress, when Mary Miller, a Republican from Illinois introduced a resolution to declare the month, of June as family month. We can do so because God loves the family. God made the family the foundational building block of society forming it before any other institution Genesis 2. It is not the government that gives stability to the nation It is the family that forms the social concrete of a thriving community and dad, I I think I think this was a resolution when you saw it you texted and you said hey We have got to reach out get congresswoman Mary Miller on let's talk to her about this resolution. What's going on? Because this is, this is a major step coming from Congress, from Washington, DC. But certainly this is something that we actually can point to several things across the nation as indications of this, that people are actually taking steps in that direction and as much as We want to point to legislative things and celebrate the legislative wins or the leadership of politicians, the leadership of different, uh, prominent individuals, whether it be Hollywood or, or whether it'd be a musician or some kind of athlete, what is also maybe worth addressing is as we are looking to encourage the restoration of, of truth, of godliness, of good things in society. There's also a significant role identifying what individuals can and should do. And so even as we're celebrating that June is maybe coming back to family month, I would encourage every family out there and everybody listening, right? Hopefully you are part of a family to some extent to some degree that we ought to take this month and we oughta be far more intentional in spending time with our family. That we have meals together, that we do things together. And, and, and whatever that looks like, right? Whether we're reading books with our kids, we're watching movies together, we're going out and playing outside together, but, but making sure that we are prioritizing, and this again, I think it's a great reminder for all of us. If we want to see the restoration of our culture, it does, it does oftentimes depend on the structure of the family. And this is what Congresswoman Mary Miller pointed out in her resolution. And really it's great resolution in lots of ways. And I'm not going to read the whole thing, but this is something as much as we want to celebrate this, and we should, what Congressman Mary Miller did and what's happening around the nation, it's also a great challenge for us that during the month of June, and we could say all months, but the month of June we really ought to recover this as family month. Find things to do with your family to prioritize family that not only would we see maybe these major organizations and corporations go away from having rainbow flags in June, but maybe we can encourage the cultural shift that maybe these corporations, these organizations, actually can catch on to the idea that we're gonna celebrate life, we're going to celebrate family. The month of June, we are shifting it to a different direction, a different trajectory, and certainly that's one of the things that we are seeing happen, and that's what this article highlights. Family Month is beginning to replace Pride Month, and that is really good news. 

Rick Green [00:09:48] And I don't know if you guys remember this or not, but you know, me being in such a huge baseball fan and boycotting major league baseball for three and a half years didn't watch a pitch because they went so Marxist with all the black lives mafia stuff and everything else and it was the Texas Rangers refusing to do pride month that, that my youngest son Rhett brought to my attention and said, dad, we got a reward on for that. And go to a game. And so that's a, that was a cultural indicator. What a year and a half ago that this thing was finally starting to turn the right direction and like you were talking about Tim, there's been a lot of, I guess market, you know, companies making that decision. They don't do that unless they know that there's something happening in the marketplace with their audience and that people are getting sick and tired of all of it. And so now, you, sometimes politics is downstream from all of that, but now we're seeing the political side of it as well, but to your point, we can each make this a special month for our families. All right, David, next piece of good news before we go to break. 

David Barton [00:10:42] Well, I'm actually coming back to Texas for another piece of good news. And this one is, this is a landmark piece of good news now I'll set this up in the sense that what, what it starts with here is there's a guy who works for the department of justice over in the Dallas office. And he was in a sexual relationship with a woman. He's 38 and he got the woman pregnant. And as they were talking about it, she said, Hey, I've six weeks pregnant and I really want to keep the baby. And she's really excited about it. And he says, well, you don't want to keep the baby. And, you know, I don't, I want the baby, you need to get an abortion. I'll cover all the costs of the abortion and I'll get you whatever, whatever you need for that. I'll do that. And she said, no, I wanna keep the, baby, I'm really excited about this. And so what he did was he took, he ordered in some Mifepristone, the plan C and spiked her drink with it without her knowing it. And so as a result, it ended up aborting the baby. There's an abortion not by her choice, but because he did it and he's prosecuted for that the the sheriff arrested him and here's what I think is amazing now. What did we just lose here? It's just a fetus. That's it's all right. He is charged with murder. He has been charged with murderer, which means the killing of a human being and so now we actually have in in law because Texas is a pro-life state we believe that unborn children are indeed human beings. And now we're not saying, Hey, it's just an abortion. It's just fetus. We're saying, no, you killed a human being. You, you deliberately murdered a human. And so this guy is, is now facing murder charges has been arrested and is facing murder charge as a result of what he did. So I'm, you know, I'm not rejoicing that he's in trouble. I'm rejoicing over the fact that we're finally in law, recognizing that an unborn child is a human to the extent that we are willing to say. And it's murder if you kill that unborn child, which has capacity to grow into a full human being like the rest of us. So I think that is a landmark step in Texas. And I think other states will be following that, that they have taken and said, hey, this is now murder because you are killing. And by the way, that's what it was before Roe v. Wade in so many states. That's the way it was with the founding fathers. We've talked about abortion even back in their writings. So this is a really big deal. 

Tim Barton [00:13:00] Well, and dad, this is one of the things, too, that's always been the challenge with the pro-abortion argument, is it was always the intent of the mother that made the difference, because if there was a pregnant woman driving, and she got hit, and the baby dies, the person that hit her, especially if it was negligent driving, if it's a drunk driver, they could be charged with a homicide, but, the question always was, but what if that pregnant lady was on her way to an abortion clinic, right? She was going to go abort the baby, then is a drunk drivers still charged with a negligent homicide in this situation? And this is where there's been such inconsistency because it would go back to what's the motivation of the mother instead of the reality of saying well, that's an unborn human child inside of that mother and clearly when we're saying fetus, fetus is Latin for unborn child. So like even even the word games of semantics people play we all know it is an unborn child in that mother's womb. And that is you indicate this is just yet another example of a legal situation where the law recognizes that if if that mom is wanting to keep the child and somebody terminates the life of that child against the mother's wishes it's viewed as murder, well if it's viewed as murder in this situation It should be viewed as murderer in all situations because we recognize the life and then more child. But again, this is just one more legal case and precedent to help set a stronger tone in case that does defend the reality that unborn children are still human children who are worthy of life and should have their life defended 

Rick Green [00:14:33] Yeah. And I don't see any difference guys than in the, you know, I remember there being a case about, you, know, the boyfriend hitting the girl in the stomach to try to kill the baby. And in one of the cases, seems like a prosecution happened for that or a car wreck where somebody kills, you know, the mom and the baby and the babies still in the womb. And I mean, this is no different. He intentionally gave her that drug to kill the baby, and like you're saying, David, this, this just to prosecute him is saying our friend Trey Tarke always says the law is a good teacher. And I think that's true. And so whatever we do in the law, in this case is a teacher to the culture that this is a life in the womb. So like you said, landmark decision by the prosecutors to do this. Very, very, very good. Okay, quick break, we got more good news coming folks stay with us. And by the way, visit the websites, wallbuilders.com and WallBuilders.show Show, you're listening to the WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:16:29] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us on this Friday. It's Good News Friday and the next piece of good news coming from Tim. 

Tim Barton [00:16:35] All right guys, this is something again, coming from Texas, which oftentimes I try not to have as many from Texas and my dad spends more time in Texas because I don't want people to think that all we do is talk about good news from Texas. But in this situation, it is good news from Texas Governor Abbott signs online safety law delivering setback to Apple and Google. Now, this law that he signed requires parental approval for minors before they're allowed to download apps or make in-app purchases. And the bill was opposed by Apple and Google. Now, why would they oppose the ability of kids to just arbitrarily download apps and make in-app purchases? Probably because they recognize that kids who are 12 and 13, or maybe even seven and eight, that they don't have any notion of delay and impulse control, and so they're like, I want this, let me buy it, let me buy, and mom and dad are like, this is crazy, but also if they have the ability, right, where we're so often these kids are getting phones and they have the ability to download any apps they want and we also know that in many of these apps predators are coming in these apps pretending to be somebody other than they are and and they're preying on these miners well that's part of the idea behind this let's make sure we protect our kids and so let's make sure there's a level of age verification or parental approval that happens before they're able to have access to this crazy wide world on the web where there are actual literal predators, threats, villains, evil people, and bad guys. What's really funny about this is an Apple spokesperson said, we believe there are better proposals that help keep kids safe without requiring millions of people to turn over their personal information. Hang on a second. So let me just, let me wrap my head around this. The Apple spokesperson, said, well, the problem with this is it would require us to get a lot of data on people. And we, we want to make sure their personal information is protected. This is the smartphone technology people saying they're concerned about protecting our privacy? This is one of the most laughable, ridiculous, ultimately contradictory statements you could have possibly made. Now, with that being said, when Texas saw it, that passes law, Governor Abbott signs it. Texas became the second state to adopt this. It's already going on in Utah. As you can imagine, there's challenges cause some of these Companies they don't want this to happen Interestingly enough meta which is Facebook Instagram meta has made headlines recently after calling for Apple and Google to be Responsible for verifying the age of user on their platform. So when even meta is calling you out being like guys There are problems because look at what you're doing and the access you're giving the kids without having some kind of boundaries protection for these kids. Again, an Apple spokesperson said the tech giant shares the goal of strengthening kids online safety, but added it was deeply concerned by the threat it believes the law poses to privacy of all users. Again, guys, the level of irony when you have Apple saying we're concerned with your privacy, when you look at what's happening and there is now more data available, the data harvesting, the data sharing, the things that these companies are able to purchase online. And I get maybe that's not all from Apple. It's not from Google, but Google and Apple certainly have a ton of our data. And the fact that they're trying to use this as a defense, again, seems laughable, but the good news is that Governor Abbott and Texas have taken another step second behind Utah and saying, let's make sure we have some age verification and parental approval before these kids have unrestricted or unlimited access to things that actually could allow predators and very dangerous things into their life. That's really good news. 

Rick Green [00:20:17] You see, Tim, you forget that these, these tech giants are, are kind of like the Orwellian overlords. So like, it's okay when we do it, because we're looking out for you. We're just selling your data so that we can serve you better so that we can have ads pop up on your screen about whatever you were talking to your buddies about. Which everybody's kind of noticed that, right? Just talking about something with your wife or with your kids or around the fire with friends that all of a sudden there's all the ads for that grill or whatever it might be. So yeah, Tim, I just don't think, you know, you just not giving them the benefit of I'm kidding. Of course they're being absolutely hypocrites. 

Tim Barton [00:20:51] Hey, hang on a second, since my Apple phone was listening the whole time, I'm just gonna ask it what it thinks about our conversation and see if it's okay with, oh, you know what, yeah, so Siri just told me that, no, I am kidding, actually, I said the word out loud, it might talk to me, but like literally, this is so crazy. Our phones listen to us all the live long day and now it's pretending like they care about our privacy concerns, it is ludicrous. 

Rick Green [00:21:15] No kidding, no kidding. All right, David, back over to you, man, what's your final piece of good news today? 

David Barton [00:21:21] This deals with a major initiative called speaking with American men. This is done by Politico. Politico is on the political left and they're not conservative and they they're very progressive and they put $20 million into this big survey and in addition to survey, they did a bunch of national focus groups. And I mean, they, really went deep on this and what they found is probably not what they were expecting or wanting. I'll just read part of here says a growing number of young men are turning away from the Democratic Party, citing perceptions that it's weak, it's out of touch, it is dismissive of their concerns. Now this is the overview kind of statement they have. And so what they said, the young men said that participants described the Democratic Party as overly scripted and cautious while Republicans are seen as confident and unafraid to offend. Now that's an interesting phrase. They're unafraid to offend, and that's what draws them to the Republican Party in some degree. That's interesting. It continues as Democrats are seen as weak, Republicans are seen as strong. Young men also spoke of being invisible to the Democrat coalition. So they recognize every other group that's out there except young men or traditional gender, traditional anything traditional. And so what they have now is only twenty seven percent of young men view the Democratic Party favorably. That's not good for their future. That is not good for future elections. It's 43% hold a positive view of Republicans which is about 55-58% higher and then there's a lot in the middle. So 27% hold favorably of the Democrat Party, 43% of Republicans and the focus groups they did revealed even deeper frustrations with how the Democrats frame masculinity. And so I thought that was interesting. This is one participant noted Democrats provide fluid masculinity. Well, they got fluid genders, I guess, fluid masculinity as well. While Republicans embrace traditional masculinity of a male provider. 

Rick Green [00:23:28] By the way, David, just to give our listeners a visual on that fluid masculinity. If you look that up in the dictionary, David Hogg's picture is there. I think my point is if they are going to keep putting out a beta mill, like David Hogg as their supposed person, I think they're giving this kid like 20 minutes or they're going to spend like 20 million dollars to try to win back young men or whatever, but if that's the, and I put guy in, in air quotes here, but that's, the guy that you're to put out there as your example, you are not going to win back those young men that want to see masculine men as the role model. 

David Barton [00:24:04] Yeah, that's that's not the image. And, but they're, they're so inundated in their own deception that they're choosing things that reinforce what they're doing wrong. I mean, they, they think that's the solution cause that's what they think. And that's it's wrong. And by the way, the other thing I thought was interesting about this is it's not that this political, poll and, and study, and it's not a poll, it's a lot bigger than polls, a survey and a study and focus groups, et cetera. It's not an outlier. They point to the fact that the CNN poll that was released on June the 1st, so just shortly ago, found that 40% of Americans identify Republicans as a party of strong leadership compared with just 16% for Democrats. So even CNN, by almost a two and a half or three to one margin, Republicans are seen as the party of strength and leadership and backbone compared to Democrats who And so Republicans are also led by wide margins as the party that gets things done and the party the drives change. So very interesting. This is not the way the media would portray it, but when you look at the numbers down in there where people live, whether it's CNN or Politico, clearly the Democrats are in trouble. And I don't see how they get out of it really quick because it's gonna take a while for a younger generation to come up and take over the party and get different views in there. It's gonna be hard for them. That's going to be a hard ride for them for... Perhaps a good while, hopefully conservatives and constitutionalists will take advantage of that and make hay with that while they can. We'll see. 

Rick Green [00:25:37] Well, in our final few seconds, I'll make this really quick. You know, last, last Friday, a week ago, Friday evening, we had a flashpoint event and the whole Elon Trump thing came up and some of the other guys on the panel were saying we should pray that these guys are reconciled. And I was, Oh, ye of little faith. I was saying, I even said it the other day on our program. I think Monday of this week that that would be like the Fonz saying I'm so sorry. Well folks, everybody prayed. We had, we asked y'all to pray here in our WallBuilders audience and who knows, but the Lord might be moving here. The good news I want to share as we're going into the weekend was Elon Musk the other day tweeting out, I regret some of my posts about president Trump last week. They went too far. So this could be the beginning of some softening of that. And apparently president Trump said some positive things back. So everybody pray for that over the weekend as well. This is really important to the future of the country, because as we said earlier in the week, that's the most powerful man and the most and the wealthiest man, and when they're working together for the good of the country, it's a really positive thing. If they go against each other and we end up with a third party, it all really bad. So Lord willing, this thing will come back on track and that's really good news for our Good News Friday as we go into the weekend. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. You've been listening to The WallBuilders Show.