Interview with Keith Pavlansky

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Good evening, everyone. This is Truth in Love. Thank you for joining us tonight. We get truth and love from Ephesians chapter 4, verse 15.

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But speaking the truth and love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him, who is the head, even Christ.

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Tonight, I have a very, very special guest, Pastor Keith Pavlansky.

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And I am so honored and blessed to have met him, getting to know him and have him here tonight.

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If you've seen any of my posts lately, you'll notice that I have been trying to promote an organization called

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Personhood Alliance that is putting forth effort to end abortion.

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And we want to jump on that and we want to lock arms with them. And Keith is representing

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Personhood Alliance tonight. And he is in our state, representing the organization in our state.

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And I'm so thankful that he is with me tonight to give us more information about that organization.

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So without any further ado, let's start with you introducing yourself,

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Keith. KEITH PAVLANSKY Oh, sure. First of all, thank you very much for having me. It's certainly a pleasure to be with you.

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We've talked a couple times and it's just been enjoyable each conversation we've had.

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But I'm Pastor Keith Pavlansky. I'm physically located in Yadkinville, North Carolina.

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We run a Christian school there, a church. I'm also in manufacturing business with my family, producing some foam plastics and things like that.

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But with regard to this particular topic, I also wear one more hat and that's the

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State Director for Personhood Alliance. And it is certainly, as you said, it's our goal to end abortion, certainly in our state and ultimately in the country.

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But we start with everything local in the alliance. So we break it down all the way to the state level and to the county level and even townships and cities.

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And we try to encourage pastors to become engaged on what we believe is the number one moral issue of our day.

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And that is abortion. Our view is that if we were all

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Christians and we had been around in Europe in the 1930s, that we would have stood up and said something against the

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Holocaust that was going on against the Jews. It was the number one moral issue of the day.

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If we had been around in the 1860s here in the

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South and there was slavery going on in the country, we would like to believe that we would all stand up and say, this is just not right.

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This can't be allowed to persist. It goes against the word of God. And we do have that chance here in 2021.

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The number one moral issue of the day is that we have stolen the personhood.

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We've stolen the rights of children in the room and true children in the womb in this country for what would basically almost be the last 50 years.

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And we've got, in essence, another Holocaust going on in our society.

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And so it's not something to be avoided. This is something that we should face head on.

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And we have something as the church of God to say about it. And fortunately, in our state, we've started to take some positive moves in a direction to finally see an end put to this evil practice.

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Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm going to start out with this quote. This quote comes from Sarah Quayle.

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Qually. Qually, Sarah Qually. And this is a quote. This is one she gives at the beginning of a new video,

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I think that was released very recently from the organization. And I think this quote says,

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I understand why they put it first. Foremost there on the video. I mean, this quote sets the foundation to me for the ministry, for this conversation that we're having.

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So let me start our conversation with this quote. Sarah says, our culture has embraced a godless worldview about life, marriage, family, sexuality, and even gender.

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The church has been battling this competing worldview by turning over our spiritual authority to judges and politicians that are just not interested in the redemption of souls.

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And we need to step back. That is what this effort is all about. Claiming our right to govern locally and claiming our spiritual authority.

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We have the answer to abortion, to the abortion crisis. It's Jesus. Only he can bring heart changes that are necessary here.

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And only we can stand up and demand abortion end in our backyard. That's a powerful quote.

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And like I said, I think it sets the foundation. I want to just briefly give you my testimony of how

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I got to you and this organization. I was just trying to brainstorm about what

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I could do. I was in the same boat. I'm probably most everyone else is in. I'm a

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Christian. I feel like I did my religious, my spiritual, my civic duty.

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I voted for pro -life candidate. But I don't have a whole lot of money to pour into a ministry, pour into a candidate.

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I don't have the extra time to go out on the sidewalk very often.

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And so I was trying to think, what can I do? What is something that I can do? And what comes to my mind was, can our county speak as a whole?

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Can we say something to this issue as a whole? And I shared with a friend that's also in another pro -life ministry.

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I share with him my thoughts. And he said, I know the person that you need to contact. And he gave me your name.

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And I was introduced to Personhood Alliance. So what I would like for you to do is kind of give your testimony of how you got to Personhood Alliance.

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I don't know how much time the show has altogether. But I will say,

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I had my first foray into politics, if you will, was during HB2, the fiasco that was going on with that whole bathroom bill issue.

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And for 18 months, we fought a fight down at the

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Board of Education here. I started to get a flavor for the process. And who you speak to.

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And how you present things. And that pushed us, ultimately, when that had...

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We actually won a victory here in our county. We convinced them to change the policies that were at the school level.

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Every district in this state has what they call a bullying policy at the school level.

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And inside that policy is a bunch of what's referred to as SOGI language. Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.

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It basically gives these people super constitutional rights. And it wasn't right. But we had that change at our county level saying, you have to change this.

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You've got to pull it out because it doesn't match state law. And it took us months, but we got that done.

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And on the tails of that, it was the next legislative session. And I said, let's see if we can't get our local state representative to put a personhood amendment on the docket to get voted for at the state level.

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Well, I ended up hitting a number of roadblocks. And when I did, I was looking for information.

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Looking for, in some cases, legal ease. For support. I said, where do you find this stuff?

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I'm just a guy. I'm a nobody who knows nothing. How do I take the next step?

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And just searching the internet, I ran into the Personhood Alliance. And it had all the answers

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I was hunting for. It had them all categorized. Here's how you do it. And here's what you do next.

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And so I went to their website and said, all right, who do I hook up with here in North Carolina that can get us to the next level?

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Because I'm kind of busy here in Yadkinville. And they said, believe it or not, we don't have anybody yet in the state.

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We need somebody to lead the charge. Somebody has to say yes in order for this thing to move forward.

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And I said, all right. I said, I've got a million other things to do. My time is limited.

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But this is something that I cannot turn away from. It's not the type of issue that you can just decide isn't important enough to make room for.

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So I made room for it in my schedule and started the process and got us down the road.

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And quite honestly, within six months, we found ourselves the first county in the history of the

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United States to be listed as a sanctuary for unborn children. Oh, wow. They were very excited.

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Hey, great things. Experts out there. Whoever this pastor is, he's really got it going.

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And it's been a fun ride. But this is one of the things that we mentioned is that you don't have to be a particular expert in order to push this thing forward.

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You don't have to have pedigree or you don't have to have, as you mentioned earlier, you don't have to have tons of time or tons of money in order to make a great impact.

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Fantastic. You've kind of answered my next two questions already. What is Person of the

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Alliance and what part do you play? So is there anything additionally that you want to add to that before we move on?

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It's worth noting that it is a national organization, that each state has an organized entity.

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And the goal is at each state level is to win these kind of victories. And so there are good people in other states that are doing the same exact thing.

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I've got good friends now in Texas and Mississippi and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

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They're all over the country and they're doing these same things on a yearly basis. They're trying to get personhood amendments on the docket to be voted on at the state level.

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But we also came up with this tremendous, what I feel is the best strategy in the pro life movement to achieve the abolition of abortion in our country.

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And that's this sanctuary city or the sanctuary county project. To me, it is the best strategy that I have seen out there.

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It's one that can win immediate battles. It can put points on the board and it can get us where we want to be, which is the end to abortion here in our state and certainly all over the country.

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Absolutely. So what I'm going to do next is just go through a list of questions that I pulled off, the information on the website and other places, and just give you a chance to respond.

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And so one of the quotes or one of the statements on the website is, it states this personhood is the right to have rights.

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So can you say that in your own words? Yeah, absolutely. Or explain it a little bit better. Anytime that you,

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I should say this, as Americans, this should be something that really resonates with us. We've got this great, beautiful document in the

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Declaration of Independence that says we hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created equal and they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

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And basically that says that every person that is created in God's image has certain rights that come to him directly from God, not from government, not from any other organization, but directly from God.

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And what has always happened is anytime that you see great evil taking place, one of the great evils is to take those rights away and to say, you don't have the right to have those rights.

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That's exactly what happened to the slaves here in America in the 1800s and the lead up to the

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Civil War. And it's the same kind of thing that happened in Germany in the 1930s.

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Basically, you have some judge at some point that says, although you're a human being, we're taking away your rights.

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You don't have the right to have rights. And we're simply saying this is the answer to the abortion issue as well, because what the judges said in 1973 is that they were taking away the rights of children in the womb.

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In fact, in the trial, the Roe versus Wade trial, it's very interesting that one of the judges was asking, was pressing the abortion attorney and said, what if it were to happen that a specific state would determine that the babies have rights, that the children that the fetuses have rights,

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I think was the language he uses. What if they were determined that that began at fertilization or a conception?

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And they both laughed at the moment. And the attorney basically agreed, saying, yeah, then we have no position whatsoever.

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Our position completely folds. There is there's nothing to be done. And and so that was the direction of attack they took.

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We think they gave us a real key to how to to to defeat abortion from a legal standpoint, that that key that was given to us saying, here's how you do it.

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You go into a state and you say, in our state, we believe that life begins at conception or fertilization and continues through till natural death and that people have rights all during that process from beginning to end.

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And that's to me, that is the central issue and the argument that we're making and and really the strategy that we're taking in order to to end abortion.

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There are a lot of different strategies that are out there. We're just I'm very sold on the idea of taking this this idea and passing laws inside the in order to give children in the womb the same rights that we believe

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God granted them. Yeah, absolutely. Should resonate with all Americans, though it really should.

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Absolutely. And that answer kind of leads into the next one. And some of these answers may bleed in to each other, and that's

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OK. But the next one kind of goes like this. And this comes from the website as well.

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Pursuing personhood as the essential strategy for restoring legal protection to to every human being from biological beginning to natural death.

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So we're looking at that and we know it's we know it's a legal battle.

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Can you explain also, which I'm sure you've you've thought this through, how this is a moral, ethical and a spiritual or Christian battle as well?

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Yeah, yeah. When you when you mentioned those three specifically, we're really talking about the very first thing that Sarah's opening remarks talk about, and that's that there's actually a competition of worldviews out there.

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And we're unashamedly and uncompromisingly saying, you know, we believe that there is a

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God who created us all. We believe that his will can be known by reading his his word, which is the inspired

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Bible, the the word of God. And so I'm unembarrassed as a as a

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Christian to say, yeah, I believe in creation. I believe I believe the entirety of the word of God.

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And I believe that because he created everything, he gets to make all the rules.

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And one of the rules that he's made is that you can't kill innocent human beings.

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So it's pretty simple how we go. If you come at it from and really what we're up against is that people don't hold that same worldview.

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They arrive at a completely they believe in a fantasy world that everything came from nothing, that there is no

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God. Therefore, there is no origin. There's no we're all a great cosmic accident.

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There can be no morality. There can be no purpose in life. And we have no ultimate destiny, destiny.

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And that that can only lead in one direction that leads towards violence and evil. If there is no moral foundation, if there's no mooring that holds us, that keeps our society in check.

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Again, you've you've unmoored, you're you're floating in the waves, tossed to and fro.

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And that's exactly what we're seeing in society, particularly in the last year. So and realistically, since 1973, with regard to this abortion issue.

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Gotcha. All right. Here's here's a thought for me, and I want to get your your opinion on this, though.

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I see this as a rescue mission in two ways.

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And I think there are two sides to the same coin, even though one may lead to the other.

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But I see it as a rescue mission. First, it's a rescue mission for this for this term personhood.

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We want to rescue that that term personhood to where it is has its true definition in our laws, basically.

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And then it's a it's a rescue mission for the the preborn or the unborn, the babies in the womb.

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And so do you think I'm in the right direction thinking that way?

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Yeah, I don't I have I have no I wouldn't contradict anything that you're saying.

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OK, you talk into into in two directions. One is is the idea of rescuing the term itself.

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And and I agree that. And I guess if I'm understanding the question, you're you're kind of saying we do have legal legal battles that have to take place and things, you know, there's a process, if you will, that takes place in essence on the legal side.

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But also there is there is in what I would look at is these are these are parts of the same strategy, right?

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You have to also somebody, you know, we need sidewalk counselors. We need people down showing up at the abortion clinics and doing that work.

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I'll note this because I think that it's what you said is is pretty insightful. A lot of really good hearted people tried to fight this exclusively in the courts, in the in the late 70s and even since then.

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And they spend all kinds of money and effort in order to in order to try to to lobby in the state capitals, in the

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U .S. capital, even in order to get this thing off of ground zero and pushed forward only to find out that they spend all this time, money, effort only to come up one vote short every time.

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And it's happened repeated over and over in one state after the other. It got very depressed, demoralized.

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And what they kind of decided was we could do more good if we would just show up at the clinic, you know, every day of the week and just start talking to moms.

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And believe it or not, they've had great success pulling one and two out of the fire. But my point or my view is that you can't you can't eliminate the other side of it.

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In essence, if you're familiar with the story of Esther, they spent time praying.

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There was there was this great intercession that took place in that in that Esther went before the king, made her petition to save her people.

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And basically, the king said, well, you know, you know, I'll what

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I can do is I can kill Haman, who was who was out after you. And so they did that. But the story didn't end there.

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This edict was still out there and and the the Jewish people were still at risk.

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There was still a day coming when they were going to be attacked and killed. And and basically, they said somebody has to write a law.

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Somebody has to to write a new law. And in the process,

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I'm saying we can't forget that. We need to we need to involve ourselves in that side of it as well.

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And and that's part of what we're doing. And it's part of changing the culture, certainly engaging the culture.

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But ultimately, we'd like to see a change on on that side. My point is that you can't you can't only do one of them.

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You need to do both. Right. Absolutely. So that leads me to some other things that came out of the website.

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So once we're successful in that rescue mission, I thought this was insightful from the website.

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It kind of gives some examples of what that would look like.

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So, for instance, from a doctor's point of view, he would see two patients.

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That's the example that he gives. And so could you could you talk to us about, you know, how the how it would change, how our viewpoint would change as a doctor and the the examples that they give are a doctor, a lawyer, a judge, an activist and a pro -life organization, how their views would change once we've got the correct definition of personhood.

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And, you know, we're we're rescuing babies. How would how would a doctor view it differently at that point?

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Again, there are some good doctors out there already who certainly do have a biblical worldview. And and they view it that way today that they are, in essence.

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In fact, I feel like that was the traditional position of most doctors. Isn't a pregnant woman came in that they were treating both.

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But if you were. I mean, I recall my wife and I going into the doctor and I took great offense when, gosh, it was, you know, it's an exciting time as new potential parents.

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And they say, oh, well, we need to we need to check this box and tell you that, uh, you know, you're you're in a high risk category.

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My wife was a little bit older. I want to say that we were she might have been 30. I remember 35 when we had our second our second son.

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And well, we need to tell you that you're in a high risk category. So we need to introduce you to all this other all this other information.

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And basically, they were they were using all kinds of fancy words for telling us that they wanted to kill our baby.

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OK, well, I took a great offense at that and said, well, we just have to tell you. And I said, you're offending me.

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Stop talking. I don't you know, this is this is not acceptable to be to be casually discussing murder in in this in this context.

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And hope those kinds of things would change again. And we would go back to a to to a place in our country where we would value life, that we'd respect life.

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And that would happen not just in the doctor's office, but as you describe the activists, the the lawyers, the attorneys at the point that you recognize that an individual unique life has extraordinary value.

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It changes your perspective on things. And we really believe that the baby inside the womb is no different than the baby outside the womb.

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It has the same amount of value and hard to make an argument other than that.

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Yeah, I can't remember all the arguments, but I think it's a good argument. Location is not an argument.

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You're you're the same whether you're in the womb or on the moon. Yeah, there's quite a few other arguments. Yes, whether and again, there's a there's a little term sled

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SLED. It helps you to, you know, the environment that they're in the the amount of dependency that they have.

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Right. None of those. And those are all the reasons that are given for this is why we should be allowed to kill this baby.

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And none of those rises to the level to a baby outside when you would never think, well, this this baby is very small.

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So we're going to we're going to give them a third of the rights that we give everybody else. It doesn't make sense at all of logical or philosophical standpoint to be making those kinds of arguments.

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So I find them to be very effective in particularly in a conversation on abortion as well. Absolutely.

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You you kind of answered my next several questions. I just want to touch on this one.

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You've already touched on the fact that there's other pro -life organizations out there.

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And I wanted to ask you about what you saw as as the differences between the person who alliance and maybe some of the other ones.

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I know there's many different things that we could talk about. But are there there any major points that you would like to present as far as differences between the organizations?

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Um, yeah, I mean, there's always going to be differences in organizations, and typically that boils down to the difference in vision and real simple.

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We want to see an end to this evil practice. Immediately position.

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So we tend to take what would be considered a an immediatist position, uncompromised position.

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And there are plenty of other groups that are out there. They're good hearted people. And I don't again,

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I I find that their strategies have been completely useless for the past 47 years.

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And yet they trying the same strategy over and over. So with, you know, with personhood, we take an uncompromised position.

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We're simply saying God's word is the highest standard. It tells us exactly what we're supposed to do.

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And that's what we're going to follow. And if and I don't believe that you can get any more wisdom than that.

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I've talked to a number of, as I said, good hearted Christian attorneys who who who become in my opinion, they become wise in their own eyes.

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And they think that they're going to trick the abortionists into into allowing a pro life position to exist.

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And again, 47 years ought to tell you it's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen.

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And so I feel that our our, you know, the types of legislation that we need to be bringing right now need to be uncompromised and they need to be immediate.

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We want an end to this evil practice right now. Right. And I'm pretty sure that you and I have this conversation.

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I know I've had it with other folks as well, but you're talking about the more immediate position, the you'll hear the word abolitionist position.

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And in the conversation that I've had, if you take that abolition abolitionist position to to a representative, if you if you take it to the state level, if you take it to the federal level, it's kind of.

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You'll find folks that may agree with you, but they are they're not very receptive because they they know that it's not going to go over well as as a bill.

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They're not going to get very much traction in their office. And and and so they settle for the more compromised legislation, more compromised bill.

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But the reason why I like personhood alliance is you don't let that defeat you.

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You say, OK, I believe that the immediate view is right. I believe that the abolitionist view is is more correct.

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So if I can't take it to my legislation because they're the ones that have the voice and the power to vote, if I can't take it there, where can

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I take it? And so personal personhood alliance is telling you where you can take that position and have traction.

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Absolutely. I think that's really well stated. I again, in order to show my my my state representative for Yadkin County was too cowardly for the very reasons that you mentioned.

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He was frightened of all this, you know, backlash that he felt he might get if he took a pair of personhood thing saying, you know, life begins a concern.

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So, well, I certainly believe that. But I could never I could never forward a bill like that. I mean, that's that would be, you know, the end of me, if you want.

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No, the people in your in your district here, here in Yadkinville. This is how we believe we would support you if you would if you would do this at a state level.

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He was simply too frightened and which is not uncommon for politicians.

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I find them all to be mostly, again, lacking in any kind of bravery or courage.

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They're well -spoken people. They're good communicators. But at their core, they you will find that there aren't a whole lot of very brave politicians.

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But what I was able to say is, all right, well, I'm going to go I'm going to go show you that the people in your district, the people who who you represent actually do feel this way and will support this.

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And so we took it to a very local saying, all right, just in our county. And we got a unanimous decision at a county level to become a sanctuary for unborn children, saying in the resolution basically says this is is you can't you can't kill children here in our county, able to do it in Raleigh, or you might get away with it in Greensboro or Charlotte or wherever else.

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But you can't do it right here. And and so you take the fight local and you win local.

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And and my my goal at this point. I've taken a look at the at the map of of North Carolina, and my view is that I can

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I can win this same fight in about 90 counties at the very least.

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And at that point, we'll have some much more political clout. And when I go to Raleigh and say, you know, we want you to consider something.

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I got 90 counties and 90 boards who all we believe this stuff.

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This is what we want you to do. And and hopefully those are the kind of things that begin to build courage in these people who have none at this point.

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And that's what we're trying to do. That's right. And part of the reason for this video is to encourage folks.

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Jesus is at work. He's moving. And, you know, don't be timid. Don't be anxious. Don't be afraid. He's working and he's moving.

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All right. So to to kind of hit us in the direction of wrapping things up, let's get to the nuts and bolts and some practical things.

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The first one is what are the what are or what is the three step strategy?

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If you'll explain, number one, safe city. Yeah, the first the first step is to pass a resolution in the inside a city, a town, a county, some locality, something that that exists out there where you say inside this area, the people here are willing to make a powerful proclamation on par with the

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Declaration of Independence, because that's all it was. Keep in mind, the Declaration of Independence, while it's a great document, it was nothing more than a few guys in a room saying this is what we believe.

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And that same thing is what you do with a resolution. You get your county leaders together.

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You go to them and say, I want you to make this this strong, powerful public statement. If you pass it as a resolution, they can't be sued.

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They can't be sued by the ACLU. It doesn't the ACLU may hate it, but they can't do anything about it because they're using their

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First Amendment rights simply to say we really believe this stuff. And that's all it is. It's a resolution inside a city, a county, whatever.

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And that's the very first step. It's the easiest one to to accomplish, and that's why it's number one.

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But somebody has to take the lead. It typically takes at least one bulldog of a person inside a county who is willing to at least carry the ball and say,

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I want to get this done in my locality. That's what you do. You make your powerful proclamation.

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You will find in the process that you can you can gain all kinds of you can build all kinds of coalitions.

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I mean, there are plenty of churches and pastors and businesses, Christian businesses that are out there who are looking for somebody to lead a charge on something like this.

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They just like that. I don't know. You know, they feel helpless and they're looking for somebody who's willing to lead the charge.

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So this gives them that that energy and you'll find you can build a very quick coalition of pro -life, pro -Bible believers that will that will pass a resolution saying we're creating a sanctuary and we don't care what the state says.

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You can't do certain things in our county or in our city or in our township.

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Heck, you know, if you want to make it boil it down to your homeowners association or whatever.

36:52

There's no limit to how small and how local it can become. Right. We're encouraging anybody can do this.

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It doesn't take a whole lot of energy. We've got the resolutions already written out.

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All we got to do is we got on PDF. We change the name and it's got all the legalese, got all the whereases and the therefores in it.

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So it's a simple and easy process, but that is step one. Okay.

37:24

What about step two? Activate community. All right. Once you've built this coalition and you've made a statement and that's all you've done, your county, everyone will feel there'll be a great euphoria that goes through.

37:38

People will be excited. But that's just part of it because the reality is you're saying to all the surrounding counties is, you know, hey, you know, mothers, fathers that are out there that are considering abortion, come here.

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We will rescue you. We'll be a sanctuary for your unborn child. Come here. We'll support whatever kind of needs that you have.

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And that's where we truly believe that we've got to have the pregnancy care centers involved in this process and get the churches to locally begin to support the works that are done.

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There are good pregnancy care centers in most counties and tie them together to say, we've got the support structure.

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So, you know, we're not going to, it's not just a matter for us, you know, to make sure we notch our belt and say, well, we saved one more.

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We got to, we have to realize as churches that we got to plug these people into a community in order to help them throughout the whole process of raising those children up and building a godly community around them.

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And so it goes to that level. It talks about even in the step two, that churches become much more involved in local government to at least counsel them on places where they may unwittingly be giving mixed signals and supporting the idea or the concept of abortion where they don't even look at it that way.

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But you have those conversations. And so now you're building a culture of life inside the county, inside the city by having these conversations.

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As part of that, we've got information at the Personhood Alliance, great video content.

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Take those to your, you know, if you got Sunday school, drag that along. And they're great conversation pieces.

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The church today doesn't do a great job of even understanding what our position is on this.

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For too long, you know, the numbers are kind of embarrassing. When you look at abortions that take place inside the church itself, it's a little bit embarrassing.

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So this is an effort to say, all right, this is an education side of the process as well, where we go back to church and begin to train our people saying, we believe in life.

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And even on the hard questions, even when we talk about in the cases of rape and incest, what is our position on that?

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We ought to be able to defend our position and explain why it matches what God says about it.

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And so those are the kinds of things that happen in phase two. And there's hopefully a knitting together of the hearts of various pastors and organizations inside a county because it's supposed to prepare you for step three.

40:38

Right. And if you want to go ahead and talk about step three, the step three is something that excited me because I had no idea this, the ability for this to happen even existed.

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So I was excited when I heard about it. So defy the unjust law. What does that mean?

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In essence, right now, we have an unjust ruling. It's not even a law.

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And you'll hear people say that, but it's an important distinction. Roe versus Wade is not a law.

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Laws get passed by the legislative branch, not by the judicial branch. And so all you had was a group of judges that made a ruling.

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Well, it was an unjust ruling. They were wrong about it. They were incorrect in deciding that we did not know that those children were human beings.

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That's in essence what they said. And they took the rights away from them. That was wrong. And so what we are getting to a point of is saying, because that was unjust, we are prepared now because we've trained and educated the people in our locality.

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We're prepared to defy that. And what that means is, we simply say, we really don't care what the federal judiciary has spoken on this.

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They were completely wrong. We're submitting ourselves to a higher power, being that of the word of God, to the kingdom of God and kingdom law, and we're prepared to defy it.

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And this is not an outrageous, crazy idea. For those who have not paid attention in our country, it's taking place right now in the marijuana battles.

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You have a number of states that are defying federal law regarding substance abuse, and they are permitting the legalization of a controlled substance being marijuana.

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And so you have states that are passing it. It defies federal law. And those states, Colorado, California, New Jersey, they're going one after the other right now.

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I can't even name all of them. They're all defying the law right now. And so all we're saying is that we get to a point and whether we can pass, well, certainly we want to pass legislation, but what will happen is if we pass a piece of legislation that ends abortion in our state, we know good and well some judge somewhere from Hawaii or wherever is going to show up and say, oh, that's, you know,

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I'm putting a stop on that. It defies it, or that's unconstitutional according to me.

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And we simply tell them, well, we're going to defy you because federal courts, you know, the little dirty secret is that they don't have an army to be able to enforce their position.

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And so we're quite comfortable saying we have to get to from point A to point B, and the way to do that is, again, you build a grassroots movement.

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We win county after county after county after county, and then we move to a point where we pass a law in our state, and then if need be, we're prepared to defy the federal government and say,

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I'm sorry that you don't like our laws in our state. We're an independent entity, and we've passed the law constitutionally.

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We don't recognize your unjust rulings, and that's the position that we do need to get to at some point.

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Did you want to speak to the idea of the local law? Yes. A local bill is, it's an additional strategy that's available to us in the state of North Carolina, and that's that if you pick a,

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I think the number is it's 10 counties or 14 something like that, that if you pass a local bill, the neat thing about it in North Carolina is that it doesn't go across our governor's desk.

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A lot of our Republican legislators are hesitant to pass pro -life legislation because they say, well, it doesn't do any good.

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Our governor is just going to veto it. Now, I don't find that argument to be good enough not to try to pass the bills anyway, but taking them at their word, what we could do is to pass a series of overlapping local bills that basically make it almost impossible to build abortion clinics or something like that through zoning laws or whatever.

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There's a whole host of different directions that we could take, but basically make it impossible for abortions to take place by passing what we call local bills.

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You put a number of group of counties together, you pass a local bill, and those local bills would just need a majority of, at this point, of Republicans in our state legislature to pass the thing, and it would never go across the governor's desk, and it would become law, and that would have the full force of law as opposed to just a resolution.

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So we're excited about that as part of a potential strategy here in our state as well. Fantastic. All right, now to the last set of questions.

45:57

If I was to make an argument, and I think you bring out some good points, if I was to try to convince my neighbor, my fellow

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Sunday school class members, or I try to convince my county commissioners, you give five points of argument, and if you want to just kind of go through each of those five and explain them to them, tell us why they're important.

46:24

Number one is the biblical position. Yes, the biblical position is the first.

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We're taking an Orthodox position. This is something, it's the position of the Baptists. It's the position of the

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Assemblies of God. It's the position, it's the traditional position of the Methodists and a number of others that are out there, but this is language that almost everybody's going to understand that life begins at conception.

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We can pull out the scriptures from the book of Psalms, from Jeremiah, that clearly indicate that God sees value of the life of human beings in the womb, so it's a biblical position.

46:58

There isn't a lot of controversy about that. People won't argue with you saying, no, it's not. It's clearly the biblical position with regard to life, and so when we go to a commissioner, perhaps, it's one of the things we like to say is that if you are a

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Bible -believing Christian, this is the position that you should be taking anyway, and so you're challenging somebody's biblical worldview or their

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Christianity even, and we shouldn't be ashamed to do that. Got you.

47:33

What about number two, the patriotic argument? Yeah, in the

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United States of America here, we've got these beautiful documents in the Constitution, in the

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Declaration of Independence. We already mentioned it earlier. We hold these truths to be self -evident that all men are created equal. They're endowed by their

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Creator with these unalienable rights, and among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life is that first one they mentioned, and when you take that in with the 14th and the 5th

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Amendments, we've got language in our American tradition, in our heritage, that basically has pro -life positions written out already, so we find that to be a patriotic position and a truly traditional

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American position that most people, again, are going to understand and warm up to.

48:28

Gotcha. Number three, the scientific argument. Yeah, the scientific, which again,

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I'm a scientist. I'm a Bachelor of Science, and in the state of North Carolina, and I've mentioned this, that every biology text on our campuses that's been funded by our tax dollars makes the same argument that life begins at fertilization in all mammals, and then somehow they try to pretend that in human beings, it's different, that somehow you take a human and a human, and it makes something that's not human for a while, but then when it's born, it is human, and it makes no scientific sense, whatever.

49:11

Our position is very scientific. Perhaps in the 1950s, before we understood

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DNA, you could make a position that they didn't understand what it was, but today, with the technology that you can see the life inside there, we know how it's developing.

49:27

We know a whole lot about it. We know that it's a unique and valuable life form. It's a great time to be a pro -lifer because all the science comes down on our side today, and we would love for this to get into a scientific argument at some point.

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So if you love science, it's the resolution for you because it passes the smell test on science.

49:53

Number four is the political argument. Political argument, and again, this is interesting.

49:58

At least in our state, in North Carolina, we almost have super majorities in both the

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House and the Senate. Our state is overwhelmingly run at the local level by Republicans as it sits today.

50:11

Well, that's good news for us because the position of the political platforms, particularly of the

50:18

Republicans at a federal level and even at a state level, both have personhood language saying that we recognize life in the womb.

50:27

And so if you're a Republican, you need to endorse and support the idea of personhood because that's already in our platform.

50:38

If you're not supporting this and you're a Republican, you need to get out of the way or you need to step down, and I'm saying tonight, you need to resign.

50:45

We don't need Republicans. We don't need rhinos that pretend to carry the banner for us but become embarrassed of something as basic and simple as a pro -life position.

50:58

And then number five, the one that's probably the most attractive or appealing to all of us, the fiscally responsible argument.

51:08

Fiscally responsible, absolutely. Nothing for local governments to take this position.

51:15

It costs them zero dollars. Too often, people show up at their board of commissioners and they're saying, in order to do this, we'd like you to take on this project but it's going to cost you

51:31

X amount. In this case, you're going to these guys saying, this will cost you zero. It'll cost you less than zero.

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In fact, it's going to endear you to these people and your name is going to be sung about in heaven for eternity.

51:47

And it costs nothing. It costs nothing to get this done. So you can lay that on as thick as you want, but I find it to be a powerful argument saying,

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I don't have a big budget. In fact, our budget is nothing right now. Statewide.

52:03

In fact, we need support in order to get this good word out. It doesn't cost anything.

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All we need are good people like yourself, Robert, to go to your local authorities and simply say,

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I want to have this done. It makes perfect sense. Let's get it done. And in doing so, we create such momentum.

52:28

When you do something at a county level, the county next door says, what did you guys just do? We want to do that too.

52:34

And we're going to see this thing start to snowball. And I'm telling you, in our lifetime, we can end abortion in this state.

52:43

The law right now that the Supreme Court is looking at, or the case they're looking at for Mississippi, and if you saw the ruling yesterday in Texas, they got a similar one that will be right behind it.

52:54

But we've got these cases that are going to go to the Supreme Court. By the numbers, the Supreme Court may overturn

53:00

Roe versus Wade. You know, the sad news for us is that that's just the beginning of the fight.

53:08

If they overturn Roe versus Wade today, the laws in the state of North Carolina still put us in a position where abortion will be completely legal.

53:18

We've got a lot of bad laws in North Carolina that have to be overturned. So we need to start doing that right now.

53:26

Absolutely. Well, thank you, Brother Keith, for joining me tonight and giving me all this wonderful information.

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And I hope it encourages so many other people to get on board, to be in prayer, to put their faith in action.

53:44

And I want to end with this. I want to go back to the quote from Sarah. She makes the comment that we have the answer to the abortion crisis, and it's

53:54

Jesus. He's the only one that can bring a change to the heart. And I would say that Jesus is the answer to everything.

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He's the answer to all of our problems and most importantly, our sin problem.

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We have all sinned. We've all missed the mark. We have all broken every single one of God's laws. We cannot make up for it.

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We cannot be good enough. We need someone outside of ourselves to rescue us.

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We need to be rescued because of our sin and from the wrath of God.

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We need Jesus Christ. And he came and did that. He came to this earth, lived a sinless life.

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He died, was buried and rose from the grave. Then ascended into heaven where he sits currently at the right hand of the

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Father. And he will forgive you of your sins if you will repent of your sins and put your faith and trust in him.

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And he will save you. And we would encourage you to seek him tonight in repentance and faith.

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And once you do that, you can join us. Matthew 28, if you look at the whole thing, we've got to remember the whole thing.

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Jesus says, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations.

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So we can speak with the authority of Christ, with the authority of the word of God on these issues, on these issues, because like Keith said,

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God created everything. It's his. And we can speak to his morality, his ethics.

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And this is his creation. And we can speak with the authority of Christ.

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So if you do not know him, we would encourage you to come to him tonight.

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And with that being said, Keith, would you mind to close us in prayer? Oh, absolutely. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for another opportunity as the saints of God to come together to sharpen one another as iron sharpens iron and to speak through and to talk through these, sometimes these difficult subjects.

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We thank you, Lord, for giving us boldness, for giving us your

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Holy Spirit to be with us every single day, to fight the fights, to give us the strength to be able to carry on.

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And Lord, we thank you for the technology that exists today that allows us even to take part this way, to have a conversation and hopefully words of encouragement that went forth that will land on the hearts of different people and bring forth fruit all over this state.

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And we thank you very much for it in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Thank you guys for watching the video.

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Remember that Jesus is King. Go speak with the authority of Christ. Go live in the victory of Christ and continue to go out there and spread the gospel of Christ.