Shownotes Transcript
Brian Johnston discusses how to impact our culture with the message of life. He’s joined by Joe Langfeld of Human Life Alliance. Human Life Alliance provides excellent cultural impact communication tools for people everywhere to use where they see fit. It’s very good to have spoken to Joe about culture and how Human Life Alliance is addressing the culture and communicating in an image inclined world of memes. What an excellent resource they are. It's important to understand the nature of culture. Brian lives on the banks of the Sacramento River. It's the largest river in the state of California. Where the Sacramento river is joined by the American, at the confluence of those two rivers, is where the town of Sacramento was founded. That's because it was the farthest inland you could actually come up from the sea, through the bay, and come inland with a seagoing ship to Old Sacramento. Culture is a lot like a river. Culture flows. It is the result of contributing factors and streams that are upstream. Little rivulets go to little rivers, to bigger rivers. Creeks, tributaries contribute to a larger river and that's the case in your culture. These rivulet sometimes are contaminated. But sometimes they're very, very pure and I want you to understand that cultures are also that way. There are things in our culture that aren't good for you and you know that. But the most important aspect of this stream, this river we live by and where we draw water from - our culture, is the fact that it has banks. That's what defines the river. Now at times it may overflow its banks but those banks will, once the waters have receded, reemerge. The banks of the river define and delimit the river. The banks for a culture are the laws of a culture. In 1973, the Supreme Court threw out the laws regarding abortion. Every state in the nation had protective laws for those babies but the Supreme Court threw them all out. The laws are critically important. Laws define your culture. If you care about human beings and the cultural values we want to establish to protect those who are the seemingly insignificant - if you know that they are indeed significant, then you need to pay attention to the laws. The laws are there to help protect the flow of culture, to make sure that it doesn't over run its banks and destroy people and lives and property. That's really what happens when laws are broken. That's what happens literally here in Sacramento if these levees break or are overtopped. It brings great harm. So it is true with our laws. Our laws are there to protect and this being an election year, I want to remind you - wherever you are in the nation to go to: nrlca.org because National Right to Life pays attention to these laws on the federal, on the state and on the local level. Here you can find your state's affiliate. It is important because it allows you to be involved in building up the banks of our culture, building up the levees, building up the protective nature of what's flowing through our lives so that people are not harmed. We have to pay attention to the laws. We have to pay attention to politics. You may not believe it but, just a handful of votes turns many elections and that is much more common on the local level from city council or supervisors in the county to the school boards. Planned Parenthood targets school boards. Very often it's a school district’s policies that determine whether they give access to the children. So it is very important in this election year to get involved with National Right to Life to make sure that the protections that need to be in place for our culture and the way to do that is to understand the need for good and just laws and understand your need for civic involvement. I mentioned the school board because if you get involved in local school boards and find out who the pro-life candidates are, who wins sometimes by 5 or 10 votes, are some of the smallest jurisdiction in your state. Everyone who votes for pro-life school board members is going to vote for a pro-life city council member and anyone who votes for those two is going to vote for the pro life County Supervisor and for the pro-life State Assembly and State Senate and for the pro-life candidate for Congress and pro-life candidate for governor and yes for the pro-life federal offices all the way to the president. So by getting involved in helping your community be aware of the cultural war and the cultural values and being aware that they can make a difference where they are, that the laws are important, the laws are the banks of the cultural river. You can make a difference right where you are go to nrlc.org.