Ringgold, GA—On Saturday, more than seventy-five pro-life activists gathered in front of the Catoosa County Courthouse to praise God for the overturn of the erroneous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and call for a special legislative session to abolish abortion in Georgia with a Personhood Amendment to the state constitution.

“We are here today to rejoice in the overturn of Roe v Wade and to call on our elected officials to end the Holocaust of abortion once and for all,” said Abigail Darnell, Vice President of Georgia Right to Life & 3rd Vice President for the Georgia Republican Assembly.

“Part of the proper liberty restored in the Dobbs decision was the ability for individual states to enact laws that protect the unborn without artificial restrictions from Washington,”said Vaughn Hamilton, Elder of Brainerd Hills Presbyterian Church. “Let us give thanks for this opportunity and let us pray for moral clarity and boldness from voters, to legislators to the judiciary and to the Governor.”

The rally featured local church leaders, politicians and activists who have joined forces in an effort entitled Georgians Ending Abortion. They are urging Georgians to sign an online petition to Governor Kemp which states: 

“Whereas, several thousand pre-born children may be legally murdered in our state before the beginning of the next regularly scheduled legislative session; and 

“Whereas, innocent Georgians may be legally murdered even if the “Heartbeat” law goes into effect because of the broad exceptions it contains;

“Therefore, we urge you to immediately convene a special session of the Georgia General Assembly.”

https://www.grtlpetitions.online 

The Governors of South Dakota and Indiana have already announced their intention to convene special sessions in their states to strengthen legal protection for the pre-born, and activists are calling on Governor Brian Kemp to follow suit. Organizers of the event contend that abortion is both a sin and a crime and therefore both the church and the state have a duty to take bold, decisive action immediately. 

“Why are we meeting at the Courthouse? Because God ordained civil government to administer justice. Not individuals, not the family, not the church,” said Keith Cochran, President of Northwest Georgia Right to Life. “What is our grievance? Pre-born children are being legally murdered by their mother and her doctor without any punishment at all.”

The rally commended Chattooga County Commissioner Blake Elsberry who last week signed a Resolution for Life affirming his desire to protect all human life in his jurisdiction. Chattooga GRA-member & activist Jennifer Tudor read the Resolution. It reads:

“Be it further resolved, that the Office of the Sole Commissioner of Chattooga County hereby resolves to use all means within its power to support the sanctity of human life in accordance with its God-given responsibilities as the people’s elected governing body.” 

“This is something I have felt convicted about getting done since first taking office and I feel a heavy burden of sadness that we even have to have this debate in America. Nevertheless, now with this issue coming back to the states, I felt that it was important that our state leadership know that this office supports the right to life for the born and unborn alike,” wrote Elsberry in a statement. 

 “We are hoping in Catoosa County the Board of Commissioners will step up and do the right thing and sign that resolution as well,” said Ray Blankenship an activist in the Catoosa GOP and leader in the second amendment sanctuary movement.

Activist Charlie Wysong who led an effort to shut down the Chattanooga abortion facility which closed in 1994 said “How does it feel to have a fifty year prayer answered?”

The rally featured State Representative-elect Mitchell Horner of House District 3 (R-Ringgold) who likened the pro-life cause to the abolition of slavery. “On March 20th 1854, the Republican Party formed over the issue of abolition. Once again we must form a Republican Party around the notion of abolition – an abolition of killing children…It’s time for Republicans in the state house to have courage and act, said Horner. 

“Republicans have had the majority in the House and Senate for twenty years. Why do we still kill babies?” Said Jackie Harling a Walker County activist and former candidate for House District 1.

The Georgians Ending Abortion petition is co-sponsored by many Republican organizations that point to the GAGOP platform which states: “We believe in the right to life from conception, beginning at fertilization, to natural death.”

“We are calling on Republicans to advance the platform they say they believe in,” said Nathaniel Darnell, the senior NFRA Director for the Georgia Republican Assembly.

State Senator-elect Colton Moore of Senate District 53 (R-Trenton) also spoke out in favor of the effort and described the intense antagonism that was displayed against the ‘Heartbeat Bill’. “I wish each of you could’ve heard the hisses and the growls from the gallery as that piece of legislation finally passed by one vote.”

Georgia’s ‘Heartbeat’ law has been challenged in court since 2019 and has not yet been enforced or saved a single life. Currently in Georgia, all babies may be legally murdered up until 20 weeks, before the stage in which it has been demonstrated that babies feel pain. However babies believed to have Down’s Syndrome or other ‘fetal abnormalities’ may currently be killed by abortion after 20 weeks despite the excruciating pain they may experience. This double standard is replicated and expanded in the Heartbeat bill which treats children conceived in rape or incest to a different standard of justice than consensually-conceived children, a concept that hearkens back to the eugenics of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger.

“We as an American society, we believe that we have equal justice under the law – each and every member of society. And when that fertilized egg becomes a new person, it too has equal justice under the law and we Americans must continue to fight for it,” said Moore.

“The Dobbs decision is not the end of our work, it is the beginning,” said Pastor Dan Hocker of Christian Fellowship Assembly in Tunnel Hill.

Dan Hocker referenced the pro-life work of early Christians. “We started this work on the hills of Rome. Back then there wasn’t a pill, there wasn’t even a coat hanger, back then there weren’t doctors that would ‘end a pregnancy’. Back then there were only wolves on the hills to eat those babies. But Christians would watch as they would take those babies to the hills and they would rescue those babies and raise them to have faith in the Lord that we serve.”

What about Rape?

Dan Hocker: “Is it right to take that babies little life because a sin was committed? “There’s no doubt that rape and incest are wrong. But it is still God-breathed life.”

“The only people that really have choices and options, are the people that breathe and walk among us. The unborn they don’t have that option… That female or that male in the womb, they don’t have the option to plead with their mother not to kill them. They don’t have an option or a choice to ask their father to fight for them,” said Blankenship.

Georgians who favor abortion vehemently reject the involvement of Christians in abortion law-making. Some Ringgold residents voiced their opposition from their vehicles yelling “My body, my choice” or profanity as the drive by. They often oppose Christian involvement on the claim that it violates the separation of church and state. However, activists at the rally clearly delineated the separate, distinct role of those two institutions. 

“We believe in the institutional separation of church and state, but there is no separation between God and government,” said Nathaniel Darnell.

“There is no authority except that which is given of God – received from God with the intent of reflecting the character of God,” said Reagan Marsh, Pastor of Reformation Baptist Church in Dalton as he spoke to Romans 13.

“Government when it positions itself above scripture has no authority… “Government is a restricted authority… they are not to execute or fulfill their own will nor that of the electorate. They are to serve God alone and they will answer to God as surely as you and I will. Just as surely as I will as an elder and as a pastor. God’s word alone determines good from evil, right from wrong, not mere populace or consensus or what is trending on Twitter.”

“We have a duty to see to it and to call our elected officials to the obedience that God’s word requires of them. Because how they govern reflects how people see Him,” said Marsh.

“I’m asking Governor Kemp to stand up and take a stand, as we put these petitions before him… What happens here in the state of Georgia is going to affect America and what happens in America affects the world,” said Edward Torres a Missionary with Amazon for Christ Medical Missions.

Last Friday, June 24 served as the cap-stone on a week of landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions dealing with issues of School Choice, Gun Rights, and finally the Lives of the Preborn. As an encore, this week they gave us another win for Religious Freedom. For countless pro-lifers, gun rights activists, educators, Christians, conservatives, and just constitutional textualists, these victories have been a long time coming! In fact, many who started these efforts 50 or more years ago have long since passed.
It reminds us that the effort to stand for our principles and promote life and freedom in America is a long-game. But by the grace of God it does pay off.

By at least the 1940s conservatives had started to notice a problem with a growing tyranny within the United States Supreme Court. Yet it wasn’t until the late 1970s that an organized effort began to build to counter-act that trend, to raise up a new generation of jurists to fight back, and to get the Republican Party to help. With the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980, for the first time Republicans seemed ready to work to turn things around.

However, the initial results proved mixed at best. Are you old enough to remember? Working with the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate up until 1987, President Reagan successfully got two excellent Justices installed onto the Supreme Court: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. They were eager to reverse most of the worst court decisions that had contributed to America’s decline in the twentieth century. But the other two appointed under Reagan proved quite the disappointment: Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy. These last two would work to ensure that the court’s tyrannical trend would grow and entrench, often pairing with the liberal justices to thwart one conservative effort after another for the next 20 years.

We could give Reagan a mulligan for Kennedy. After all, Republicans had just lost control of the U.S. Senate in the 1986 election, and Reagan had previously offered two exceptional judicial nominees in Robert Bork and Doug Ginsberg that the Democrat Senate had turned down before Kennedy was offered as a compromise candidate. But there was no excuse for Sandra Day O’Connor. Republicans in control simply failed to properly vet her just because she was a woman, and they wanted to make good on the promise to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. It was an early example of the folly of identity politics.

That mixed trend continued under President George H.W. Bush, who appointed another stellar conservative in Justice Clarence Thomas, but an awful disappointment in Justice David Souter. Thankfully, Thomas has endured on the court while O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter (finally!) retired.

Under Democrat Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama the liberals got nothing but consistent liberal Justices appointed to the court. They weren’t playing games. “Liberal” didn’t mean pro-liberty; “liberal” meant more liberal intrusion of the federal government, and a more liberally “fast and loose” interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

President George W. Bush continued the mixed success for Republicans, though, in appointing the terrific Justice Samuel Alito and the quite disappointing Chief Justice John Roberts. Again, there was no excuse for this mistake since Republicans controlled all of Capitol Hill at this time. President Bush even originally was going to appoint Harriet Miers instead of Alito, but the outcry from conservatives was so strong that Bush had to relent. Then a shift started to happen.

In 2008 for the first time SCOTUS reversed itself on a series of repeatedly encroaching decisions that involved gun rights with D.C. v. Heller. Prior to graduating from law school, I had the opportunity to personally witness the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Heller. It was a momentous occasion. A bright glimmer of hope. It wasn’t just the first major reversal for gun rights, but virtually the first major reversal for conservatives of any kind for the court in decades.

Then when Justice Antonin Scalia unfortuitously died in 2016, most of us thought that was the end of any hope of fully reversing the court’s tyranny in our lifetime. Thankfully, U.S. Senate Republicans had enough fortitude to prevent out-going President Obama from appointing Scalia’s replacement.

Next, do you remember the 2016 presidential elections? For many of us who had been paying close attention to what had been going on in the United States Supreme Court for decades, we trusted that despite whatever other weaknesses U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) might have, he as a conservative attorney at least knew very well what was going on with jurisprudence in D.C. and what kind of Justice the next President would need to appoint to help turn things around. We didn’t have the same confidence in presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Cruz pressed Trump on the question of who he would appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Trump agreed with Cruz on the type of Justices that needed to be appointed—a key point that helped Cruz supporters feel more comfortable getting behind Trump for the Republican nomination.

And President Trump made good on his word. Working with the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, and listening closely to conservatives, President Trump appointed three conservative Justices to the court that provided a cushion for when Chief Justice Roberts acted up. It is very likely President Trump’s federal judicial appointments will be the most lasting positive legacy of his presidency.

Yet until this previous week, all of those three appointed Justices had not yet been fully field tested. After so many previous disappointments, we were still holding our breath in suspense waiting for another possible letdown.

They didn’t let us down. This time Republicans delivered. They delivered because conservatives hounded them relentlessly. And when Republicans deliver, it makes us want to get out and vote for them again!

We don’t mean to suggest that these Justices are perfect either individually or collectively, but they do represent a major course correction in the federal court that has been a long time coming.

So while many statists and liberals took to the street this weekend to complain and protest about the decisions, many of us were celebrating. I was grateful for the opportunity to speak on behalf of pro-life activists like many of you to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Over the last 40 years, there have been so many opportunities for them to do this and … they haven’t had the courage to do it, they’ve missed opportunities, and then all of a sudden, they finally did it! We’re just so excited. Can’t believe we lived to see this day.”