2020 Elections: What's At Stake?

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, an engaging and informative weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, this is John Rustin, President of NC Family, and we're grateful to have you with us for this week's program. It's our prayer that you will be informed, encouraged, and inspired by what you hear on Family Policy Matters and that you will feel better equipped to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Today we bring you an excerpt from NC Family's virtual event on October 22nd entitled, The 2020 Elections, What's at Stake? This event features Victoria Cobb, President of the Family Foundation of Virginia.

We hope you enjoy. Well, Victoria, thanks so much for being with us today. Let me just say at the outset that you are a great friend and a great leader among the nearly 40 family policy councils across the nation. So we're grateful for your leadership and we're grateful for your participation in this event tonight. Victoria, before we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself and how long you've been at the Family Foundation of Virginia.

Sure. I am originally from the Philadelphia area, came down to Virginia for college and have been here ever since and pretty much been at the Family Foundation ever since. I was one of those and all the family policy councils love these, you know, one of these interns that was just so passionate.

I just kind of stayed. And so I've now actually been president for about 15 years, but I'm, you know, I was passionate about the life issue. That's what got me into this work. I quickly figured out that there's a lot of other areas that need just as much work as the pro-life area. So yeah, it's a broad based passion that's just kept me here.

Well, you do such a great job at it and I know your team is just really very effective in what you do and we appreciate your leadership. So speaking of Virginia, the Commonwealth of Virginia actually holds elections for the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates in odd number years. So you all had a legislative election in November of 2019. So just this past year and those elections turned out to be highly, highly consequential.

Tell us a little bit about that. Well, as I tell people, you know, there was a, there's been a season in Virginia where we used to have, you know, mostly conservative elected officials and all of a sudden we started electing a liberal to the US Senate or a liberal to the governorship and we tried to think of these things as one offs and they became more frequent. So we get to 2019 and unfortunately in a matter of a few seats in the House and two seats on the Senate that got changed, pro-family legislators lost control of the majorities in both chambers, which added to already a very liberal governor. So now we have this very left wing trifecta controlling really everything here in Virginia. I think one of the big points that I want our folks to understand here is that the number of seats in the state legislature in Virginia that actually changed hands was not all that many. I think you said it was about maybe six in the 100 member House and two in the 40 member Senate.

But just those tiny changes in highly competitive districts made all the difference in the world. Also you mentioned that Virginia has a Democratic governor, Ralph Northam. Let me kind of make a disclaimer right now. I mean, we have to talk in terms of party Democrat Republican because we operate within a political environment. But we know that there are folks on both sides of the aisle that we work with, but because we work within that political structure in that political system, you know, it's important to understand how the parties and the party platforms play into that. Of course, speaking of Governor Ralph Northam, I'm sure a lot of our viewers will recall the famous and now infamous comments that he made back in January related to abortion. It's just unreal that we heard these remarks, but it was really a precursor to what was going to happen in Virginia and unfortunately took place in New York and a number of other states where these extreme abortion proponents came in, took control and started just dismantling decades of pro-life and pro-family policies. Yeah, I mean, possibly the most devastating thing that did happen was on the pro-life front and probably because it does take decades to get this work done and it was all stripped away.

And this is important for folks to realize, stripped away in one bill that got very minimal hearing. So it isn't just how painful the outcome is. I will tell you that the process is painful too, to watch.

So let me just share the pieces that got gutted. In Virginia, if a woman goes to seek an abortion, no longer will she have true informed consent, which is really important. Just what's actually going on? Do you understand the process?

Do you understand the risks? That got gutted and ours had recently encapsulated the right to be able to see your ultrasound. And we feel like that has just been such a game changer. The pregnancy centers talk about how valuable that has been because they offer the free ultrasound.

So women know that's part of the process. They go there and we're seeing lives have been saved as a result of what we call the window to the womb. So that's been gutted. Another thing that's been gutted are safety standards.

This is not a side issue. This is really a central issue. Women in Virginia, even if they might make a choice you or I wouldn't make, and they take the life of their unborn child, the idea that they have to risk their own life because these facilities are not up to any kind of medical standards is just shocking. And we had finally resolved that, gotten safety standards in that just simply said, let's actually treat these like every other medical facility instead of putting politics and sort of allowing politics to drive a medical situation.

Let's align them with other outpatient surgery centers. So that was a travesty. But I have to remind people they got rid of 50 years of public policy around abortion. And that's because no longer in Virginia does a woman even have a right to guarantee that there's going to be a doctor involved in her abortion. But technically a midwife could do an abortion in Virginia if her association allowed it, so to speak. It's a shocker.

And women should be appalled that even those that are supposed to be looking out for their interest. So even if you're a pro-choice woman and you think abortion should be legal, the idea that you're put in such an unsafe situation is just appalling. So Victoria, how long did it take that piece of legislation to make it through?

Oh, I would say that was about three weeks and we were faded for the completion. And the tricky part is, you know, it goes, it gets drafted, it goes into a committee, then it goes to the floor, then it reverses chambers, as you know. And it was just really alarming that you can have so many critical policies on the table in one bill and your entire side of opposition in one chamber, our whole us and all the other pro-life groups, the pregnancy centers, total of five minutes of testimony between all the different groups to try to say why removing a doctor, safety standards, informed consent, why that's all bad. They gave us five minutes to try to make our case.

And obviously your case is not made in the committee. It's made ahead of time with legislators, but it was just a stunner to see all these people try to come out and want to be helpful in sharing information and not even really getting the opportunity to do so. I know that there were some significant changes made with respect to LGBT issues and the passage of the so-called Virginia Values Act. Tell us about that. Yes. So up until this point, the Family Foundation and many other conservative allied organizations and legislators had for 20 years blocked all these attempts to add sexual orientation and gender identity to every place where the code talks about not discriminating, which as we all know, that's a really polite way to say we're going to kind of force an orthodoxy on everyone when we insert these things into the code.

And so we have been able to be successful on that. And as many people may not be aware, this is in every area you can imagine. This is housing.

It comes up. It comes up with who the government's going to hire. It comes up with who is going to be allowed to use certain facilities, you know, whether it's a wedding venue or whether it's a bathroom. Right. So all of these are very intertwined issues. And the moment you introduce these terms, sexual orientation, gender identity, which often are vague, which makes it even more complex, that's where we find instantly you clash with religious freedom. Right.

But we've been able to block all these attempts because we're not loving, not because in every case we think there should be any, you know, decision making around these issues. But what happened in Virginia is they hit lots of things with individual bills. Right. So they kind of had the housing bill, they had the hate crimes, they had the government. But then they decided they'd also introduced this omnibus, throw all these concepts in one big bill. So they threw everything into this bill. And so it's called the Virginia Values Act, which is painful. And it is as broad and far reaching as could be.

So we actually managed to go sort of broader than even places like New York and California. And that is that we passed a law that says not only will government not discriminate on these things, will let's say, like retail business, like a cake baker or a, or a wedding, not even those things, we went all the way to say, we're going to impact churches, Christian schools, tabernacles, you name it, if you are a faith provider in some kind of faith based space, we're also going to apply these things to you. And so it's deeply alarming. Clearly, we believe that these entities are clearly protected under the First Amendment. We believe the US Supreme Court is sort of just validated that. But unfortunately, we believe we're also going to have to defend these various faith entities when they run into this through the legal system, probably all the way up until the US Supreme Court, because that's kind of how our courts have also started to fall in Virginia is very, very left wing activism kinds of decisions. So it's a hard place to be as a faith based provider in Virginia. And the most we can say is we did form a legal center as part of our family policy council to say, if we need to help, we call them religious freedom victims, then we will do that. And it's important that folks understand, I think that it's easy to look at these things in really tiny pieces and go, well, I don't think the government should discriminate on sexual orientation. Sure, except that we know the left is not really looking for non discrimination, they're really looking for universal compliance in this worldview. And so even though sometimes you see the little bills, everyone should understand the big bill is what they want. And it's just a matter of how to get there. And so in Virginia, once they had that freedom to go as far and as fast as possible, they did because it's not really about the little pieces. It's about ensuring that those of us who hold Orthodox views on marriage or gender are silenced and unable to actually live out those views. Well, Victoria, this is all just incredible.

I know we could go on and on. I tell you, as we talked about at the beginning, it was just a handful, a small handful of seats, six seats in 100 member House of Delegates and two seats in a 40 member State Senate that allowed for all of these dramatic changes to take place. And as you've said over and over again, it really is tragic. But we see in this day and age in Virginia, in North Carolina, these races really being decided on a razor thin edge. So as someone just having gone through this, as someone that spent as many years as you have advocating for pro life and pro family laws and policies, Victoria, how are you dealing with this yourself?

And what advice would you give to our audience? As we know that just in a matter of days, we're going to have one of the most consequential elections in our history take place? Well, I will say this, I'm glad that we know the Lord and Savior, we know who sits on the throne, even when the government is horrific. And I would say that's kind of the case in Virginia. We're hoping that's not going to be the case in North Carolina, we're hoping that's not going to be the case nationally, as we look at all these races. But our job is to do the things we can do. That's our job. And so we're asking our pastors, please preach the whole counsel of the word so that when people get to elections, they're rooted. So that's step one.

The next piece is always registration, your deadlines are probably passed ours have. But also, you know, what are believers able to do in the workplace? How is the gospel getting out in other places? Is it only how we worship?

Or is it how we live? And so, you know, all of these things should be really pushing us to say, what is the one more thing I can do? Well, I couldn't agree more Victoria with that. And we have a real opportunity to make a real difference. And I don't, I don't think we could express that difference any more clearly than our conversation today, about what's happened in Virginia and where we stand in North Carolina right now. And Victoria, I want to just thank you so much for your time for your willingness to share for the gosh, the eloquence with which you have presented all of these things and advocated so well for why we need to keep these good policies in place policies that honor God, that honor his principles and his laws, and fight as hard as we can against principles that are contrary to that.

Because again, they have real effects on real people that we care about because we love our God and we want to love our neighbor and do what's best for them. You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. This has been an excerpt from NC Family's virtual event entitled The 2020 Elections, What's at Stake? This program features Victoria Cobb of the Family Foundation of Virginia. To listen to this virtual event in its entirety, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Also, NC Family's highly sought after nonpartisan 2020 general election voter guide is available at ncfamilyvoter.com. Find out where candidates stand on the issues you care about, from sanctity of human life to religious liberty to school choice and much more. Become an informed voter at ncfamilyvoter.com and then be sure to get out and vote your values. Thanks so much for listening and may God bless you and your family.