Alright. So we're gonna wrap up this table time and move on to the next session, which is my colleague and coworker and friend, attorney Joel Thornton. Joel is a an attorney with the Child Apparental Rights Campaign. He do he heads up our advocacy in education.

I worked with Jay Sekulow with the American Center for Law and Justice years ago, and Salter are c o o. And he's gonna talk about equipping church leaders to protect your church from the transgender trend.

And I'm gonna talk until Bob Dylan starts singing.

That's who said on my timer. So if you hear we gotta serve somebody that needs needs a need.

You hear I've gotta serve somebody, it means I need to quit talking. And you need to be able to not hear me again.

You know, Jesus said that he who endures to the end shall get free legal advice.

So, that's what you're that's what you're in school for now.

This is this is a hard thing to do because the first thing that you need that I need to ingrain in your head is that you need to seek out an attorney if you're doing these things. You don't need to just take what we're giving you here and run with it. I'm licensed to practice law in the state of Georgia. I can form a corporation in the state of anybody can form a corporation in the state of Georgia.

It's embarrassingly simple to do. Cost you a hundred bucks, and you have to have Internet connection, and that's it. You don't even have to know anything. You just fill in some blanks.

They say you're you're in. Wait seven days. Pay your hundred dollars, and you can get it.

But you need churches need to be incorporated. There's a lot of reasons for that, and we'll go through them. But you need your church needs to be incorporated at the state level as a nonprofit. The federal government doesn't have nonprofit corporations, but they recognize them through a different statute, and the IRS does that.

So you need to be incorporated in the state where you are. If you're if you're building is physically in Georgia, it needs to be incorporated in Georgia. If it's in Tennessee, needs to be incorporated in Tennessee. If you're in both places, you would probably want to have something incorporated in both places if you're physically meeting in two different places.

And to do that, you'll end up with articles of incorporation in Georgia. You could end up with a certificate of of, formation or certificate of incorporation. You need that for the bank. The bank's gonna want that to help you open up your account. And so but you need to get again, you need to get an attorney to help you walk through all of that.

It's important that you not run. The good news is this. You've heard a lot of really depressing things today, and you're probably sitting here wondering why you thought this was a good idea to come to get really depressed about how bad a shape the country's in and how desperate all these are, and and what are we going to do? The sky is falling kind of thing. Everything you've heard today is true, but the beautiful thing is the constitution of the United States was a revolutionary document at the time it was written. It had never been heard of that the people would control the power.

And one of the beautiful things about the constitution is the bill of rights, the first ten amendments to the constitution. And the first amendment, which gives us freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom to exercise our religion. And that is something that has been really ingrained in American culture. It's been ingrained in American legal culture.

The court the federal courts to this day still support church's rights to religious freedom. You've gotta make it a religious freedom issue and a free speech issue. When I worked with Jay, the thing that drove him not that drove our opponents nuts at the ACLU, when we were fighting for the the right to to end abortion and the right for sidewalk counselors to be on the streets, they would get really mad because every case we took, we turned into a free speech case. It's not about, do I have a right to be on this street?

It's, do I have a right to say this on this street?

And so the the constitution is there to protect you, and it will. You don't need to run from it. You don't need to be afraid of it. The idea that there's separation of church and state, the country now understands and the courts particularly understand that the separation of church and state is to protect the church from the state, not the state from the church.

So that that was the big misunderstanding. That's understood. Listen. Prayer was never outlawed in public schools. As long as they gave test, children will pray.

And children had a right to pray in public schools. No one can stop them.

But there was a disinformation campaign that went out to tell us that that wasn't allowed. It's the same thing that's going on now. Say, well, you don't have a right to discriminate. You can't discriminate based on these things. It's why the LGBTQIA plus community is working so hard to create this as we were born this way. Because if it becomes a civil right, it's a different matter. We all understand that churches cannot exclude people based on race.

That's that's intuitive to all of us. It was counterintuitive to a segregationist South.

People had to come in and explain that to a lot of conservatives in the south at the time that this was going on. But nobody argues that anymore. We all understand it. That's why this this is so critical that we understand that this is about this is a discussion of how god created us to be.

If if Genesis two is right and god created the male and female, then that ends the discussion. If that's wrong, then everything else is a house of cards and it falls apart. That's why the church has to hold itself firm on these issues. That's why the church has to stand on these issues.

It's not easy because you're you're being threatened with a whole lot of things. After same sex marriage was made legal, everybody was wondering what do you do? Well, you you hold your ground and you live by your biblical principles. But your biblical principles, you have to understand them as well.

And you can't run from that language when you're forming your charitable organization. To create a charitable organization in Georgia is one thing. To create something that the federal government recognizes as charitable is completely different because there's certain things that they have to have. There's language that they have to have.

And you need to understand that churches are automatically tax exempt.

You don't even have to apply for a tax exempt status from the IRS to be tax exempt to give out donation receipts to your members. You don't have to apply for it.

And we're gonna get to a slide on that. I see you're looking around for my slide. I'm getting there.

I I hate using PowerPoints, by the way, in case you haven't noticed.

I'm praying for Bob Dylan to start singing.

You wanna make sure when you're incorporating that you have language that limits the liability of the officers and the the elders, the deacons, whoever it is, because you need that. That's the point of a corporation is to protect individuals from liability. So if someone comes in and says this church discriminated against me based on my on my gender identity and wouldn't allow me to use the bathroom of my choice, you don't want the pastor to be the one that's liable for that. You want the church to be the one that's liable for that. You want the corporation to be liable. That's why we have corporations to limit liability.

So it's important that you have that that you have the limiting the liability limiting language there as well. I'll take my glasses off so I can see better.

And that you have language integrating the church's religious beliefs.

Now, there's there's debate over where this comes in, but you need your religious beliefs written out very clearly somewhere.

You don't need to run from this. And the tendency is to wanna run from it because how how upfront do we wanna be? I don't want a target on my back. But if you don't have it written down listen, you've got six thousand years of history arguing on your side on this one. This is not a well, this is something they created just to come back at us.

You've got bylaws that you have to create when you create a corporation. The bylaws are the operation manual. It's how does how is the church run? Is it run by the pastor?

Is it run by the deacons? Is it run by a board of elders? Is it run by a board of directors? All of those things.

What are the office terms? How long does a deacon serve? How long does a board of directors serve? How do they get elected?

How do we replace them? How do they reside? All of those things. I this you should address the fact that you are a religious organization in the bylaws.

And I think it's okay. And and we talk in the book about this, about including, your beliefs on sexuality and sexual identity. Now I I wanna say this about sexual sexuality.

We're very quick to want to enforce the the gay marriage ban.

We're not so quick to deal with some of the other issues in some churches. I've I've talked to pastors about this all over the country.

You've got to have rules that enforce all of the restrictions of the sexual immorality code. You've gotta deal with adultery.

That's right. You've got to deal with fornication.

You've got to deal with homosexuality.

You've got to deal with the transgender.

I'm sorry.

Was there something I missed?

I thought somebody asked.

Div what divorce all those things. Divorce is is kinda separate from the sexuality. And it's not as much fun to say, we're not gonna marry anybody that's living together.

Because it it's kinda counterintuitive because by getting married, they kinda overcome the sin of fornication.

But if we believe in the spiritual nature of of sexuality, we understand that it's not enough to deal with that. So you need to have common sense rules on this thing. You can't just point out we're not gonna marry gay people. We're not gonna marry we're not gonna allow trans people to trans identify here.

If you're going to deal with this, you need to deal with it across the board. And you need to have some common sense rules, and I'm I'm not gonna tell you what those are. If if you hire me as an attorney to incorporate your corporation, I would give you advice on that. But I think that that's advice that comes from a conversation because it it depends on some of your tolerances, some of your beliefs, and and those things.

And that's ultimately part of your constitutionally guaranteed right as a church.

And then you wanna make sure that the church's governing body and leaders have the final say on interpreting its own documents.

You don't ever wanna give this right to a to a court.

The answer to a court when a court gets involved in a in a case involving a church and issues of ruling in that church, the the correct legal response is is none of your business.

The the court does not have the authority to intervene in this. And federal courts have said, we don't have the the state courts have said, we don't have the authority to intervene in this. This is an inter church dispute.

For example, the Methodist Church owns the property of the church building so that when a church dissolves, even though the local church actually paid for the church I've I've dealt with this issue. Even though the local church actually paid for the church, they still have to give the property back to the Methodist church. They own it. When they had a dispute with that, the court said that's an internal decision. You sign the documents. Y'all y'all resolve it yourself.

And that's what we want. We don't want the courts getting in. We want the courts coming in and saying, outside agitators don't have the authority to come in and tell you how to run your church. It's your decision how to run your church. It's your decision how bold do you wanna be, how aggressive do you wanna be, all the way up to performing or not performing same sex marriages.

It's your decision. It's nobody else's as the authority in the church.

You'd have to address the church's core religious beliefs with a statement of religious beliefs, statement of doctrine.

I've heard them called a whole bunch of different things, but a statement of faith. You wanna have that and you wanna spell out all of these things there. You don't want to shy away from these. You want them written down and you want them to have scripture attached to them because you want to be able to say, these are my religious beliefs. And because of this, it's it's my decision and it's nobody else's. It's our decision as a church body. It's nobody else's.

Make sure that, you know, that that you're addressing when you're addressing what scripture refers to a sin, make sure you have scripture that addresses it and that it's not just some pet peeve of yours.

Like like and I'll I'll give you an example. This is this may be controversial. I don't know the lottery.

You know, I we everybody comes out in different places on the lottery when it mattered and when there was an argument, but most of the conservative churches in Georgia were against the lottery because they considered it gambling. I'm not judging that. But that's can you can you show a scripture of that? Because I can show you a scripture where the apostles cast lots to decide who was gonna replace Judas.

They threw a stone on the ground and said, oh, you're it. Congratulations.

Sounds like a lottery to me.

I'm just I'm not I'm not I'm not saying to be judged on that. I'm saying make sure that you got scripture to back up what you're doing. When you're calling sin sin, as long as you're calling it sin and the bible calls it sin, you're in good grounds because nobody in their right mind is gonna argue with the bible, with the Old Testament and the New Testament.

And then you've also got to deal with your call to confession and repentance. The fact that this is not the end of your life. This doesn't mean it's all over for you. It means that there are some things you can do to get in right standing. Whether you've committed adultery and you wanna get married in this church, whether you're you're living together and wanna get married in this church, or whether you're gay and wish you could get married in this church. There are certain things that have to happen to make that happen.

It's important to articulate right now and adopt the church's views on the sexuality and sexual identity issues of the day complete with script scriptural references. And that's what we just talked about, those complete views.

Not just the ones that that really get us worked up, but all of them. And the trouble is the the adulterers aren't coming after us and threatening to shut us down and threatening to sue us and call and say, I've gotta log in. I've got social media. It's the LGBTQ community because they want the church to say, we're okay.

And the church can't reconcile with scripture that that's okay.

I've I've worked with gay people. I've had conversations with them about their sin. And I've said I had a conversation with a guy one time and I said, look. I'm I'm obviously overweight.

And, you know, according to to the same scripture that says homosexuals shall not inherit the kingdom of God, it says gluttonous people will not inherit the kingdom of God. A lot of people might think I'm gluttonous. I've made my peace with God on that, and I think fat people are gonna get into heaven.

I'm not here to argue with whether or not gay is gay people get into heaven, but you're wanting to tell God he's wrong. And you can't win that argument with you're not arguing with me. You wanna argue with me that I'm wrong about my beliefs on homosexuality. It's not an argument with me. I'm talking about what god has said, what he wrote down, what he made really plain, and what he punished pretty severely in earlier times.

You're not arguing with me. You're arguing with God. You're telling God to change the rules, and you can't win that discussion.

I I I don't even try. I just I just pray I'm right on this one. At the end of the day, we'll find out. If you see me there, you know I was right.

If you don't see me there, I might be in a nicer location because they're not they're not getting a lot of lawyers.

Don't shy away from from including the provisions on gender and sexuality.

You gotta you gotta meet this head on with biblical truth when you and we're gonna get into some policies here in a minute. Consider incorporating additional doctrinal statements in the in the governing documents. Make sure that you've got those statements there on all your doctrine. You're not just addressing the the sexual issues. You gotta kind of get it all in there. Okay?

Remember that at the end of the day, the church is a religious body.

And if we start trying to secularize the church or start trying to get within the keeping of the current culture, all we do is weaken the church.

That's what happened to the early church. When the when Constantinople came in and declared the church the official religion of Rome, the church began to crumble from inside because it began to be controlled by the government. And it became part of the culture instead of shaping the culture. I mean, think about that. Jesus took twelve men. One of whom was a failure.

Ten of whom didn't show up for his crucifixion Wow. And changed the world.

He revolutionized the world from the outside in, not from the inside out. So you cannot give into the culture. We've got to define the culture. And that's the hard part of this because you're being told you're not showing love.

Jesus was love. Well, you know, it's it's that whole that Jesus knows campaign that ran around the Super Bowl. I I don't even know where it came from. I hope it's not from Victory Church.

I okay. I didn't think it was. I was I was feeling facetious, because I really don't care. I I I just it it was it was very disappointing to me because it's trying to cast this view of Jesus loves everybody.

He's got no judgment for anybody. Well, that's that's partially true, and it's partially not true. Jesus loves everybody. But part of loving everybody is saying there's still standards that you're expected to meet.

And that's where the church has to be. I'm not saying I don't love you. I'm saying that I'm not willing to go down to your standards. If you wanna beat your children, I can love you, but I'm not gonna stand by and let you beat your children.

We're gonna go faster now.

We've already talked about this tax exemption.

You you don't have to apply for a five zero one c three, which is the IRS document. It's called a form ten twenty three.

It it's it's a very convoluted document. It takes it takes me about an hour and a half to go through it if I've got everything prepared when I sit down. If I don't have everything prepared, it can take days to get everything in order. The IRS says on the front of their of the application on the instructions that they give you with everything in bold, it says, if you are a church, you do not need this. Some churches require bigger churches tend to want this. If you have doctors and lawyers in your church, they want you to have a determination letter because they want to be guaranteed that their that their checks are gonna be good. If you're if you're a Presbyterian church, you're gonna need this.

I say that as a Presbyterian.

All the lawyers and doctors in in my home church insisted on having a ten twenty three determination letter from the IRS. It's not required, though. The church the the exemption that the IRS recognizes and created for nonprofit organizations, it comes from the church's automatic exemption under the constitutional standards. So you don't need it at all, and you can stand firm on going, we're just exercising what the what the government has recognized from the beginning that as a religious organization, they don't have the right to to interact with us, and therefore, they don't have the right to tax us.

And then all your policies need to be guided by biblical reality, biological reality, sir.

Excuse me. We lost the feed. Do you know? Keep keep talking. I feel like I'm not here.

I wish Israel would come up here and help us out.

If only Israel would come.

Yeah. So they've gotta be based in biological reality. Don't be afraid to do this to say that our bathroom spent you know, most schools most public schools until recently don't have a bathroom policy because we haven't needed one. The boys understood they went in the boys' room. The girls understood they went in the girls' room. The boys tried to go in the girls' room. A teacher stopped him or another student stopped him or a fight broke out.

And and it was the end of discussion. What are you, a pervert? Why are you going in that bathroom?

So you you may not think about this, but if you're having this issue starting in your churches, you need to have policies that are very clearly laid out and that are they're biologically based. I saw I heard a pastor one time that had a church of homeless people down in, in Grant Park, and he said he had a transvestite in his church, a cross dresser, that kept insisting he was a woman, and he would have been a transsexual at the time. This was thirty years ago. And he said he he had to literally stand in front of his church every Sunday morning, go to the microphone, and say, I don't care what you're wearing. If you pee standing up, you go to the men's room.

He said, Joel, I had to say that every Sunday, and then I had to post security at the bathroom door to keep this one guy from going into the women's bathroom because he was wearing a dress, and he insisted he'd go. If you have a clear policy on that, you don't have to worry about it. It may take security to help get you through that.

It's these are this is important, and this is something I want you to understand because the re the reasons behind this are part of what you're gonna be asked. And the reasons are you're protecting the girls' privacy. I can't I can't imagine that women aren't at Target tearing the walls out of that building going, one, we don't want men ruining our bathroom.

Men's bathrooms are the nastiest places in the world.

Why aren't y'all fussing about that from a sanitary issue if nothing else?

And second, from the security issue, it's a privacy space. Women don't need to worry about men being in there, especially in the church. But think about this. It's also protecting your men and your boys.

Because if I'm in the men's room or the boys' room and a girl comes in there because she identifies as a man and walks out and says that that lawyer just tried to touch me inappropriately or was staring at me while I was using the bathroom.

I've got to defend myself against that, and that's an indefensible place to be.

In this culture, I'm gonna get crucified for that. So you're not just protecting the women in their women's spaces, which is a noble enough reason to do it. You're also protecting the men and the boys in your church as well when you do that. And that's that's the logic behind that.

The church leadership's discretion, this is this is within their discretion to set these policies. They should boldly set these policies and not worry about it.

Names and pronouns. You have a First Amendment right to not say anything you don't wanna say.

End of discussion.

If you don't wanna support biological ir irrationality, then you don't nobody can force you to say it. That's my biggest complaint about this. I can I don't mind being polite to some people? But if you're telling me I have to, the answer is no. I don't have to say anything.

The constitution is clear on that. The first amendment is clear on that. You cannot be compelled to engage in speech with which you disagree. We win that case all day long, especially with the court we currently have.

Overnight accommodations shouldn't have to say anything. It should be the same as your bathrooms. Do you really want to have women supervising boys in the girls' bedrooms? Do you really want to have men supervising girls in the boys' bedrooms?

I would not. If I were on a field trip and I showed up and there was a girl in the room that I was supervising, I would walk away. I mean, I'm not willing to supervise this room. I'm not willing to put myself in that situation.

Again, it's about protecting the men's and the boys and protecting the girls because it's this is absolute insanity that we think you can mix boys and girls in in the ages of puberty, and you're not gonna have problems.

How stupid are we That's right.

As a culture to go, I just can't imagine anything going wrong with that. I can't imagine anything going right with that.

I went to high school. I was in middle school. We were brutal to the girls in middle school. In high school, we would have loved this policy. I would have I would have loved I would have loved the transgender thing. I would've been an all state basketball player in high school on the girls' team. I would've been.

Unfortunately, I was an average boys' basketball player.

So, again, overnight accommodations.

Parental involvement, you gotta have per the parents involved. You should never conceal these things from your parents. One of the things they say is you can't tell the parents because the parents might not understand. This is the parent's decision ultimately.

If they have a child that you know has a a a transgender issue, you need to be talking to those parents and helping them with ministering to them with how do they go about this. They don't go home and start tearing the house up and throwing stuff out and screaming and hollering. How do they how do they deal with this? This is a hard thing as a parent to realize.

The church has to step up with that and you the first thing you have to do is not is not condemn the parents and keep them out. Then wedding facilities, again, biological reality.

We believe in marriage between a man and a woman. Therefore, we don't perform other marriages.

I don't understand why anybody would want me to make a cake for them if I thought what they were doing was wrong to the point that they would be willing to sue. I don't know why anybody would want to sue, but there are pastors that are gonna get sued over this one, I predict, before this is all over. I think at the end of the day, as long as you have clearly defined, written out statements of belief like we talked about, you're gonna be okay with this, and I'd be willing to take that case and defend you on that.

That. So and that's the end of that's way past the end of my time.

That's great.

Thank you. That's great.

You can stay. We're gonna do human actions so you can stay stay put.

Yeah. Let's do some q and a on this.

Yeah. I'm just gonna do I'm gonna finish off with the the last part of this.

I need a spot to put all my paraphernalia.

I can't.

Okay.

So, I wanna come back and and touch something quickly that Joel hit on. Where's the click control? Did I treat it? Covered up? Okay.

He keeps us amused in the office, and, that's why we keep him around. No. He's wonderful.

Thank god.

This this slide right here, this bears a little bit of of emphasis protecting your church.

The because I and I I I've I've talked with so many. And my observation of churches is that somehow they have thought this this contradictory thing that if I just become more seeker friendly, if I become more secular, if I be if we we look a little bit more like the culture, we'll be safer.

We'll be less of a target. We'll be Yeah. And what you don't realize is the the perversity of that and, frankly, the lie that the enemy has has has fed us is that it actually weakens your constitutional protections.

Why? Because if you only have a come to Jesus, so to speak, and that was actually a deliberate plan words, when the issue arises, when a trans identified person comes in or when a disaster happens in your church, and only then do you start to begin to enforce what you always knew to be true, or only then do you retroactively put it into your documents, then you're gonna be vulnerable to a claim that it's all a pretext and that it's not a sincerely held belief of the church and and that you are actually you do harbor invidious discrimination in your heart. That's the term, invidious discrimination in your heart.

So if if you recall to defend yourself in court or repair, then you by virtue of not having everything that Joel said, he was absolutely correct, having it documented, having the scriptural references that show this is thought through, this is that is a seamless with the belief system of our church. If you don't have all that, then defending yourself is gonna become harder, much harder, much, much harder. Okay? So everything Joel just told you to do is what is going to really, invigorate the the the constitutional protections that are that are there.

Listen. The other side, all they can do is try to bully us into seeding our protections.

Just try to goad us into giving them away. Don't take the bait.

Okay?

Alright. The last part that I was called to to to find a finish this segment up on is, churches working with the community. I'm not gonna go very long because I really wanna ignore this to be Jill's part of this.

We take five minutes and talk about yeah. Two more slides on this on on this final part, and then we'll take some q and a. Influencing our government. Churches stepping up to the people of God. You know, who's the church?

Us. Really, at the end of the day. Yes. It is a corporate organization and and all that.

But but whether it's the church or whether it's the components of the church, for since the founding, we have influenced laws for the good. Look at the civil rights movement. That literally would not have passed, but for their pastors pastors that stepped into the gap, went to jail, were beaten, were willing to be, you know, abused in order to stand up for what was right. And at the time, it was for treating African Americans, rightly and fairly.

Abolition movement, same thing. That that was that was churches led.

So there is a assignment now. There has been, and it really got going, more publicly in the sixties to active to remove voices of faith, particularly Christian voices and the voices of the church from the public square. That was that's not organic. That was that's deliberate.

And to cause churches to feel that you don't belong in the public square. That's politics. That's dirty. That shouldn't be what Christians get involved. Churches get involved with you know what? With politics, it's government.

It's good government.

The entity in the earth that causes the greatest suffering amongst the billions of people on the planet are governments.

Governments.

So when you have bad government, you have suffering.

You have violation of basic civil rights. Look what's happening in China. Look at the starvation that Hamas. Hamas is a government, by the way, is doing against the Palestinian people. Are we okay with letting people suffer?

Well, shame on us if we are.

Okay? So it's about requiring good government because my bible in the book of Romans and elsewhere tells me that God made government. Government didn't make itself. That human nature desires lawlessness because that way we can just the the strong can take advantage of the weak.

Government was reversing that because God made government.

For what purpose? To reward those who do right and to punish those who do evil so that the weak are as protected from the strong.

So we have to understand that we must get back into requiring good government once again. That's not dirty politics. And so here are some of the ways that we can do that. I'm just gonna give you two quick examples that are Georgia examples.

One of which gets pretty close to home. But I'm gonna start with another one. In Jasper, Georgia, this is the case we worked with. There was a, school district up there that, adopted a trans access policies to their bathrooms. They just lost their minds up in rural Georgia.

And, there was one pastor, pastor Ben Mok. He was in the news, so I'm not adding him. Pastor, pastor Ben Mok. Humble guy. Just as just a simple, humble pastor.

But he was like, we're not happy to. And so he started mobilizing the churches and people, everyone he knew, and everyone knew with pastor Ben.

There was a town hall meeting. This is Jasper, Georgia. Jasper has hundred people, maybe nine thousand or something.

They have three thousand registered voters.

There's three thousand registered voters.

In the whole county.

And seven hundred people showed up for this town hall meeting.

That's like a significant percentage of bodies, that that, you know, that showed up. And long story short, that policy got reversed.

So they made a diff they made a huge difference. Okay. So here in Gwinnett County, there is the comprehensive sex ed that was on that was on notice to be considered by the school board. We already talked about comprehensive sex ed. All that crap was in there.

And there was a church that courageously stepped up and, use social media to mobilize parents, to inform parents about the dangers were what was embedded into that comprehensive sex ed, tell them with the school board, and and really empower them to show up and to speak out.

That church was Victory Church.

And I know some of you are like, we did.

You did.

And it got tabled. I don't I I well, someone will tell me it got tabled. It might it could come it could come up again in the future, so you gotta stay on it, but it got stopped. And so at least for today, our kids in Gwinnett County is protected from this junk.

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