Glenn will be the first to admit that wants to just be a lazy slug, so the fact that he's planning to get active in the fight for the lives of the unborn shows a unique level of passion. After all, this isn't just talking about high taxes and bad healthcare policy - these are human lives being destroyed by Planned Parenthood. But where does one get started? Glenn invited pro-life activist Lila Rose onto the show to explain how people can start taking a stand today.
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it may contain errors:
GLENN: Let me go to Lila Rose. She's from liveaction.org. This is a topic that all of us have been on radio for a very long time. None of us have ever really talked about abortion on the air because that's just -- there's no -- there's no faster way to drive listeners to drink or to another station than to talk about abortion. And we've never talked about it up until the last few years. Now it is -- to me, with what's happening with Planned Parenthood, this is such a clear sign of, you're on the book of life or you're on the book of death, that I can't not talk about it. I have to -- I met with my family last night and said, we have to become activists. But I don't even know what that means. And so I wanted to get Lila Rose on. She's with liveaction.org. And she is -- if you don't know who she is, she's one of the more incredible activists. How old are you, Lila?
LILA: I just turned 27. I'm getting up there, Glenn.
GLENN: I know. You're an old lady.
When you were in college, your face, and I think it still is, is put in every Planned Parenthood location as watch for this girl. Because you were making recordings of them. You would go in as an underage girl and show that they were doing illegal things. Right?
LILA: Right. I mean, some of my first investigations of Planned Parenthood exposed their rampant sexual abuse cover-ups of minor girls. So I posed and then later on we trained investigative teams to pose as underage girls or as the abusers of underage girls, including the pimps and the sex traffickers of minor girls. And Planned Parenthood clinics across-the-board in dozens of situations agreed to cover up the sexual abuse of minors or aid and abet sex traffickers. And we also documented many cases where there is actual ongoing lawsuits where young girls were settled out of court -- young girls sued Planned Parenthood for the sexual abuse cover-up that they endured because the best friend of a pedophile or the best friend of a statutory rapist is a reproductive health clinic, quote, unquote, an abortion facility that will deal with the evidence of their crime, that helpless unborn child. And so it's in their best interest to get that little girl a secret abortion so that no one ever knows about the attack against her.
GLENN: That's phenomenal. And you were doing this when you were, you know, a relative kid. Now you're 27. And you have taken the fight against abortion to new levels. I want to ask you as someone who has never been involved in this stuff before. How can I get involved? What do we do as people?
LILA: Thanks, Glenn. I think there's absolutely work for people to do. And there's a few steps. There's some immediate more simple steps. And then there's the more day-to-day grind steps, which takes patience and persistence.
First of all, immediately, we're dealing with the defunding fight on Capitol Hill. We have two Democrats in the Senate, ten more votes that we had in 2007, in the Senate to defund Planned Parenthood. We're five votes away -- five votes away from success. So this is a fight that we have now. We have petitions going.
I know people are like, well, what does a petition do? Your name does count. Our goal is to get to a million signees by the end of August. We're working with other groups, even potentially some other campaigns behind the scenes to get petition signees all together in a database so that we can rally troops.
And right now we're at -- Live Action's petition alone is at 160,000. That should be -- there's no reason that shouldn't be in the hundreds of thousands. We're trying to get up the numbers of people who can get behind defunding Planned Parenthood to show that the country is not only ready for this to happen, but the country demands that we stop funding the abortion industry.
GLENN: So how do we sign that?
LILA: So that's at PlannedParenthoodExposed.com or .org. PlannedParenthoodExposed.org. It has a petition on there. It has information on there that you can share about Planned Parenthood's atrocities. Facts you can share with friends, family, people that may not know the facts. That's the first thing. The second thing is to be bold about speaking about this. Posting about this. Talking about this with friends, family, neighbors. Not shying away from the issue. Because it's too late to shy away from the issue. This is prepped up in our own communities. They're butchering children. They're selling their body parts in an industry making millions of dollars across the country.
The government is funding this on both sides. The government funds Planned Parenthood a half of a billion dollars a year, 1.4 million a day. And then they're funding the National Institute of Health over $60 million for fetal tissue research. So on both ends of the spectrum, the government is paying for this. So talk about it in our communities.
And the last one. This is where the persistence and the day-to-day grind happens. Is get involved. There's work to be done on the pro-life movement. It needs people from all walks of life, all political backgrounds. Every kind of -- every kind of person can be involved in one way or another. There's the compassion side of the movement, making sure that you have the highest and the best technology in your local pregnancy care center. You're caring for women in tough pregnancy situations. You're marketing to them in your communities to make sure that they hear from pro-lifers and those that will help them before walking into an abortion clinic. Praying and counseling outside of abortion clinics. Working with your local community to make sure that the zoning laws or the -- or the regulations for your community or city don't allow Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics to set up shop. Getting Planned Parenthood out of your local schools.
It's amazing to me how many parents are unaware of the way that Planned Parenthood is active to our nation's kids in our own communities at our own schools. And sometimes even contracts with private schools. So working to find out -- get to the bottom of it. Is Planned Parenthood allowed in any way, shape, or form in my school? Making sure that they're not. And then, of course, getting involved politically in our states and then at the federal level. Making sure that we have 110 percent politicians. That we won't stand for anyone who will even be halfway.
Keep in mind, under George Bush -- and I love, you know, President George Bush. I think he had a lot of good things -- I think he had a good heart. But under his administration, four and a half years of a Republican-controlled Senate and House, they still funded Planned Parenthood in the '90s. I was in high school. I wasn't on Capitol Hill the way I'm able to be now. But they were funding Planned Parenthood. So don't think that just because there's an R next to the name of the politician, our answers are going to be -- we're going to have our solution. We need to be active in pressuring and pushing for folks in office to do their job and getting the right people in office. Those are just a few thoughts.
GLENN: I think I have asked that question from people on this show over and over again, and it's always bullcrap answers. That's probably the most complete answer I've ever received from anybody.
LILA: Well, let's do it. Let's do it.
GLENN: Lila, how do you feel -- I mean, you are optimistic. I looked at this do-nothing Congress couldn't even stop the funding of a slaughterhouse. And I look at that as a horrible sign. You actually -- you actually have hope.
LILA: I'm a realist, Glenn. I like you. What I'm seeing though is change. And that's what gives me the hope. I see real change.
Again, in 2011, 42 votes in the Senate, no Democrats to defund Planned Parenthood. Two Democrats now. Fifty-two. It would have been 54 if McConnell and Lindsey Graham had shown up to the vote. That's a whole other story. But McConnell only didn't vote because he wanted to retain the ability to bring the vote up again. So we basically had 54 votes. There's a lot of work, and then there's an independent we need to move and then five more Democrats. There are pro-life Democrats though who voted to protect Planned Parenthood funding.
There's work that can be done behind the scenes here. People's voices do matter right now. I think the worst that the killer of the pro-life movement -- the killer of this country is the idea that people don't change, and things can't change. And that's why our rallying call from the beginning, when we first started doing investigations, before 2011, in 2011 -- yes, we know a Republican-held government funded Planned Parenthood in the '90s. Yes, we know that we've always funded Planned Parenthood for over two dozen years, and it was actually Republicans and Democrats for the architects from the Title X funding that now goes to the abortion industry. Yes, we know those things. But that can change.
The Republican -- not the Republican -- the establishment. The Washington machine, as Ted Cruz calls it, the control, the cartel in D.C. they do not have all the power we think that they have. They are sensitive to the outcry of the American people because they don't want to lose their positions. So don't lose hope and realize that we can make a change. I think that needs to be our message. And we're seeing its success already.
GLENN: Can you address -- because I think most people who are in this audience, they haven't watched the videos. And they don't want to watch the videos. Because they already know it's going to be horrible. And they don't want to -- they don't want to be the person that's posting those videos. They don't even want to think about it. But they support you.
Can you explain why these videos are important? To be shared and to be seen by everybody.
LILA: Yes. And I'll use -- I'll sometimes use this analogy. Every era has its own injustice. And you've talked about this before, Glenn. Every era has its own injustice. And we look back at the atrocities of history and we wonder, how could that have happened amongst good people who were surrounding it?
Nazi Germany. There were some good Germans who were just kind of allowing it to happen. And the trains would roll by with the Jewish prisoners off to their death. And there would be silence in the community, or there would just be inaction from the community. They didn't agree with the regime of the Nazis. But they allowed it.
In our country, slavery, we knew that it was happening in the South. We knew that it was sometimes happening in our own communities. We were uncomfortable. But what did we do to stop the incredible injustices perpetrated against our own brothers and sisters?
Today is no different, except I would argue today is the worst that our country and I believe in many ways human history has ever seen. Because the largest number of the most weakest members of our society are being destroyed by the thousands each day. Over 50 million children since this became legal in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. This is of incredible -- this is of epic proportions, and the crisis intensifies every day it continues, as more people are wounded in the wake of the killing.
So if that's not enough to give people courage -- and I think it is enough to give people courage. If you need a little more courage. Give yourself the encounter to inspire you. To touch your heart with the humanity of a child and the inhumanity of an abortion. By having the courage to watch one of the videos of what Planned Parenthood is doing in our own communities, near to our churches and schools.
I mean, I think that is just a simple plea. I think millions of people have responded to that plea. These videos have been viewed millions of times now. Videos of Planned Parenthood and their abuses have been viewed tens of millions of times, and these ones are making incredible progress, showing Planned Parenthood covering up, Planned Parenthood negotiating -- bartering the sale of baby body parts.
Give yourself that opportunity to be cut to the heart so that you can feel as well as you may know the passion or the -- the realization of what's happening so that you can feel inspired to do something more. We are human beings. We're mind and heart. We're emotions and intellect. We need to be connected to this because it's so sanitized. It's so hidden. It's so full of false rhetoric. It's so politicized. We need to get in touch with what's really happening. And these videos are a door, a window into the facilities that are doing the killings to give us that opportunity.
GLENN: Lila, thank you very much. Appreciate it. And we pray for you.
LILA: Thank you.
GLENN: You are really truly a warrior. God bless you. Lila Rose. She is with liveaction.org. And follow her advice. Follow her advice.