Free the States was born out of the abolitionist movement which began in 2011 as a tiny grassroots group of Christians in Oklahoma seeding the culture with the ideas of immediate abolition. Through these efforts, a paradigm shift away from incremental, pro-life regulationism to uncompromising immediate abolitionism was ignited. In 2016, after five years of tireless activism, abolitionism made its debut on the political scene as Oklahoma State Senator Joseph Silk heard the call of the abolitionists and responded. Silk introduced SB1118, a bill calling for the total abolition of abortion as murder, becoming the first abolitionist legislator in the United States. Legislators in five other states soon followed and bills of abolition have been gaining ground across the states ever year since.

SB1118 sent shockwaves through the pro-life establishment. For the first time, pro-life leaders like Tony Lauinger, VP of National Right to Life and President of Oklahomans for Life, were forced to go on record against the immediate abolition of abortion. This opened the eyes of many in Oklahoma and across the United States to the compromised nature of the leaders of the pro-life movement and the need for the abolitionist movement, among whom was pastor and State Representative Dan Fisher who would soon make a major impact for the abolitionist movement. Inspired by the bill and the budding abolitionist movement, Fisher ran for Governor of Oklahoma in 2018.

Fisher’s campaign was the second big step forward politically. On the June 27 primary, more than 37,000 Oklahomans registered their support for Fisher and the previously thought politically unviable idea that the supreme court’s opinions on abortion are legally and morally illegitimate and should be ignored. Though he didn’t win, many were brought into the movement by his campaign. Silk and Fisher converting from pro-lifers to abolitionists helped abolitionism gain a seat at the political table in Oklahoma.

After Fisher’s campaign, Oklahoma abolitionists shifted their attention back to the Abolition of Abortion in Oklahoma Act. With momentum building and hundreds of new abolitionists ready to work, there became a need for an organizing force to harness the energy. This was the beginning of the lobbying organization Free the States as a handful of the staff and volunteers who guided Fisher’s groundbreaking campaign for Oklahoma’s highest office founded an organization dedicated to advancing the principles which animated Fisher’s campaign.

The entrance of Free the States onto the scene, with our platform of completely and totally abolishing abortion in the face of judicial tyranny, was the third step to changing the game in Oklahoma politics. With an organization dedicating all of its time and resources to its passage, in 2019, the Abolition of Abortion in Oklahoma Act got more attention than ever before. The ranks of supporters for the Abolition of Abortion in Oklahoma Act ballooned so much so that a thousand people rallied inside the capital building in 2019 demanding its passage. At our 2020 rally, we had between two and three thousand.

Free the States exists to inform people of the power they possess to abolish abortion at the state level and to provide training and leadership to the growing abolitionist movement. During legislative session, we are in full-blown lobbying mode, meeting with magistrates, putting up billboards, flyering districts, rallying people to the capital, and encouraging them to lobby their senators, representatives, and executives. During non-legislative months, we produce abolitionist content like booklets, videos, flyers and more to further educate the new abolitionists brought into the movement during the session, and spread the ideas of abolitionism to prospective abolitionist converts. To learn about the various ways in which we do this, see our “What We Do” page.

Free the States is run by followers of Jesus Christ

We are not ashamed of the Gospel and it is our intention that the truth, justice, and mercy of God be freely and powerfully proclaimed to all the nations of the earth. We strive to make ourselves, with Christ, enemies of all that is sinful. In the context of a culture that murders its children, being a consistent Christian means being an abolitionist. It means bringing the light of the Gospel into conflict with the darkness of death and child sacrifice. It means loving your preborn neighbor by demanding equal justice and protection. This is our intention.

We dread to see the Gospel driven underground. Totalitarian governments now and throughout history have sought to do exactly that. Tyrants hate the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords – the one from whom all earthly authority is delegated. Sadly, the form of government we have in these United States today has been perversely twisted from what it was intended to be with devastating consequences.

Nine politically connected lawyers in black robes have come to rule 330 million people across all fifty states from their perch in Washington D.C., and by a successful propaganda campaign, most people have come to view their tyranny as legitimate. Though this form of oligarchical rule is accepted on by most people (including most professing Christians), it has become vehemently hostile to crucial practical applications of Christianity itself. Namely, the right to love our neighbors as ourselves and establish equal justice and mercy in the courts (Exodus 23:2; Isaiah 1:16-17; Amos 5:14-15). 

Abortion is the very antithesis of Christianity. Whereas Christ said “My life for yours,” and bids His followers to be similarly willing to lay down their lives, abortion says, “Your life for mine.” A government that permits child sacrifice and arrests those attempting to save the victims of child sacrifice isn’t merely in need of slight alterations. It is a government in violent rebellion against God and one that is actively suppressing Christians’ ability to love their neighbors. It is a government that has driven essential applications of the Gospel underground.

We Advocate Defying Tyrants and Their Wicked Decrees

The way out begins with defying the tyrant that is the United States supreme court. We reject pro-life legislation on numerous grounds as explained in the pages in the “What We Believe” section of this website. Among these reasons is the fact that these bills submit themselves to the supreme court itself, and thus, these laws are the states simply petitioning the tyrant to stop being a tyrant. That’s not what checking the power of a tyrannical branch of government looks like. The court must be defied and Roe, ignored.

We demand this first and foremost on moral grounds, but also on a Constitutional basis. The courts have no authority to legalize abortion. Honest Constitutional scholars admit that Roe is a farce, with former Dean of Stanford Law School John Hart Ely saying it best: “[Roe] is not Constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” In other words, the court hardly attempted to make its decision appear legitimate. Roe was a transparent power grab by a court intent on making itself the engine of societal upheaval and national rebellion against God.

Thomas Jefferson addressed the matter of judicial supremacy directly in an 1820 letter to a judicial supremacist of his time, William Jarvis. “You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps…. Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”

Years earlier, in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, Jefferson and James Madison made clear that states ignoring unconstitutional federal action is the “rightful remedy” to the problem of tyranny. We’ve gotten to a point where judicial supremacy is so ingrained in our body politic that such action is seen as an extreme measure but it is simply what a standard check on the judicial branch looks like.

It cannot be said that our governing authorities are ruling in accordance with the principles of the documents from which they derive their authority, and even less so with the Higher Law of God. They have directly, intentionally, and severely violated both. The US Federal Government generally and the supreme court especially have undeniably become destructive of the purposes for which they were established.

More than 63 million preborn babies have been brutally butchered under the covering of American law. Every child murdered by abortion is created in the image of God, murdered in the place of the incarnation. They are all, like us, neighbors; fellow human beings, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Rights Are Grounded in the Law of God

We believe human government was established on this earth for the sake of securing these rights. Human government is ordained by God not to be a terror to good conduct, but to bad, and to act as a servant of God for man’s good (Genesis 9:5-6; Romans 13:3-4). On this matter, we also agree with our founding fathers who believed that the rights of man were not ultimately derived from governmental documents, decrees, or any man-made institution, but from the Creator. Furthermore, without the right to life no other rights may be secured and the concept of inalienable rights itself ceases to exist.

At this time, no state in the Union is practicing good governmental rule in accordance with the higher law of God or upholding the revolutionary principles of the Declaration of Independence. The right to life has been completely denied to the preborn for the past 46 years and freedom of speech and religion is under direct daily assault. This is no recent development. The enemies of the Lord Jesus Christ have long sought to corrupt and undermine the moral fabric of society by turning God’s created order on its head, usurping governmental authority to rule against the law of God, and persecute those who would dare seek to establish God’s justice and mercy in the world.

In recent years, it seems that they have succeeded. They have pathologized all that is good, decent, and holy, while placing the most abominable perversions and the most wicked practices on a pedestal as shining examples of strength, bravery, and virtue. They have accomplished this in large part by controlling and perverting public discourse, heaping praise upon those who embrace the lie as “tolerant” and “inclusive,” while demonizing those who speak the Truth in love as “hateful” and “bigoted.”

The same kinds of groups who have already used their wealth, power, and influence to enact draconian anti-Christian “hate speech” laws in Europe are waiting in the wings to do the same here, if but afforded the right opportunity. And the gradual encroachment of Federal power over the States has created a situation where publicly reading and applying certain parts of Scripture could easily be outlawed as “hate speech,” just as it already has in the United Kingdom and around the world. The First Amendment has no practical value if the governing authorities have no interest in enforcing it. Even more so if secular humanists can find a federal judge chomping at the bit to dredge up heretofore undiscovered legal “emanations and penumbras” that have the practical effect of making the law mean the opposite of what it actually says. Exchanging the Truth for the lie, the enemies of God’s moral order have nullified legitimate laws and established the rule of their arbitrary whims. In so doing, they’ve reduced the courts to little more than a charade where political activists in black robes, sometimes covertly and sometimes overtly, replace the law with their desired political outcomes, which are most often evil and unconstitutional – Roe being the preeminent example.

This system is the most execrable form of tyranny. As Washington D.C. and the federal courts adopt more and more totalitarian control and the culture becomes more and more hostile to Christianity, what will happen to the States retaining large Christian populations? Will they be ruled over by the federal tyrants who do not share their values but actually despise them? What will come of those states who do not share the values of the majority assembled in Washington D.C. and in the halls of the supreme court? Will they be tyrannized in the way that our forefathers were themselves tyrannized by King George? As strange as it might be, that the people of the States are already far more tyrannized in our current system of government than the people of the 13 Colonies ever were in the 18th century.

Our objective at Free the States, while focused on freeing states from their participation in the American Abortion Holocaust has nothing to do with “taking back America” or “reclaiming the nation for Conservative Republican Christianity.” We do not exist to ensure that church-going, conservative Republican politicians get elected and gain control in Washington D.C. Conservative pro-life pro-family Republicans have already been in power with majorities in the House, Senate, Judiciary, and Executive branch and when they possessed the power to abolish abortion they didn’t even attempt it.

We have no interest in playing the political games of most lobbyists and career politicians. Our goal is far simpler and much more fundamentally American: to protect the unalienable rights of the people to live freely in the states.

The most important application of this desire by far is our mission to empower and set States free to abolish abortion within their borders. In seeking to check the power of the federal courts and immediately outlaw child sacrifice, abortion abolitionists alone remain dedicated to the principles upon which this Union was founded.

As proponents of the freedom of religion and speech and followers of Jesus Christ, we see the writing on the wall. Asserting state sovereignty to check the untethered and tyrannical power of the federal judiciary is not only key to abolishing abortion in the states, but is necessary to preserve the proclamation of the gospel under an increasingly anti-Christian federal government.

Undoubtedly, accusations of all sorts will be made about our views and the material presented on this website. To preemptively respond to those, we will note that the objective of Free the States is not the establishment of a theocracy. And it is not to secede from the union. We just want to be free – free to apply and preach our religion, to speak our minds, and to protect our fellow human beings from destruction. If that cannot be done in the United States of America today, then we have become the very thing we were fleeing from in the beginning when the Declaration of Independence was first written.

According to that Declaration, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive” the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” that form of government, and “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  If “we the people” now living in the United States of America are not afforded the ability to secure these rights, we are not free. Principally speaking, if the States are not allowed to protect the lives of human beings within their borders, they are not free.

Nullifying Roe is “Loyalty to Goodness”

Like the 19th century abolitionists who worked the Underground Railroad in defiance of Federal Fugitive Slave laws and supreme court rulings prohibiting states from helping runaway slaves, we are advocates of nullification. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was among the statesmen of the 19th century pro-nullification movement. “Since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by Congress, I find myself in a position with respect to it, which I fear my fellow citizens generally are not prepared to justify,” Whittier wrote. “So far as that law is concerned, I am a nullifier.” Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison concurred in an article for The Liberator: “The nullification advocated by Mr Whittier…is loyalty to goodness.”

What greater cause exists for nullification than to protect pre-born human beings from destruction? 

We understand that the world is not as it ought to be, that men are fallen. We understand that not everybody is going to adhere to our theological beliefs. We are not seeking to force people to adopt our religion, we are just practicing it ourselves. Forcing people to adopt the Christian faith or profess their allegiance to Christ is not our job. Protecting the right to preach the faith and actively follow Christ as King of King and Lord of Lords is.

Are Christians allowed to love their preborn neighbors as themselves? Will Christians be allowed to continue to oppose the evil of abortion or any other evil that contradicts the law of God (thou shalt not murder) or the principles of the Declaration of Independence?

Will we live in freedom or will we be tyrannized by the courts as our fellow image-bearers of God are destroyed by the millions? As Abolitionists, we are dissidents of the culture of death and we will not only make our voices heard in calling our culture to repent, but we will use every political tool available  to love our neighbors as ourselves and glorify God in whose image they are made.

Our “What We Believe” section explains point-by-point the distinctions between abolitionists and pro-lifers. To learn about abolitionism and the abolitionist movement, please read those six pages, beginning by clicking the button below to read the first page, “Abolitionist, Not Pro-Life.”