The Equal Rights Institute Podcast

Right before we released the Equipped for Life Course, we realized that one of the videos seemed to include Virtue-Signaling. Since Virtue-Signaling is a negative thing, it was rather confusing that this particular instance seemed okay. After a lot of thinking, Tim offers some distinctions between objectionable and acceptable types of Virtue-Signaling. He closes with suggestions about how and when to accuse someone of Virtue-Signaling, with the aim of helping those who disagree to have better dialogue.

This is a short clip from the Equipped for Life Podcast, available to everyone who purchases the Equipped for Life Course. In this episode, Josh, Tim, and Rachel respond to questions on double-effect reasoning and how they would respond to someone who is pro-life for the wrong reasons. Afterwards, they talk about how to respond to the Freakonomics argument that abortion has resulted in a drop in crime rates, as well as a new technique Josh has been using when talking to utilitarians.

Even before ERI officially began, Josh and Tim cared a lot about helping pro-life people to think well and take pro-choice arguments seriously. They don’t think every single pro-choice argument is a good argument (there are a lot of really bad arguments on both sides), but we won’t be persuasive unless we can recognize and take the stronger pro-choice arguments seriously. In this piece, Josh addresses two bad pro-life responses to some of the stronger pro-choice arguments.

This is a short clip from the Equipped for Life Podcast, available to everyone who purchases the Equipped for Life Course. In this episode, Josh, Tim, and Rachel respond to a bunch of listener-mail questions related to the thought experiment about a burning in vitro fertilization lab—particularly the concern that it is too easy for pro-choice people to get traction with strawmen tweets when pro-life people have to answer with longer, more thoughtful responses that fewer people will read.

Sometimes it is tough to be a pro-life college student. Most challenges students face are found on campus during a tabling event or with the administration, but sometimes they are inside the classroom. Far too often when pro-life students dare to speak up in defense of the unborn, professors attempt to humiliate and silence them. This piece is about two real stories: one of them happened to Rachel and one of them happened to Ellen, a student we heard from first-hand on Twitter.

This is a short clip from the Equipped for Life Course Podcast, available to everyone who purchases the Equipped for Life Course. In this episode, Josh, Tim, and Rachel talk about their recent outreach at Davidson College, which was a particularly difficult outreach for Tim and Rachel. They discuss what made it difficult as well as share some practical tips for handling discouragement at an outreach. In these clips, Tim discusses why it is important for volunteers to take breaks at outreach.

This piece is an outreach dialogue story. It did very well because, we suspect, the title could give the impression that this is one of those “The brilliant pro-life person destroys the stupid pro-choice person” posts. That’s not an attitude that we want to nourish. Though Josh didn’t intend to write a bait-and-switch piece, we think he sort of did, and we're glad it got some people who otherwise wouldn’t read our blog to learn a little about what we do when we’re trying to create a good dial

This is a short clip from the Equipped for Life Podcast, available to everyone who purchases the Equipped for Life Course. In this episode, Josh, Tim, and Rachel share how they respond to pro-choice students who ask about life-threatening pregnancies. They also talk through some of the more difficult philosophical issues that sometimes come up when discussing this. In this clip, Rachel shares a sound bite to help you respond to this question, and the team discusses how to begin a response.

Josh wrote this piece a few years ago. Someone had asked him a really tough question in an email, so he decided to address the question in a blog post in case others were interested. He addressed the need to respond to this pro-choice objective relationally. To his surprise, it seemed to touch a nerve. For the past 2 years, this piece has been the #1 most-read piece from a previous year on our blog. It certainly seems to be connecting with people.

This is a short clip from the Equipped for Life Podcast, available to everyone who purchases the Equipped for Life Course. In this episode, Josh, Tim, and Rachel sit down to answer one of the most frequent questions about the Equal Rights Argument: “How do you respond to someone who says that you need to be ‘human plus something else,’ like sentience, to have equal rights, given that it seems like that combination gets around the problems in the Zoo Shooting thought experiment?”

Josh gives an update on the main things that have been going on at ERI in the last month and what we're working on next.

When Rachel was president of Students for Life at the University of Michigan, they tried to do an outreach at least once per month because they felt that once per semester wasn’t quite enough. With that experience and help from the rest of the team, she put together a list of 10 tips that will help student leaders as they prepare for an outreach. Especially if you’re doing this for the first time, you want to prepare for whatever might arise by having a strategic plan and practical supplies.

This is a short clip from the Equipped for Life Podcast, available to everyone who purchases the Equipped for Life Course. In this episode of the Equipped for Life Course Podcast, Josh, Tim, and Rachel interview Casey Mattox on how students should deal with free speech violations and respond to common arguments from typical leftists defending free speech violations. In this clip, Casey gives advice to students about what to do if people try to silence your outreach event.

If you are a part of a dialogue-oriented outreach, you should be paying attention to who should be in a given conversation, and who should not be. This is one of those advanced practical outreach tips that you just learn by doing outreach a lot and by talking with the rest of your team a lot about different kinds of situations. The idea for this piece came to Josh as we were debriefing an outreach our staff did at Davidson College here outside of Charlotte, NC.

This is a short clip from the Equipped for Life Podcast, available to everyone who purchases the Equipped for Life Course. In this episode of the Equipped for Life Course Podcast, Josh, Tim, and Jacob answer listener mail. In this clip, the team responds to a question about the “Rephrase What They Said” lesson in Module 2. How should we respond if they say that they didn’t actually say that, not because we misunderstood, but because they are changing their views during the conversation?