Author Archives

Josh Brahm

President

Josh has worked in the pro-life movement since he was 18. After 12 years of full-time pro-life work he launched Equal Rights Institute to maximize his impact on the movement.

A sought-after speaker, Josh has spoken for more than 29,000 people in six countries and in 25 of the 50 states.

Josh’s primary passion is helping pro-life people to be more persuasive when they communicate with pro-choice people. That means ditching faulty rhetoric and tactics and embracing arguments that hold up under philosophical scrutiny.

He has publicly debated leaders from Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), Georgians for Choice, and one of the leading abortion facilities in Atlanta.

Josh also wants to bring relational apologetics to the pro-life movement. “Some pro-choice people will not change their mind after one conversation on a college campus. Some of them will only change their mind after dozens of conversations with a person they trust in the context of friendship.”

Josh is formerly the host of a globally-heard podcast turned radio/TV show, Life Report. He now hosts the Equipped for Life Podcast. He’s also written dozens of articles for LifeNews.com and the ERI blog. He has been interviewed by the Washington Post, NPR, and Focus on the Family.
He directed the first 40 Days for Life campaign in Fresno, resulting in up to 60 lives saved.

Josh has been happily married to his wife, Hannah, for 19 years. They have three sons, Noah, William, and Eli. They live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
David Bereit, the National Director of 40 Days for Life, sums up Josh’s expertise this way: “Josh Brahm is one of the brightest, most articulate, and innovative people in the pro-life movement. His cutting-edge work is helping people think more clearly, communicate more effectively, and — most importantly — be better ambassadors for Christ. I wholeheartedly endorse Josh’s work, and I encourage you to join me in following Josh and getting involved in his work today!”

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Will Smith’s Indefensible Moral Relativism

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Will Smith was recently featured along with several other actors on one of The Hollywood Reporter’s (THR) hour-long roundtable discussions. Not only did Will Smith make a relativistic statement, but the interviewer asked precisely the right question to push back against his view! It’s worth taking a few minutes to analyze what Will Smith said because his view is unfortunately common and it’s helpful to take a close look at the views of those with whom we disagree.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.

About halfway through the discussion, one of the interviewers asked Will Smith about his recent movie, Concussion. The movie is based on the true story of a Nigerian forensic pathologist named Dr. Bennet Omalu who spent years trying to get NFL leadership to take seriously his research on potentially lethal head injuries from playing football.

Will Smith on The Hollywood Reporter

Screenshot from The Hollywood Reporter video

The Equal Rights Institute training seminar is coming to Sacramento!

Josh and Tim Brahm will teach and mentor you personally to make sure you get the most out of the day. This seminar is designed to train you to have productive conversations with pro-choice people, using the arguments and dialogue skills that will be most likely to change their mind.

NOTE: If you attend this seminar, you will be working with an experienced mentor who will help you to learn the concepts and be able to put them into practice. Because there is a limited number of mentors, there is a cap on the number of people we can effectively train at this seminar. Registering at this page is the ONLY way to guarantee a seat at the seminar. If we still have room left for more people on the day of the event, it will be first come first served until we meet our cap. If you’re planning to attend, please complete this registration to guarantee a seat.

Training Seminar:

  • When: Saturday, February 27th. Registration starts at 8:30. Seminar starts at 9:00 and ends at 4:30.
  • Where: New Hope Christian Fellowship | 6240 Verner Ave, Sacramento, CA
  • Food: Lunch will be provided, as well as snacks and refreshments.
  • Cost: Free

Campus Outreach:

  • When: Monday and Tuesday, February 29th and March 1st, from 9 am – 4 pm.
  • Where: Location to be announced at the seminar.
Date: February 27, 2016
Time: 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Event: Equal Rights Institute Seminar
Sponsor: Equal Rights Institute
559-593-8700
Venue: New Hope Christian Fellowship
Location: 6240 Verner Ave
Sacramento, CA 95841
Public: Public
Registration: Click here to register.
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Students for Life Is Honoring ERI with a Defender of Life Award

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Students for Life of America has decided to honor me and nine other pro-life Millennial leaders with a Defender of Life award at their conferences this month.

This means a lot to me, as I see Students for Life as being one of the most effective pro-life organizations in the country. To be on the same list as so many other young leaders who are making a huge impact is also humbling.

But mainly, this is really encouraging to me because it tells me that we are helping people. We started ERI to create more opportunities to help pro-lifers learn to be more gracious and persuasive, and I’m really thankful for the success with which God has blessed us. Thank you so much for faithfully supporting us and making this mission possible.

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Top 5 ERI Articles of 2015

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I created this list using the Google Analytics for the ERI blog, instead of complicating the process by incorporating stats from LifeNews.com, where many of our articles are later republished.

Our blog received 79,000 unique pageviews from more than 43,000 unique people this year. That’s a 140% increase in readers from last year.

After running our first reader survey this year, we decided to post more consistently, maintain a calm, respectful, yet uncompromising tone, keep things practical, and keep using stories to model the kinds of dialogues we want people to have. I think we accomplished all of those goals, and we saw great growth to our blog this year.

On to the list!

#5: Avoiding an Embarrassingly Common Pro-Life Mistake

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Our mission is to train pro-life advocates to think clearly, reason honestly, and argue persuasively. We want to help the pro-life movement to make the kinds of arguments that are compelling to pro-choice people. We also want to help pro-life people to avoid common pitfalls, and this post is an example of that.

It was interesting to see some people respond to this piece by claiming that pro-lifers don’t make this mistake while at the same time reading comments from readers saying that they’ve been making this mistake for years and had no idea they were committing a logical fallacy.

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A Look Back at 2015, and How We’re Moving Forward

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It’s been an incredible year at Equal Rights Institute.

In our first full year as an organization we gave 24 speeches in Iowa, San Francisco, Ohio, San Marcos, Oregon, Fresno, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, Visalia, Washington, DC and Canada! Thanks to some great logistical planning from Jacob Nels, we also did five half-day or full-day seminars in Bakersfield, Michigan, Oregon, and Virginia. All in all we trained approximately 6,500 people!

SFLA-speech-for-blog

We also continually train pro-life advocates to be more gracious and persuasive through our blog. I’m extremely proud of the quality of the content we’ve produced this year, especially the work Tim Brahm has done. By the time we wrote this letter, we had 40 original articles on our blog from this year! And the reach is far and wide. 37,718 people visited our blog in the year 2015 to date. Most of these people are from America, although we had a significant number of visits from Russia, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom as well.