The Power of Just One ‘NO!’

The heroes among us are not the professional politicians, church leaders, or celebrities, most of whom buckled under the government tyranny known as the COVID-19 and transgender scams. They are the few courageous souls who said “No!” to the evil forces, stuck to their beliefs, and paid a heavy price.

We honor them today as the heroes they are.

One of them is Artur Pawlowski, a Canadian pastor whose video of him chasing the police out of his church in 2020 as they attempted to enforce the countrywide lockdown went viral. His new book, “Lions Do Not Bow,” describes the relentless crusade by the Canadian government to break his spirit, including jailing him for almost two months in subhuman conditions, beating him, setting fire to his house, and trying to get his fellow inmates to murder him.

His crimes? Keeping his church open, feeding the poor during the illegal lockdown, and encouraging the truckers who launched an historic pushback all the way to Ottawa.

Pawlowski, who left his native Poland to escape communism, found it alive and well in our “neighbor” to the north. But he refused to knuckle under to these modern-day Nazis, and tens of thousands of Canadians followed suit, led by one courageous pastor who dared to say “No!” to evil.

Another unsung hero is Peter Vlaming, a former French teacher who was fired for refusing to go along with the transgender agenda and would not use the preferred pronouns of a transgender student.

The West Point School Board in Virginia has now agreed to a court settlement requiring it to pay Vlaming over half a million dollars in damages and attorneys’ fees after the Virginia Supreme Court determined that board members violated his First Amendment rights.

“I loved teaching French and gracefully tried to accommodate every student in my class, but I couldn’t say something that directly violated my conscience,” Vlaming said. Lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit on his behalf in 2019, claiming that he was wrongfully fired not for anything he actually said, but “for something he couldn’t say.”  

Even though he tried to avoid controversy by calling the student by her newly invented male name, members of the school board fired him anyway, exposing their totalitarian bent.

The $575,000 settlement came six years after Vlaming was dismissed after teaching at the school for seven years. Despite the loss of his job and the damage done to his reputation, he did not back down or stop fighting this injustice. As a result, a lot of other school board members in Virginia will have to think twice before doing the same thing to another teacher.

The power of just one “No!” uttered by a principled individual who is willing to suffer for his/her beliefs cannot be overstated. As Pastor Pawlowski said in a recent interview, the totalitarians like to make an example of those who refuse to go along with their evil designs, but “there’s more of us than them.”

And if God-fearing people stick together, we can defeat these monsters.