Communities draw line on ‘gay’ rights
Communities draw line on ‘gay’ rights
Fights erupt in Indiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and now loom in Texas
Americans with religious convictions about sexual lifestyle choices, specifically the biblical condemnation of homosexuality, are under assault both at the ballot box and in the jury box but now are fighting back against those who believe their behavior must be acknowledged and approved by all – or else it’s discrimination.
Battles have erupted recently in Indiana, where “gays” demanded the Religious Freedom Restoration Act be watered down for their benefit, and in Arkansas, where they insisted a pending law be changed before it could be adopted.
They won, for now, in those two locations. But in Springfield, Missouri, just this week voters repealed a “protections” ordinance for homosexuals, prompting, again, the claims of discrimination.
And there appears to no common ground for a truce, as “gays” and others with alternative sexual preferences demand to be protected from anyone’s “discrimination,” even though to the faithful that “discrimination” is simply a choice to follow the biblical teachings that some human behaviors are wrong. In the Bible, it’s called “sin.”
The problem is that those choices play out in the public arena, in schools, malls, businesses, parks, office buildings and more. And they conflict.
The bottom line, as WND has found in its Big List of Christian Coercion, is that these days in many locations, courts and others are enforcing the demands that the faithful violate their own deeply religious beliefs to relieve homosexuals and others of the feeling that they don’t have the approval of Christians for their lifestyle.
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While court cases have yet to catch up, there are the beginnings of a clear movement toward a return to the recognition of faith, and the acknowledgment that the First Amendment secures those ordinary practices, too.
Earlier this year, voters in Charlotte, North Carolina, rejected an “Equal Rights Ordinance” that would have installed in law the rights of those with alternative sexual lifestyles to enforce their choices in public.
Rev. Dave Welch, of the Houston Area Pastor Council, noted that Baton Rouge, Louisiana, also recently rejected such a move.
“We stand with the courageous Charlotte pastors led by pastor Mark Harris of First Baptist Church and other community leaders who rallied the community to stand for decency and freedom,” Welch said. “Franklin Graham also weighed in very influentially and courageously to help stop this.
“We commend and thank the six council members who voted the right way and stopped this attack on the families and freedom of Charlotte.”
What do YOU think? Sound off on ‘non-discrimination’ laws vs. religious freedom in today’s WND poll!
According to other online reports, just last year in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, voters repealed sexual orientation anti-”discrimination” ordinances.
It’s true that a similar effort in Pocatello, Idaho, failed in 2014, but just two years earlier, campaigns in both Salina, Kansas, and Hutchinson, Kansas, to repeal those special protections were successful.
That appears to be the watershed, since those results followed a long string of unbroken victories for homosexuals to protect ordinances that provide legal grounds to force a Christian to violate his or her faith for the benefit of the “gay” community.
But now a case is looming in Texas that might cast a long shadow.
Not just because Houston is one of the larger cities in America, or that it’s been a massive coalition of faith leaders fighting a lesbian mayor’s agenda. It’s because it could define how much elected leaders must abide by what voters say.
Who’s to blame for the demand for same-sex “marriage”? Paul Kengor’s “Takedown” argues that extreme-left radicals are attacking America’s families in their pursuit of “fundamental transformation.”
A hearing is scheduled Monday before Judge Robert Schaffer on the fight that developed between the city’s lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, and a coalition of pastors and Christian leaders.
Houston city officials told WND on Thursday they would not be ready to comment until after Monday’s hearing.
The case drew national attention just months ago when WND broke the story the city had issued subpoenas to five of the pastors for copies of their sermons. The pastors later called for an investigation of city hall’s actions in the dispute.
The resulting negative publicity for Houston – talk-radio hosts excoriated the city and its mayor – prompted officials to drop the subpoenas.
Rush Limbaugh, said, “I think what that mayor in Houston has done may be one of the most vile, filthy, blatant violations of the Constitution that I have seen. And I, for the life of me, cannot figure out why law authorities are not pursuing this. I cannot understand it.”
The dispute developed after Parker pushed the city council to adopt a transgender ordinance that installs in law special protections for those with alternative sexual lifestyles. At one point, Parker said the ordinance was all about her.
This came after voters in 2001 in Houston adopted a charter amendment to prohibit the city from granting same-sex domestic partner employment and health-care benefits.
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The pastors jumped into action, collecting tens of thousands of signatures from voters calling for a vote on the ordinance. Ordinarily, with enough votes, the council either would have rescinded its ordinance, or held a public vote.
But the city attorney, David Feldman, then stepped in and disqualified most of the signatures that had been collected, and the city has been fighting efforts to overturn the ordinance ever since.
The pastors went to court, and WND reported when the jury found no fraud by the pastors coalition. The judge then outlined the parameters for the city to use and the continuing inability to resolve the case follows its actions on the case.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Andy Taylor has said, “The only potential supposed issue that our side has is the fact that the affidavit form that was drafted lacks a signature line underneath the body of the oath itself. But, as I have briefed extensively to the judge, this ‘error’ in form is the direct result of the manner in which the city posted the required affidavit on its city website. Instead of posting an affidavit that contained a blank line for a circulator to print their name and a second line for a circulator to sign their name, the online form has a short 5/8s of an inch horizontal line with no accompanying description of what that short line is supposed to denote.”
Taylor said all of the testimony at the trial “was to the effect that you cannot glean from this required form that the short line is a signature line.”
“And I don’t think the judge thinks any reasonable person would know what this line is for, either.
Parker had posted an online statement that she was pleased with the jury’s verdict.
“The jury’s verdict confirms that the petitions did not meet the legal requirements. The plaintiffs are expected to appeal any outcome that is not in their favor. That would be unfortunate for the city,” she said.
F.N. Williams, senior pastor at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, said the city’s attorneys “went to extraordinary lengths to discredit, demean, denigrate and disqualify as many petitions and signatures as possible.”
But now the city has questioned the legibility of signatures, the signature lines, and much more, continuing its fight against the pastors.
That’s even though City Secretary Anna Russell, who has served Houston for more than four decades, explained in a deposition faced with more than 50,000 signatures collected she stopped counting signatures at about 19,000 because the minimum number of valid signatures had been surpassed.
She explained she understood the city charter “provides that the city secretary determine the number of qualified voters who sign the petition.”
In her testimony, she was asked: “And based on that understanding, you did that; and the result of your work was that 17,846 signatures had been validated. And that was more than the minimum number necessary, correct?”
“That’s correct,” she replied.
Welch told WND that it’s a case of the “fox counting the chickens” right now.
“We again call this what it is; a criminal conspiracy to deprive the citizens the right to vote on allowing biological males in women’s restrooms,” he told WND.
Welch said this week, “We know that Mayor Parker is terrified to allow the people of Houston to vote, hence their conspiracy to deprive us of that right that has cost us six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to simply restore what the Constitution guarantees.”
WND reported this week on the decision in Springfield, Missouri, to repeal a six-month-old ordinance that gave protections to the LGBT crowd.
Sexual identity groups, including PROMO, Promoting Equality for All Missourians, said the decision was disappointing.
“PROMO and the entire community of Springfield will continue to focus on the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act (MONA) which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Missouri Human Rights Statute, which currently prohibits discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations for other protected categories, including race, sex and national origin,” the group said on its website.
The Springfield vote came in the midst of a national furor over the issue. It happened only days after Indiana rushed through a change in a state religious freedom law amid a backlash led by homosexual-rights groups and Arkansas reacted by modifying a similar law before it was adopted.
WND reported Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act had been fiercely criticized by homosexual activists, including the CEO of Apple, prompting state lawmakers to provide special protections for homosexuals at the expense of the religious rights of business owners.
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth said the changes amounted to “eviscerating” Indiana’s religious freedom bill.
The Indiana chapter of the American Family Association had also urged Republican Gov. Mike Pence not to adopt the changes.
“The actions taken by the Indiana General Assembly do not clarify our Religious Freedom Restoration Act’s purposes or goals. Our legal advisers tell us that it actually changes our law in a way that could now erode religious freedom across Indiana. If this revised law does not adequately protect religious liberty for all, it is not really a religious freedom act,” said AFA of Indiana Executive Director Micah Clark in a statement.
In Arkansas, the governor sent a similar religious freedom act back to lawmakers to make changes before he would sign it.
More than a dozen other states already have Religious freedom laws similar to what was proposed in Indiana, and a federal level was signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton.
J. Matt Barber, a popular blogger and associate dean in the law school at Liberty University, said of Indiana’s maneuvers, “What was intended as a shield to protect religious liberty has now become a sword to destroy it.
“What was intended to defend people of faith against being forced by government, under penalty of law, to affirmatively violate their First Amendment-protected liberty of conscience, has now been turned into a government weapon that compels people of faith to violate that conscience.”
Barber called the changes “a complete 180.”
Joining Barber in alarm over the reports of the lawmakers’ plans was Senior Counsel Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom.
“The [original] religious freedom law is a good law. It does not pick winners or losers, but allows courts to weigh the government’s and people’s interests fairly and directs judges to count the cost carefully when freedom is stake. The new proposal unjustly deprives citizens their day in court, denies freedom a fair hearing, and rigs the system in advance. It gives the government a new weapon against individual citizens who are merely exercising freedoms that Americans were guaranteed from the founding of this country. Surrendering to deception and economic blackmail never results in good policy.”
Waggoner has defended a florist who was targeted for standing by her Christian beliefs and declining to lend her artistic talent to a homosexual ceremony. It wasn’t that the homosexuals couldn’t get flowers elsewhere, in fact, they were offered free flowers. They just chose to make an issue of the florist’s faith.
In Washington state, florist Barronelle Stutzman already has been penalized $1,001 for her faith.
And the judge ruling in the case has opened her savings, personal possessions and even home up as a target for the homosexuals who wanted her artistic talents and now may claim her assets as damages.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/rebellion-communities-draw-line-on-gay-rights/#k2PFrBZ1ffwTzEDh.99