Category Archives: News

News

Republican legislators getting things done for social conservatives in Texas

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott
Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Texas is the most economically successful state in the union, but that’s not the only thing special about Texas. Texas governor Greg Abbott is a strong promoter of the free enterprise system. But he is also serious about defending Judeo-Christian values. Right now, he is my pick to be the next Republican nominee for President, even more than my previous favorite, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Abbott’s doing a lot for social conservatives, as well as fiscal conservatives.

This Texas Tribune story shows what achievements he will be able to run on in a Republican primary:

Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law legislation shielding pastors’ sermons from government subpoena power.

Senate Bill 24 stemmed from the 2014 battle over Houston’s anti-discrimination ordinance, when the city subpoenaed sermons of five pastors who opposed it. The legislation was a priority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who joined Abbott on Sunday for a bill-signing ceremony at the churches of one of those pastors.

[…]Authored by state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, SB 24 says a government cannot “compel the production or disclosure of a written copy or audio or video recording of a sermon delivered by a religious leader during religious worship … or compel the religious leader to testify regarding the sermon.” It went into effect immediately when it was formally signed by Abbott on Friday in Austin.

You’ll remember that this law became necessary when Houston’s gay Democrat mayor decided to subpoena the sermons of Christian pastors to try to intimidate them into not talking about moral issues.

There’s another story from the Daily Signal about another bill that is headed to Governor Abbott’s desk:

The Texas Senate early Monday passed a bill to allow faith-based adoption and foster care providers to operate based on their religious beliefs.

By a final vote of 21-10, state senators agreed with their counterparts in the Texas House of Representatives that society should continue to make room for adoption and foster care services associated with a religious tradition, whether Christian or Muslim.

Only one Democrat joined the Senate’s 20 Republicans in voting for the bill. The remaining 10 voted against it.

In an interview Monday with The Daily Signal, state Rep. James Frank, a Republican who co-wrote the legislation, predicted that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would sign it.

“I am obviously very excited about it passing the Senate, and I fully expect … that Governor Abbott will sign it and it will be law,” Frank said, “and we’ll have, I hope, more people serving and free to serve children in the state of Texas.”

Not sure why Democrats would vote against a bill like this, but I notice a lot of Democrats are getting busted for underage sex and underage sexting lately. We already knew how Democrats felt about no-fault divorce and adultery: they’re all for it! Any sort of selfishness that adults can engage in is more important than providing kids with a mom and a dad. Democrats oppose prioritizing opposite sex couples, because it might offend gay couples or single parents.

News

More accusations of child molestation against Seattle’s gay Democrat mayor Ed Murray

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Democrat mayor of Seattle Ed Murray
Democrat mayor of Seattle Ed Murray

The radically leftist Washington Post reports on the latest round of accusations against Seattle’s gay Democrat mayor:

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, a nationally famous champion of gay rights and progressive causes, has been accused by three men of having sex with them as children.

An unnamed man filed a child sex abuse lawsuit against the mayor on Thursday, alleging Murray “repeatedly criminally raped and molested” him when he was a homeless 15-year-old in the 1980s.

The unnamed plaintiff and two other men gave interviews to the Seattle Times — all telling similar stories about a politico in his late 20s and 30s, who befriended street kids, paid them and had his way with them.

“I don’t necessarily think that he destroyed my life,” Jeff Simpson told the newspaper after describing years of molestation from age 13 on. “But I believe a lot of the problems I have stemmed from this.”

Murray, a gay rights pioneer-turned-leading opponent of President Trump’s immigration policies, canceled a planned event after news of the lawsuit broke Thursday and held a brief news conference the next day.

[…]Toward the end of the decade, according to the lawsuit, he met a homeless, drug-addicted 15-year-old on a bus.

“Young and curious, D.H. encountered Ed Murray upon the bus and developed a friendly interaction,” reads the lawsuit.

This quickly turned into a regular negotiation, it reads, with the teen “willing to do whatever Mr. Murray asked for as little as $10 to $20.”

The plaintiff, now 46, was named only by initials in the lawsuit. But he gave an interview to the Times, recalling: “He’d be doing certain things, and I’d tell him to stop, and he wouldn’t stop.”

[…]The lawsuit — filed because the statute of limitations precludes criminal charges after so many years — goes into explicit detail about the alleged sexual encounters between the two.

This isn’t the first round of accusations against the Democrat gay activist:

It describes the apartment’s floor plan. It also describes intimate physical descriptions of Murray that match the account of another accuser who did not sue: Lloyd Anderson.

Anderson told the Times that he met the future mayor as a teen in the early 1980s — when he and Simpson were both living in a group home in Portland.

Murray invited Anderson home and gave him $30 and some marijuana in return for oral sex, he told the newspaper.

Simpson told the Times he lived off-and-on with Murray for years, having sex regularly, and reported the molestation to his group home manager after an argument in 1984 — though nothing came of it.

Authorities pursued a sodomy investigation against Murray that same year, according to the Associated Press, but dropped it.

Anderson and Simpson took their accusations to the media and Washington lawmakers in 2008, the Times reported — when Murray was a state senator known for championing same-sex marriage and other gay rights causes.

Previously, I’ve blogged about how the co-founder of the Human Rights Campaign – and a prominent donor to the Democrat Party – was also accused of child molestation. We also had the story about the two gay activists who molested a boy they adopted (for money) from Russia. The story about the two gay men who were investigated for sex with a teenage boy. And so on.

While searching for previous stories along these lines, I found this old story about how Democrats voted to subsidize Viagra for child molesters and rapists. Yes, really. That blog post quoted from the Washington Times, a respected national newspaper. This actually happened.

Although you don’t often hear much about the kinds of causes that the Democrat party really care about, their real priorities are there, if you pay attention to the news. While Republicans are trying to eject MS-13 gangsters from the United States, Democrats are voting for Viagra for child molesters and rapists.

News

California State University gives $300,000 to left-wing campus groups, but zero to pro-life group

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Young pro-life women protest Planned Parenthood
Young pro-life women protest Planned Parenthood

Consider this story from Alliance Defending Freedom, which talks about California State University–San Marcos.

Excerpt:

Although the university says that it prohibits any of those groups from spending activity fee grants on expenses to bring speakers to campus, the Gender Equity Center and the LGBQTA Pride Center enjoy preferential status, and as such, are exempt from that rule and the standard $500 cap. In the 2016-2017 academic year, those two “centers” received a combined $296,498 for speech and expressive activities —more than 21 percent of all mandatory student activity fees the programming board received for that year—compared to only $38,629 for the more than 100 other groups combined (less than 3 percent).

The Students for Life group applied for $500 to bring in a pro-life speaker, and the university wouldn’t even give them that tiny sum.
However, I linked to Alliance Defending Freedom for a reason… somebody is about to get sued:

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against California State University–San Marcos officials on behalf of a pro-life student organization and its campus president, Nathan Apodaca, who are prevented from bringing pro-life speakers to campus under the university’s discriminatory funding policies.

[…]“While touting a community that values ‘individual and cultural diversity, and respect[s] multiple perspectives,’ Cal State–San Marcos is not practicing what it preaches,” said ADF Senior Counsel Casey Mattox, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom. “Today’s college students will be tomorrow’s legislators, judges, commissioners, and voters. But at Cal-State San Marcos they are learning that government can force citizens to pay for advocacy of the views it decides shall be orthodox and effectively exclude competing views. There can be no marketplace of ideas where the government simply funds its favored views.”

Alliance Defending Freedom is also suing another California university professor who instructed his little thug students to smash a pro-life display.

Excerpt:

In April, the Fresno State Students for Life received permission to chalk positive, life-affirming messages on the sidewalks leading to the university’s library. As its members finished chalking these messages on the morning of May 2, Gregory Thatcher, a public health professor, confronted them and falsely alleged they could not chalk messages near the library, and could only express themselves in the so-called “free speech area.” (The university eliminated this speech zone in June 2015.)

After club president Bernadette Tasy explained she had university permission to chalk messages in that spot, Thatcher announced that he would return to erase the messages shortly. He then recruited at least seven students from his 8:00 a.m. class to erase and deface the pro-life chalk messages. When Ms. Tasy reminded him that the club was acting with full permission, Thatcher walked over to one of the pro-life messages and began erasing it himself, claiming that he was exercising his free speech rights.

[…]The lawsuit, Fresno State Students for Life v. Thatcher, explains that Professor Thatcher’s decision to erase Students for Life’s expression, to recruit students to help in his censorship, and to harass and intimidate the group violates their fundamental right to freedom of speech. Additionally, the complaint asks the court to block Thatcher “and any other persons acting on his behalf or at his direction from interfering, disrupting, or altering any future lawful expressive activities that [Fresno State Students for Life and its members] conduct.”

Lawsuits are fun! As long as it isn’t me being sued.

Not everything that ADF does is a lawsuit, though, they also win lots and lots of prestigious trials.

Here’s one report from this week:

In many people’s minds, it would have been easy for Blaine Adamson to “just print the shirts” when he was contacted about making shirts promoting the Lexington Pride Festival. He could have saved himself the lengthy legal battle, the lost customers, and the derogatory messages and phone calls. But Blaine’s conscience would have suffered.

“I want God to find joy in what we do and how we work, how we treat our employees, and the messages we print,” says Blaine. “So if someone walks in and says, ‘Hey, I want you to help promote something,’ I can’t promote something that I know goes against what pleases Him.”

Thankfully, a Kentucky appellate court has recognized Blaine’s constitutional freedom not to print messages that he disagrees with. Today the court affirmed the Fayette Circuit Court’s ruling that Blaine, managing owner of Hands On Originals (HOO) in Lexington, Kentucky, is free to decide for himself the ideas and messages he wants to express.

The Gay and Lesbian Services Organization, which requested the shirts and filed the original complaint against Blaine with the Lexington-Fayette Urban Country Human Rights Commission, had tried to make this a case about discrimination. But the truth is that Blaine didn’t discriminate against anyone. And that’s exactly what the Kentucky Court of Appeals said in its ruling.

Both Blaine and HOO regularly do business with and employ people who identify as LGBT. His decision not to print the shirts was because of the message that the shirts would promote. It had nothing to do with any characteristic of the person requesting them.

“Americans should always have the freedom to believe, the freedom to express those beliefs, and the freedom to not express ideas that would violate their conscience,” said ADF Senior Counsel Jim Campbell. “Today’s decision is a victory for printers and other creative professionals who serve all people but cannot promote all messages.”

If this case goes to the Kentucky Supreme Court, ADF has promised to defend the Christian business owners.

If you like Alliance Defending Freedom like I do, be sure and subscribe to their podcast. If you’re looking for a good podcast app that’s free and ad-free, try this one.