News

Texas has sued the Obama administration 44 times for federal government overreach

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott
Texas Governor Greg Abbott – “Broken But Unbowed”

Here is a left-leaning article from the Wall Street Journal about a Governor and an Attorney General who are not just marking time while in office.

Excerpt:

When a deadlocked Supreme Court on Thursday blocked President Barack Obama’s plan to give millions of illegal immigrants a temporary reprieve from deportation, it marked a pivotal victory for the administration’s most relentless legal adversary: the state of Texas.

The president “is not a king who can unilaterally change and write immigration laws,” responded Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose myriad lawsuits against the Obama administration, including the state’s lead role in the immigration case, have been a trademark of his political career.

During Mr. Abbott’s first term as governor, and while he was state attorney general before that, Texas has challenged the president’s signature issues in court—tougher carbon-emission standards, health-care reform, transgender rights and others.

Texas has sued the Obama administration at least 44 times since the president took office—more than any other state over the same period.

The collective, long-term impact of all the lawsuits is uncertain. But legal scholars say the aggressiveness with which Texas under Mr. Abbott’s watch has fought White House policies and regulations points to a major shift in how political fights are waged.

Amid congressional gridlock, arguably the most consequential power struggles are no longer fights between executive and legislative branches—but legal battles between states and the federal government.

“The action is in the courts, and it’s cases brought by the states. And Texas is almost always at the table,” said Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler.

Texas’ legal assault is part of a sweeping wave of state-level Republican activism that has marked the Obama years. Compared with the Clinton era, Republican attorneys general have been far more active in challenging federal polices, according to a recent Marquette University study on Supreme Court litigation.

[…]Most of the cases filed by Mr. Abbott and his Republican successor as attorney general,Ken Paxton, have turned on a broad theme of federalism: that the Obama administration has encroached on Texas’ right to manage its own affairs.

[…]In February, Texas scored another major victory when the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s marquee climate policy, halting enforcement of rules limiting carbon emissions from existing power plants.

[…]The most recent legal action came last month after the Obama administration directed public schools to let transgender students use the bathroom of their choice. Texas accused the administration of unlawfully rewriting federal discrimination law.

[…]“I like playing offense more than defense,” said Mr. Abbott in a recent interview while crisscrossing Texas aboard a private jet for various political events.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also a hero. Here he is explaining to the Daily Signal his latest broadside against overreach by the liberal federal government;

Abbott is a former Texas Supreme Court Justice, and served 3 terms as Texas attorney general, so he is no stranger to the law. Although sometimes people get the perception that the Obama administration is not being challenged, that’s not true. You just have to know where to look for the people challenging him.

News

Author of Alberta’s gay rights policy tweets anti-Christian hate propaganda

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Alberta Premier Rachel Notley participated in the Edmonton Pride Parade
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley participating in the Edmonton Pride Parade

Watch this video from The Rebel Media about a story from Alberta, formerly known as the most conservative province in Canada.

There is a story up about it on The Rebel‘s web site:

Kris Wells is an Assistant Professor and Faculty Director at the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta. […]Wells is also the author of the Alberta Government’s controversial new homophobic and transphobic bullying and gay-straight alliance resources. He’s a high profile activist the media’s “go to” guy for everything LGBTQ.

Wells tweeted and soon deleted a cartoon that depicted Christians as the mass beheaders of gay people. It was truly shocking. A week ago an Islamic terrorist shot 101 people, killing 49, in a gay bar. Not a Christian, but an Islamist. But the self appointed spokesperson for the LGBTQ community in Edmonton is so delusional [with] hate [for] Christians that he put them in the role of the ISIS murderer.

Here’s where it gets worse. The tweet Wells sent was even more reprehensible than just passing the blame for Islamic terror on to innocent Christians. The cartoon Wells tweeted was altered. The original cartoon was a Christian being beheaded by an ISIS fighter. Wells made the victims into the perpetrators and proudly tweeted it.

But it’s worse than that, if that’s even possible. The cartoon, before it was shamefully doctored, was originally drawn to honour 21 real Coptic Christian Martyrs who were beheaded on a beach in Libya by ISIS fighters in 2015. The martyr’s’ last words were reportedly “Lord Jesus Christ” and the water on the beach ran red with their blood. And Kris wells, this self professed, anti bullying activist, co opted their memory, their victimhood, their bravery, their Christian martyrdom for himself and his cause. Then put these Christians who died for their faith at the hands of ISIS in the role of ISIS. Deranged.

Well, how did the Canadian news media react to anti-Christian hate speech by a prominent and politically-connected gay rights activist?

The media is dead silent.

Kris Wells is the man who drew up the government’s anti bullying, anti homophobia literature that arguably violates religious freedoms in religious schools all across the province. And he hates Christians. That’s clear.

He hates Christians, and he’s teaching his beliefs at a major university, and writing government policy for a whole province.

You’ll recall that over in Ontario, a more liberal province, their sex education curriculum was authored by a convicted child pornographer. The Governor of Ontario is a gay activist named Kathleen Wynne. Here she is marching in a gay pride parade with the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau:

Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau
Premier Kathleen Wynne and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Previously, I blogged about how the Liberal government of Canada wants to imprison those who dissent and disagree with the transgender agenda for up to two years. There is no right to free speech in Canada. There is no right to free speech enshrined in their founding documents. Speech critical of the secular left’s favored groups is criminalized. Just ask Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant about being called before a “human rights” tribunal by the Canadian government, merely for speaking words that caused people on the left to feel bad. And of course, the system does not work in reverse – people who are religious or conservative have never had their complaints adjudicated. Because the laws and the courts don’t work for the “wrong” side. The money that Christians and conservatives pay in taxes is accepted, but the laws are not there to protect them.

Commentary

Walt Russell explains how to read the Bible effectively

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Bible study that hits the spot
Bible study that hits the spot

Dr. Walt Russell’s book on the subject of interpreting the Bible is called “Playing With Fire: How the Bible Ignites Change in Your Soul“. I like that book, but I found four articles that summarize the main points of the book so people can understand how to read the Bible at a high livel.

Here is part one which talks about how postmodern relativism is at odds with discovering the original intent of an author.

Excerpt:

Twenty-four year-old “Janet” (not her real name) was angry at my emphasis on seeking to discover authors’ intentions when we read their texts. She was an evangelical Christian and a second grade teacher in a public school. She prided herself in helping her 20 students learn to love literature. She would read them a story as they gathered around her, and then ask each child, “What does the story mean to you?” She prodded them to come up with their own unique meanings. With such strong encouragement, the class of 20 would eventually have 20 different meanings for the one story. Janet sensed that I was a naysayer about such “love of literature.” Pouring a little emotional gasoline on the fire, I said, “Janet, you’re certainly doing your part to insure that these 7 year-olds will never recover from a radically relativistic view of meaning!” Now I had her full attention.

Here is part two which talks about the importance of knowing the genre of a text before you try to interpret it.

Excerpt:

“INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” — the newspaper headline virtually screams out at you. The thought of something being slain is repulsive. You’re gripped by a mental image of southern India’s Bengal tiger. You imagine its beautiful face, its stripes and piercing eyes. Then your image is shattered by the sudden blast of a high-powered rifle. You see the exquisite creature writhe in pain, fall gracelessly in its tracks and die. Having read no further than the headline, you feel sick, as if you’ve witnessed something tragic.

But should you feel this way? The slaughter of an endangered species — especially one as magnificent as the Bengal tiger — is horrifying, no doubt. But suppose you failed to notice that the headline “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” appeared in the sports page of the morning paper. Clearly enough, it now refers to different Indians, different Tigers and a different manner of slaying than you originally thought. And is it really that tragic that the Cleveland Indians badly beat the Detroit Tigers in a major league baseball game last night? Not unless you’re a long-suffering Detroit Tigers’ baseball fan. But how do you now know that the headline is about baseball and not tiger-slaying in India? You look at the words “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS” and you know exactly what each word means. When you combine these words, how can they not mean exactly what you first thought they did — that Indians slay tigers? Answer: because their meanings are communicated (as the meanings of all words are) through genres!

Here is part three which talks about the importance of reading the context of a verse before you try to interpret it.

Excerpt:

“Never Read a Bible Verse!” That’s the title of a little booklet my friend and Christian radio personality, Gregory Koukl, has written to help people read the Bible well. What great advice. “That’s right, never read a Bible verse. Instead, always read a paragraph — at least.” But the current is flowing the other way in our popular sound-bite culture. Not to be left out (or left behind!), the Church has its own version of sound-bite culture: verse-bite culture. In verse-bite culture we take a sentence or sentence-fragment from a biblical paragraph, memorize it out of context, write it on a little card, put it on a billboard, a plaque, a rock, etc. Somehow we think that just because this little chunk of Scripture has a verse number in front of it, it was meant to be a free-standing unit of thought. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Apart from the fact that chapter and verse divisions weren’t added to the New Testament text until 1560 — long after the New Testament’s inspired authorship — there is a more important reason for never reading just a Bible verse, and instead reading at least the paragraph that contains it.

Here is part four which talks about the importance of applying the words of the Bible to your life.

One verse that is often misinterpreted is missing from the articles, but present in the STR lecture. It’s Philippians 1:6 that says “6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus”. Russell says in the lecture that this promise is specifically intended for the church in Philippi, to whom Paul is writing, not necessarily to all Christians. He is giving them a promise just after directly referring to their good work in supporting him in his ministry. Some verses are just not meant for us, and the context reveals it.