News

Christian couple loses appeal, must pay $135,000 for not affirming same-sex marriage

5 Comments
States with non-discrimination laws
States that force Christians to affirm and celebrate LGBT lifestyles

There’s been an update on the persecution of the Christian bakers from Oregon. They appealed their case to the Oregon Court of Appeals.

The Daily Signal has the latest news:

A husband-and-wife baking team must pay a $135,000 fine for declining to make a cake for the wedding of two women, Oregon’s second-highest court has ruled.

A three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld a decision by a state agency that led to the fine and forced Aaron and Melissa Klein to close their bakery.

The court ruled that baking wedding cakes is not “speech, art, or other expression” protected by the First Amendment. The judges said the state did not “impermissibly burden the Kleins’ right to the free exercise of religion” because it compelled the Christian bakers only to comply with “a neutral law of general applicability.”

Oregon law prohibits businesses from refusing service because of a customer’s sexual orientation, as well as because of race, gender, and other personal characteristics.

“We are very disappointed in the court’s decision,” Michael Berry, deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, which represents the Kleins, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Friday. “I think that punishing people for their religious beliefs is … not American, and it’s wrong.”

“It does not matter how you were born or who you love,” one of the lesbians, Laurel Bowman-Cryer, said in a written  statement  following the ruling.

[…]After the Kleins declined in 2013 to make a cake for the wedding of Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer, citing their Christian religious beliefs that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, they also faced protests that eventually led them to shut down their bakery.

[…]Berry, the First Liberty attorney, said his legal team is deciding how they will move forward, which could mean appealing to the Oregon Supreme Court.

How would same-sex marriage affect your marriage? That’s what proponents of same-sex marriage asked before forcing us all to participate in their gay weddings. The Christian bakers in question did not discriminate against individual gay people, they just didn’t want to be participants in a view of marriage that is unacceptable to any Bible-believing Christian. Marriage is important in Christianity. It’s a union of complementary male and female natures designed to provide children with male and female parenting.

If you’re living in one of the blue or purple states in the map above, then you are vulnerable to persecution by your state. It’s very important for Christians to be aware of where they live, and to whom they are paying taxes. I think husbands in particular need to be careful about what they study, where they work, and where they live, given the challenges that Christian families face from the secular state. Secular leftists are in love with their sinful rebellion, and morality makes no sense to them. We have seen many, many examples of people on the secular left using threats, coercion, vandalism and even violence, to get others to agree with them.

It’s worth remembering that we’re in this situation largely because pious Bible-oriented pastors have been taking a vacation from the moral issues of the day, e.g. – abortion and same-sex marriage. They see their role as feeling good and being liked. Using science and philosophy to train Christians about the case for pro-life and or the case for natural marriage is too much work. I guess they think that it’s better to just focus on proper theology for the 50th time in a row, and not say anything divisive about current events.

News

Obama administration ignored pro-democracy protesters, gave Iran dictators $1.7 billion

1 Comment
Neda Agha-Soltan - pro-democracy protester who was killed by Iradian dictatorship
Neda Agha-Soltan – pro-democracy protester who was killed by Iradian dictatorship

Since we are seeing Trump reach out to pro-democracy protesters in Iran, it’s worth remembering how Obama responded to them in 2009.

First, here’s what happened in Iran in 2009, just after Obama was elected president.

The radically leftist BBC reports:

The doctor who tried to save an Iranian protester as she bled to death on a street in Tehran has told the BBC of her final moments.

Dr Arash Hejazi, who is studying at a university in the south of England, said he ran to Neda Agha-Soltan’s aid after seeing she had been shot in the chest.

Despite his attempts to stop the bleeding she died in less than a minute, he said.

Video of Ms Soltan’s death was posted on the internet and images of her have become a rallying point for Iranian opposition supporters around the world.

[…]Dr Hejazi said he saw Ms Soltan, who he did not know, with an older man who he thought was her father but later on learned was her music teacher.

“Suddenly everything turned crazy. The police threw teargas and the motorcycles started rushing towards the crowd. We ran to an intersection and people were just standing. They didn’t know what to do.

“We heard a gunshot. Neda was standing one metre away from me. I turned back and I saw blood gushing out of Neda’s chest.

“She was in a shocked situation, just looking at her chest. Then she lost her control.

“We ran to her and lay her on the ground. I saw the bullet wound just below the neck with blood gushing out.

“I have never seen such a thing because the bullet, it seemed to have blasted inside her chest, and later on, blood exiting from her mouth and nose.

“I had the impression that it had hit the lung as well. Her blood was draining out of her body and I was just putting pressure on the wound to try to stop the bleeding, which wasn’t successful unfortunately, and she died in less than one minute.”

Here’s the video:

Here’s how Obama responded to the pro-democracy protesters in 2009, according to the far-left extremist New York Times:

President Obama said Tuesday that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling” in the disputed Iranian presidential election, dismissing criticism from several leading Republicans that he has failed to speak out forcefully enough on behalf of the Iranian opposition.

[…]With protesters filling the streets of Tehran to denounce the declared outcome of the election, administration officials said they were wary of doing anything that would allow the declared victor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to portray the protests as American-led.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, offered some of the sharpest critiques of Mr. Obama’s tempered response.

“He should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election,” Mr. McCain said in an interview Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”

The UK Telegraph explains that this was not a free and fair election:

Iran has seen thousands demonstrate following the election, prompting the regime to respond to public anger on Tuesday by offering a partial recount of votes in last week’s election.

Supporters of both men have staged demonstrations, each drawing tens of thousands of people, but the event in support of the president was heavily promoted on state television, with all six channels urging Iranians to attend.

The rival protest, by contrast, was officially banned and the regime tried to stop its opponents from communicating by blocking text messages and email accounts.

Later on in his failed presidency, Obama would send $1.7 billion in cash to Iran to help them develop nuclear weapons, so they could destroy Israel a little faster. He made sure to include $400 million in unmarked bills, so that future administrations would not be able to back out of the “deal”.

It came out recently that Obama was so desperate to give the Iranian regime this money, that he actually stopped an investigation into drug-smuggling by Iran’s terrorist ally, Hezbollah.

The Stream reports on the story, which was broken by the far-left Politico:

President Barack Obama torpedoed a DEA-led effort to stop Hezbollah from smuggling cocaine into the country. POLITICO broke the bombshell news Sunday night. The reason for allowing the Iran-backed terror group’s criminal enterprise to continue? Obama’s desperate desire for better relations and a nuclear deal with Iran.

The DEA teamed with dozens of agencies here and abroad in 2008 after discovering Hezbollah had grown beyond Middle East politics and thuggery into international crime. The special task force was called Project Cassandra. For eight years Project Cassandra worked to unravel Hezbollah’s drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa.

Hezbollah isn’t just smuggling cocaine. A November piece in The Hill noted, “Hezbollah’s involvement in producing and selling counterfeit medicines such as Captagon — a powerful amphetamine — is well documented.” Captagon is dubbed “chemical courage.” It was the drug of choice for ISIS. As Canada’s CBC reported, Captagon is “widely used by fighters in the Syrian civil war for its ability to make people alert, fearless and ready to kill with abandon.”

Project Cassandra traced the crime syndicate to “the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.”

This is the same Iran that imprisons Christian women in dirty prisons, funds Hezbollah terrorists, sends aid to Islamic terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, and backed the corrupt Syria dictatorship. And more. I don’t have space to write all of what they do, but they’re one of the worst countries on the face of the planet. Not the people – but the Islamist dictators who run the show.

Trump came out and expressed support for the Iranian protesters, for which he received widespread support from lawmakers and former government officials.

Right now, half of the American public is so ignorant of national security and foreign policy that we elected an imbecile to the White House in 2008 and 2012. The idiots elected an idiot, and it was a disastrous eight years for liberty and peace. All I can say right now about Iran is at least the bleeding has stopped now that the grown-ups are back in charge.

News

Trump’s major accomplishments for the year 2017

11 Comments
Trump signs good executive action = GOOD TRUMP
Trump signs good executive action = GOOD TRUMP

At the beginning of 2017, I was a card-carrying member of the Team Never Trump. I was very grumpy that my picks for president, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, were beat out in the primary by a pretend-conservative. I expected Trump to be a center-left Democrat who would do nothing to fix 8 years of failure from our first affirmative action President. We now know that Trump basically lied his way through the GOP primaries, pretending to be a redneck pro-union isolationist Democrat when he actually intended to govern as a mainstream conservative.

This article from the Washington Examiner lists 81 of his major accomplishments, not counting the repeals of 11 Obama-legacy policies. Let’s look at the ones that are quantifiable improvements over his predecessor.

Excerpt:

Jobs and the economy

  • Passage of the tax reform bill providing $5.5 billion in cuts and repealing the Obamacare mandate.
  • Increase of the GDP above 3 percent.
  • Creation of 1.7 million new jobs, cutting unemployment to 4.1 percent.
  • Saw the Dow Jones reach record highs.
  • A rebound in economic confidence to a 17-year high.
  • A new executive order to boost apprenticeships.
  • A move to boost computer sciences in Education Department programs.

Killing job-stifling regulations

  • Signed an Executive Order demanding that two regulations be killed for every new one creates. He beat that big and cut 16 rules and regulations for every one created, saving $8.1 billion.
  • Signed 15 congressional regulatory cuts.
  • Withdrew from the Obama-era Paris Climate Agreement, ending the threat of environmental regulations.
  • Signed an Executive Order cutting the time for infrastructure permit approvals.
  • Eliminated an Obama rule on streams that Trump felt unfairly targeted the coal industry.

Boosting U.S. energy dominance

  • The Department of Interior, which has led the way in cutting regulations, opened plans to lease 77 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling.
  • Trump traveled the world to promote the sale and use of U.S. energy.
  • Expanded energy infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline snubbed by Obama.
  • Ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
  • EPA is reconsidering Obama rules on methane emissions.

This Washington Examiner list failed to mention opening up a tiny area of the HUGE ANWR district to oil drilling. Not only will this create more jobs, but it also lowers the price of energy for individual families and for job creators. Also, it helps us to not be dependent on foreign sources of energy.

I think this is important as well:

Protecting communities

  • Justice announced grants of $98 million to fund 802 new cops.
  • Justice worked with Central American nations to arrest and charge 4,000 MS-13 members.
  • Homeland rounded up nearly 800 MS-13 members, an 83 percent one-year increase.
  • Signed three executive orders aimed at cracking down on international criminal organizations.
  • Attorney General Jeff Sessions created new National Public Safety Partnership, a cooperative initiative with cities to reduce violent crimes.

Promoting peace through strength

  • Directed the rebuilding of the military and ordered a new national strategy and nuclear posture review.
  • Worked to increase defense spending.
  • Empowered military leaders to “seize the initiative and win,” reducing the need for a White House sign off on every mission.
  • Elevated U.S. Cyber Command into a major warfighting command.
  • Imposed a travel ban on nations that lack border and anti-terrorism security.
  • Saw ISIS lose virtually all of its territory.
  • Pushed for strong action against global outlaw North Korea and its development of nuclear weapons.
  • Announced a new Afghanistan strategy that strengthens support for U.S. forces at war with terrorism.
  • NATO increased support for the war in Afghanistan.
  • Approved a new Iran strategy plan focused on neutralizing the country’s influence in the region.

The article didn’t mention the latest news of Trump’s decision to defend U.S. industry from an EMP attack – which is the threat we are least defended against.

This is a big difference from Obama, who liked to attack law enforcement at every turn, preferring to side with criminals and radical Islamic terrorists at every turn. He did it over and over and over. The criminals and terrorists were always right and entitled to special privileges. After all, Islamic terrorism was just “workplace violence”. The police had always “acted stupidly”. Obama had armed security on him at every moment, so who cares if some illegal immigrant shot you? If you were the victim of crime, then it was your fault. You deserved it. Remember the Crusades before you get on your high horse about judging. All that while his administration was running guns to Mexican drug cartels and giving $400 million in unmarked bills to Iran to aid their nuclear weapons development.

That’s the public safety you got with your taxpayer dollars with the Obama administration.

But one of the areas where Trump really shined had to be in the nomination of judges who were committed to interpreting the law as written, instead of interpreting the law based on their need to feel good and look good to others.

The Washington Examiner posted another article on the 9 most significant achievements, and here’s number one:

President Trump shattered an all-time record earlier this month when the Senate confirmed his 12th federal appeals court nominee, marking the only time in history a U.S. president has made more than 11 appellate appointments during his first year in office.

With those appellate appointments, a new Supreme Court justice, and his investiture of several other low-court judges, Trump has rapidly and radically changed the federal judiciary this year. The president’s close relationship with conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society has ensured that nearly all of his judicial nominees fit the mold of Justice Neil Gorsuch, a strict originalist who succeeded the iconic conservative Justice Antonin Scalia after being confirmed by the Senate last April.

“There’s been a serious effort to identify people who are seriously committed to doctrines and modes of analysis rather than just being seen as conservatives or Republicans,” Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute wrote recently.

Many conservatives see the president’s judicial appointments as his biggest accomplishment yet, noting that Trump’s progress in this area will likely be the most enduring element of his post-presidential legacy. With 59 nominations (including U.S. Attorneys) and 19 confirmations in the Senate so far, even legal conservatives who begrudgingly voted for Trump are likely to be pleased.

As a Never Trump person, this has been the biggest surprise of all. He picked judges better than George W. Bush! Who could have predicted this, based on his record prior to running for President? But he certainly has some conservative accomplishments now, to rival those of the better 2016 candidates like Walker and Cruz.

I’m a Never Trump person. Trump treated my favorite candidates shamefully in the 2016 primaries – especially Ted Cruz. However, I cannot deny that he governed more conservatively than expected. It will be interesting to see if he is able to make any progress on building the southern border wall, and on repealing Obamacare. He hasn’t been able to do anything on either of those yet. He needs to do a better job of being persuasive to centrists, instead of being snarky and insulting.