The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.
“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”
ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”
“Political and social commentary is not a crime,” Holcomb said. “It is protected by the First Amendment.”
The subpoenas are just the latest twist in an ongoing saga over the Houston’s new non-discrimination ordinance. The law, among other things, would allow men to use the ladies room and vice versa. The city council approved the law in June.
The Houston Chronicle reported opponents of the ordinance launched a petition drive that generated more than 50,000 signatures – far more than the 17,269 needed to put a referendum on the ballot.
However, the city threw out the petition in August over alleged irregularities.
After opponents of the bathroom bill filed a lawsuit the city’s attorneys responded by issuing the subpoenas against the pastors.
The pastors were not part of the lawsuit. However, they were part of a coalition of some 400 Houston-area churches that opposed the ordinance. The churches represent a number of faith groups – from Southern Baptist to non-denominational.
“City council members are supposed to be public servants, not ‘Big Brother’ overlords who will tolerate no dissent or challenge,” said ADF attorney Erik Stanley. “This is designed to intimidate pastors.”
Mayor Parker will not explain why she wants to inspect the sermons.
Why is it that people on the secular left are so comfortable with bringing in the government to threaten, intimidate and coerce those who disagree with them? Could it be that they know that what they are doing is morally wrong, and have to force others to celebrate it so their guilty consciences will be appeased? After all, you don’t see chaste people marching around in pride parades, or demanding government force people to celebrate chastity. We know we are right, and opposition to chastity doesn’t bother us. Our consciences are clean.
Hands On Originals discriminated against the Gay and Lesbian Services Organization of Lexington when it refused to print the group’s Lexington Pride Festival T-shirts in 2012, according to a hearing officer in the case.
Greg Munson issued his decision Monday. The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission released it Tuesday morning.
“The evidence of record shows that the respondent discriminated against GLSO because of its members’ actual or imputed sexual orientation by refusing to print and sell to them the official shirts for the 2012 Lexington Pride Festival.”
Munson wrote that the application of the Fairness Ordinance did not violate the T-shirt vendor’s right to free speech and the free exercise of religion. The Human Rights Commission found in 2012 that Hands On Originals violated the city’s fairness ordinance, which prohibits businesses open to the public from discriminating against people based on sexual orientation.
Alliance Defending Freedom defended the business, and here was their line of argument:
“No one should be forced by the government — or by another citizen — to endorse or promote ideas with which they disagree,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Jim Campbell, who argued before the hearing examiner on behalf of Hands On Originals on June 19.
“Blaine (Adamson, of Hands On Originals) declined the request to print the shirts not because of any characteristic of the people who asked for them, but because of the message that the shirts would communicate.”
In the statement, Hands On Originals’ co-counsel Bryan Beauman, with the Lexington firm of Sturgill, Turner, Barker and Moloney, said, “No one wants to live in that kind of America — a place where people who identify as homosexual are forced to promote the Westboro Baptists and where printers with sincere religious convictions are forced to promote the message of the GLSO. … In America, we don’t force people to express messages that are contrary to their convictions.”
In cases like this, the Human Rights Commissions will try to drag the trial out for as long as possible, in order to send an intimidating messages to minorities they want to discriminate against and coerce. This case went on for two years, and probably cost a lot of money to defend. In Canada, Ezra Levant’s case went 2 years and also cost $100,000. The goal here is to use the legal system as a form of terrorist action, to intimidate anyone who disagrees with the secular left. And it works.
If you are looking for something to do with your life, becoming an ADF attorney or supporter is probably a very good option.
A former USC professor once on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives list pleaded guilty Friday to flying to the Philippines and sexually assaulting underage boys he groomed online.
Walter Lee Williams, 65, admitted engaging in illegal sexual contact with minors in foreign places, entering the plea during a brief appearance before U.S. District Judge Phillip S. Gutierrez.
He was apprehended within a day of making the FBI’s Most Wanted List in June 2013 after he was indicted on sex crimes involving two 14-year-old boys in the Philippines. He was captured in the Mexican coastal town of Playa del Carmen after a resident recognized his photo from a newspaper.
Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michel Moore said Williams’ conduct came to light three years ago when a person concerned about the safety of children contacted authorities.
Williams taught anthropology, gender studies and history at USC for about two decades until he quit in 2011. Under the guise of academic research on sexuality in the Southeast Asia/Pacific region, he repeatedly traveled to the area.
Federal prosecutors alleged that the author and Fulbright Award winner used those trips to sexually assault underage boys. Investigators believe he has at least 10 victims across Southeast Asia, aged 9 to 17.
Williams engaged in webcam sex sessions with two boys, aged 13 and 14, in the Philippines in 2010. The next year, he traveled to the country and sexually assaulted both boys and a 15-year-old boy, according to the plea agreement. He was 62 at the time.
While there, he also had sexual contact with three other 16-year-old boys, records show.
When he returned to Los Angeles International Airport on Feb. 11, 2011, he was “intercepted,” and child pornography was found on him. The professor fled Los Angeles a week after being interviewed by the FBI.
An attorney for USC last year provided the FBI with materials the professor donated to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives that contained “lascivious visual depictions of minors,” according to the plea agreement. FBI agents also obtained similar images from Williams’ former home.
And now, I’d like to go over some other recent news stories.
Veteran gay rights advocate and former San Francisco Human Rights Commission staffer Larry Brinkin pleaded guilty Tuesday to possessing child pornography.
Brinkin, 67, changed his plea in a deal with the district attorney’s office that will result in a sentencing recommendation of six months in county jail, six months of home detention, five years of probation and lifetime registration as a sex offender.
Brinkin, who worked as a senior contract compliance officer with the rights commission until his 2010 retirement, was arrested in June 2012. Authorities said e-mail attachments were found on his America Online subscriber’s account that contained images of toddlers engaged in sex acts with men.
Prosecutors originally charged him with six felony counts of possessing and distributing child pornography, but dropped all but one felony count of possession as part of the plea bargain.
Brinkin must undergo sex offender therapy and is banned from working with kids, contacting a juvenile without parental consent, and living with someone responsible for a child without disclosing his offender status.
During his 22-year tenure at the rights commission, Brinkin helped craft the city’s Equal Benefits Ordinance, which became a national model for workplace equality for gays and lesbians. When he retired, the Board of Supervisors declared the week of Feb. 1, 2010, as Larry Brinkin Week.
Brinkin, who appeared in court with his husband, has been out on $240,000 bail since September 2012. He is scheduled to return for sentencing on March 5, and to surrender into custody at a later date.
The NY Daily News reports on another similar case, and links to CBS News and the Hartford Courant.
Excerpt:
The case of a same-sex Connecticut couple accused of repeatedly raping and abusing two of their nine adopted boys is headed for trial.
Married couple George Harasz and Douglas Wirth of Glastonbury were supposed to be sentenced Friday in Hartford Superior Court under a plea deal, but instead withdrew from their agreement with prosecutors. The men had already pleaded no contest in January to one felony count each of risk of injury to a minor — a reduction from even more serious charges related to sexual assault.
[…]Harasz and Wirth adopted nine children — three sets of male siblings — beginning in 2000, and ran a home-based dog breeding business called The Puppy Guy.
The couple was arrested in November 2011 following a police and state investigation of sex-abuse allegations. The children were removed from the home.
Police said two boys, ages 5 and 15, accused Harasz of sexually assaulting them. Harasz was initially facing first-degree sexual assault and other charges, while Wirth had been charged with third-degree sexual assault of the 15-year-old boy.
Their arrest warrants claimed the couple not only sexually and physically abused the children, but also forced them to sleep in closets.
[…]One of the victims who spoke during the court hearing said sexual assault began when he was 6.
“They took turns raping me over and over,” he said.
During his ordeal Mr Cannon was repeatedly plied with Ecstasy and cannabis before being molested by David Cannon and John Scarfe.
His complaints to care workers were ignored and at one stage he was wrongly diagnosed as having mental disorders.
Both men were eventually arrested and charged after Mr Cannon was readmitted to into council care following a domestic incident, at which point he managed to persuade a Forster carer he was being abused.
Cannon, 54, and 31-year old Scarfe were each jailed for 30 months in 2006, for inciting sexual activity with a child.
[…]Cannon was allowed to adopt Andy in December 1997, when the youngster was aged eight. This came despite the fact he had earlier been convicted and put on probation for 12 months for assaulting the boy’s mother, Elaine Moss, possessing cannabis and handling a stolen computer.
Miss Moss had also claimed Cannon had been abusing her son.
A social worker failed to bring the allegations to the attention of the family court and instead called Cannon a “very caring parent who considered his children’s need”.
And here’s another similar story, this time from Scotland where the head of a gay youth organization was running a child sex ring.
Excerpt:
Eight men in a Scottish paedophile ring have been found guilty of a series of “horrific” sex offences against children and babies.
[…]Two of the men – convicted sex offender Neil Strachan and gay rights campaigner James Rennie – were convicted of sex attacks on children.
Strachan, 41, and Rennie, 38, both from Edinburgh, were also found guilty of conspiring to abuse youngsters, as were three other members of the gang.
[…]The jury found Rennie, the former chief of LGBT Youth Scotland, an organisation dedicated to helping young gay people, guilty of molesting a young boy over more than four years.
The child was just three months old when the abuse began.
WINTERY KNIGHT 