I had friends who have been trying to get me to move to Georgia. Sure glad I didn’t listen to them – it’s turning out to be a very bad state for liberty.

Here’s the latest from religious liberty hero David French, writing at National Review.

He writes:

This morning, the First Liberty Institute filed a lawsuit in federal court that makes chilling claims against Georgia’s Department of Public Health, claims backed by a host of damaging documents. The Institute represents Dr. Eric Walsh, a California physician and former director of public health for the city of Pasadena, Calif. Walsh is also a devout Christian, a Seventh-day Adventist who sometimes preaches in his spare time.

Walsh, a former member of the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, had accepted a job in Georgia as a district health director when Georgia officials became aware that he’d delivered a number of “controversial” sermons on his own time — sermons where he articulated orthodox Seventh-day Adventist positions on, among other things, human sexuality, Islam, evolution, and the corrupting influence of pop culture.

In California, Walsh had been attacked by student activists who objected to his selection as a commencement speaker at Pasadena City College. To these activists, working for former president Bush and President Obama to combat AIDS, serving as a board member of the Latino Health Collaborative, and starting California’s first city-run dental clinic for low-income families dealing with HIV/AIDS wasn’t sufficient to overcome the horror at Walsh’s Christian views. Under fire, Walsh canceled his commencement speech — while the city, incredibly, put him on administrative leave. The college replaced him with a gay screenwriter.

When Georgia officials learned of Walsh’s California controversy, they responded by immediately violating the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits government employers from considering an applicant’s religion in employment decisions, but Georgia officials not only evaluated Walsh’s religious views, the director of human resources wrote an e-mail to department employees giving them the “assignment” of listening to his sermons.

And so they did. E-mails indicate that health-department employees split the sermons up, listened to Walsh’s religious views, and took notes. Walsh asserts that one department official called and told him that “you can’t preach that and work in the field of public health.”

[…][T]wo days after health-department officials carried out their “assignment” to watch his sermons, they terminated Walsh — informing him through a mocking voice-mail message that a termination letter was on its way.

Previously, I wrote about how Georgia fired their highly-respect Fire Chief, because he wrote a book in which he supported moral views consistent with the Bible in areas of sexual behavior.

The story is from the Daily Signal.

Excerpt:

Former Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran lived the American dream. That is, until he was fired from his childhood dream job for writing a book during his own private time.

Cochran’s book, published in 2013 and called “Who Told You That You Were Naked?,” expresses a biblical view on marriage and addresses homosexuality from his Christian perspective.

[…]Fast-forward a few months, and Cochran received a 30-day suspension without pay, after an LGBT activist group started to protest the book.

[…]After 34 years as a firefighter, Cochran’s fairy-tale career came to a halt in January due to his personal views on gay marriage.

[…]Cochran had worked his way up, and out from the poverty he grew up in, to be named Atlanta fire chief in 2008. In 2009, he was appointed administrator of the United States Fire Administration under President Barack Obama. Less than a year later, he was back to his position as chief in Atlanta.

Investigation into Cochran found that he did not show discrimination against anyone during employment, yet he was terminated anyway.

[…]“The part that got me in trouble was the fact that in the book I dealt with sexual challenges that Christian men have and spoke of biblical marriage and biblical sexuality,” Cochran said in August while speaking at a religious liberty rally in Iowa.

Pretty every day now I am getting a message from someone who is asking me how to have an alias, whether they need an alias, and so on. I hope that these cases show you that no amount of excellence in education or ability or work history will protect you from the fascists of the secular left. They don’t care whether you are the best at doing this job or that job – it’s more important to them that you share their personal opinions on moral issues. Specifically, it’s more important to them that you believe that when it comes to sexuality, there are no rules. That is, that the selfishness of the adults must override all moral rules, especial moral rules around sexual behavior. There are no marriage rules, there are no children’s needs, there is no chastity, there is no fidelity, there is no self-control.

When it comes to expressing your views in order to have an influence, my advice is simple. First, don’t listen to anyone who is reckless about the consequences and is more interested in prancing around praising their own supposed bravery. The object of this game is to share your views with the right people as persuasively as you can, and not to find yourself silenced or sidelined because the other team hammers you and undermines your ability to be effective. Handing the other side your real name, real address, and so on, undermines your effectiveness with no compensating increase in effectiveness. It’s a net loss, and not one that you should choose to take.