Tag Archives: Gay Rights

How same-sex marriage will be used as a weapon against religious conservatives

Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

This Public Discourse article talks about the new “Equality Act” proposed by Democrats who are anxious to destroy Judeo-Christian values by using the government as a weapon against faith-based organizations, and individuals.

Excerpt:

So, in concrete terms, what would the proposed law do? Here are just a few of the potential areas of impact, given how the Equality Act would amend various provisions of the Civil Rights Act:

– Employment: would amend Title VII to create new protected classes for “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” with no countervailing exemptions for faith-based organizations that maintain internal standards of sexual conduct rooted in longstanding religious tenets.

– Federal Programs: would amend Title VI, historically limited to race, color, and national origin, to create new protected classes for “sex, sexual orientation, gender identity,” with no countervailing protections for faith-based providers who willingly serve every program-eligible person but maintain internal standards of sexual conduct rooted in longstanding religious tenets.

– Public Accommodation: would drastically expand the Title II definition of “public accommodation” to cover “gatherings” and facilities historically owned and operated by churches or religious organizations—“shelters,” “food banks,” and “care centers”—extending far beyond the categories at issue during the Civil Rights Movement: common carriers (bus, taxi, train, and air lines), public utilities, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues.

– Public Education: would amend Title IV definitions of “desegregation” to include new protected classes for “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” placing in the litigation crosshairs all sex-restricted facilities like dormitories, restrooms, or locker rooms.

– Religious Freedom Restoration Act: would omit exemptions for religious organizations contained in prior drafts of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and expressly state that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) may not be used as a defense or a basis for challenging the Equality Act.

– Sex: would enter a congressional finding that “federal agencies and courts have correctly interpreted [] prohibitions on sex discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex stereotypes,” thereby adopting the EEOC’s most aggressively extra-textual recent rulings.

– Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications: would amend Title VII exemptions for employers who have sex-based “bona fide occupational qualifications” (BFOQ) for specialized jobs—for example, male security guards in a maximum security prison or female undercover officers in a sex-trafficking sting operation—to require recognition of persons “in accordance with their gender identity.”

Unlike ENDA, the Equality Act does not even feign an equal balancing of sexual liberty and religious liberty. Like some voracious legal Pac-Man, the Obergefell-fueled Equality Act devours any preexisting constitutional rights that might impede absolute victory in the march for “marriage equality”: speech, association, assembly, and the free exercise of religion. The Equality Act boldly declares that some constitutional rights are “more equal than others.”

It seems like every day I am getting a messages from some Christian friend about how his or her co-workers, family or friends are attacking the traditional definition of marriage. And I tell them not to respond directly, but to instead write about it under an alias. It seems like we can no longer even speak in defense of traditional marriage without running into all kinds of legal problems from people who are “offended”. Somehow, their offending us with their view doesn’t draw any ire from the law. But the reverse is not true – it’s open season on pre-sexual-revolution views of dating, sex and marriage.

Marriage is something I really believe in, and have always believed in. And I don’t mean the new post-sexual-revolution definition of marriage. I mean the traditional view of marriage: chastity, courting, commitment, fidelity, parenting. It seems really obvious to me that marriage is something beautiful, something that is above our selfish desires, something that helps us to grow and love someone of a complementary nature self-sacrificially. There is a mystery in the way that a man and woman come together to make children and then raise them, balancing out their different male and female natures for a common purpose. But if I say anything like that in public under my real name in so many places where the topic comes up, then suddenly I would get into so much trouble.

We really need to be focused about restoring our freedom to express our support for traditional marriage, and the natural family in public.

Hillary Clinton supports jailing Christian clerk for dissenting from gay marriage

Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

NBC News reports that a county clerk is now in jail for refusing to recognize gay marriage.

A federal judge has ordered a Kentucky clerk to jail after she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who has turned away same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses, was found in contempt of court and taken into custody on Thursday.

Davis, 49, was in federal district court to appear before a judge after refusing to issue licenses to gay and lesbian couples in Rowan County. Davis, an Apostolic Christian, has said doing so would “violate God’s definition of marriage” and infringe on her personal religious beliefs.

District Court Judge David Bunning said that she is bound by an oath of office to perform her duties under the law, and ordered her to jail.

Hillary Clinton tweets that Christians should be jailed for holding to the definition of marriage taught by Jesus:

Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians
Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians

Obviously, Clinton is as much a Christian as the atheist Obama: not Christian at all. And it turns out that all the talk of tolerance and diversity on the secular left was just lies.

Anti-marriage demonstrators cheer fascism

So the Christian woman is in jail. Here are some supporters of diversity and tolerance chanting their support for using the government to coerce someone against their religion and conscience:

They want to force us to agree with them, and our religious liberty is no defence to government coercion. Imagine this woman tried to run away from the police who were arresting her – what would happen then? This is the America we got for voting for the Democrats.

Some people who claim to be Christians actually think Jesus is a fool

You might think that jailing people for agreeing with Jesus would not be supported by many Christians, but actually, many people who claim to be Christian do disagree with Jesus on issues like marriage:

Which religions supported Obama most in 2008?
Which religions supported Obama most in 2008?

For some people, keeping the money coming from government is more important than actually following what the Bible teaches. That chart shows who is good at following the Bible and who is not.

What should she have done?

In this particular case the right course of action is civil disobedience until you are fired. It’s important to do this so that the public has a clear understanding of what is happening. If you substitute an example like Nazi Germany forcing a Christian in government to murder Jews, then you can see that there are some cases where Christans have to refuse to do what the government wants them to do. Marriage is one of the cases where Christians should prefer to be fired rather than act against conscience.

Now, if you can get a conscientious objection that allows you to recuse yourself from duties that conflict with your duty to Christ, that is a good enough compromise. Because then you keep your influence in government (which is important!). But if there is no opt-out, then just let them fire you. I would say that you can resign, but in this case it’s better to resist and let it become a news story. That way, in the next election, people will remember where the fascists stand on religious liberty. Maybe some of the fake Christians will actually vote the right way.

How to live your life in preparation for tyranny

I would suggest that Christians stop making bad decisions with their education and career. When things like this happen, it’s important for you to have savings and skills, so you can find another job. In a very real sense, your ability to be a faithful Christian is going to hang on the decisions you make about school and work and spending vs saving your earnings. Jesus was not a person who pursued fun, thrills and travel for travel’s sake. He did not go on adventures. I think it’s time that we start to get serious about having an influence and making ourselves defensible against threats like this.

Right now, the fascists are running everything, and we seem to be disinterested in doing the degrees and careers necessary to have an influence. Some people like to think that God is speaking to them through their feelings, and telling them to have fun, go on adventures, and feel happy. But God is not your feelings. These threats are real. You need to start doing what actually solves the problem, instead of following your heart.

You want to plan your life out in a way that will allow you to defend against these threats and recover from losses. That means you don’t get to do whatever you feel like. It means you study hard things, do hard work, pay off your debts, save and invest, and stop complaining that work is boring. Christianity is not about having fun.

Here are a couple more posts for you to read about this issue:

130 left-wing fascist groups petition Obama to end religious liberty in America

Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

Christian Daily has the story.

A group of 130 organizations sent a letter to President Obama asking for a review of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), worried that a 2007 Justice Department memo allows for federally funded religious organizations to discriminate in the hiring process.

The letter requests President Obama to direct Attorney General Loretta Lynch to reevalute a 2007 memo from the Justice Department that interprets the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as allowing for faith-based groups to be exempt from nondiscrimination laws.

“RFRA was intended to provide protection for free exercise rights… to federal laws that substantially burden religious exercise. RFRA was not intended to create blanket exemptions to laws that protect against discrimination,” the organizations contend in the letter to Obama.

[…]However, Derek Gaubatz of the Federalist Society asserted in a 2011 article that the decision on whether to reverse the 2007 memo or not “will affect the ability of faith-based providers who engage in religious hiring preferences to compete with secular and other faith-based organizations for federal social service grants.”

[…]The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a federal law that ensures the protection of religious freedom and had been enacted in 1993.

That story is also being reported in the mainstream media, e.g. – the Washington Post. BuzzFeed has the full text of the letter and the list of organizations who signed it.

If Obama chooses to act on the letter, it would be a federal level fix which would expose Christians in the entire country to lawsuits of the kinds we are seeing in “non-discrimination” states, where Christian florists, bakers, photographers, etc. are being dragged before tribunals, forced to pay huge fines, forced into sensitivity training, and forced to celebrate things that are against their religious liberty and conscience.

Once again, here are the states where anti-Christian bigotry is legal:

States with non-discrimination laws
States with non-discrimination laws, which allow Christians to be put on trial

The 130 groups are going for a federal 50-state implementation of these laws. The Democrats have actually already introduced the “Equality Act”, which I wrote about before. This bill would achieve this goal, so the letter is really to get Obama to push for that and sign it. That goes to show you how the secular left feels about tolerance and diversity, by the way. They want to push their views and values on others, using the government, in all 50 states.

One of the groups, the Human Rights Campaign, had previously got caught trying to squelch the free speech of pro-marriage activists.

From the Daily Signal in June 2014.

Excerpt:

Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit.

The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival.

“Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.”

The have the background to this story as well:

In February 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its web site NOM’s 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of the marriage group’s major donors, including soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. That information then was published by the Huffington Post and other liberal-leaning news sites.

HRC’s president at the time, Joe Solmonese, was tapped that same month as a national co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

[…]HRC is among organizations and activists advocating same-sex marriage that routinely describe NOM as a “hate group” or “anti-gay” for making the case for preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

The Human Rights Campaign is a group that had previously condemned the Family Research Council as a hate group. This is the same Family Research Council that was later attacked by a convicted domestic terrorist / gay activist. After the attack, the HRC continued to denounce the FRC as a hate group. This is the group that Obama hires out of.

Shouldn’t there be criminal charges for whoever leaked the donor names to the gay activists? There should be, but…:

Unauthorized disclosure of confidential tax information is a felony offense that can result in five years in prison, but the Department of Justice did not bring criminal charges.

The Department of Justice did not press charges because they are on the same team as the leakers.