Tag Archives: Sin

House Democrats pass Equality Act bill to put sexual orientation and gender identity above religious liberty

21 states have SOGI anti-discrimination laws
21 states have SOGI anti-discrimination laws

Remember watching that video of the fascist thug Democrat Brian Sims, as he bullied the pro-life lady who was praying outside of an abortion clinic? Well, imagine that abusing Christians who take the Bible seriously became the law of the land, and a minority of secular leftist were empowered to use government as a weapon to silence and coerce Bible-believing Christians.

Regular readers will be familiar with the cases where gay activists went after bed and breakfasts, wedding venues, photographers, florists, bakers, etc. who refused to participate in celebrations of same-sex marriage. Christians oppose same-sex marriage, because the leader of the religion defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. However, religious liberty wasn’t a defense in these cases, because these states had passed “SOGI laws”, which made it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The Equality Act is a Democrat bill that forces all the states without SOGI laws to allow gay activists to weaponize government against Christians, forcing them to participate in non-Christian celebrations of gay activism.

The Federalist described some effects of the bill:

On the surface, the “Equality” Act is supposed to protect LGBT folks from discrimination by adding the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity to all federal civil rights laws, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It would make claims of discrimination related to these characteristics legally actionable in the way racism is, and applying to virtually every area of life: the workplace, education, banking, jury service, federal funding, housing, medicine and psychiatry, and all public facilities.

It is a power grab in the guise of anti-discrimination. A bait-and-switch. It’s another attempt by a ruling micro-clique to exert mega-control over everyone else’s lives, including those it purports to protect. It allows the Mass State to maximize bureaucracy and social engineering, especially by its huge regulation of speech and expression. It erodes individual rights while claiming to uphold them.

Sane people of goodwill have a host of good reasons to object to the so-called Equality Act. And many of those reasons have been written up, including the de-sexing of toilets and showers, the compelled speech inherent in pronoun protocols and severe punishment for “misgendering,” the promised harassment of business owners, the invasion of girls’ and women’s sports by biological men who force on them an unequal playing field, the utter contempt for individual conscience, and more.

The net result of this act would be a huge inequality of power accrued to the state and drained from the individual.

Other areas that would be affected: tax exempt status for churches, private college admissions, scholarships and curricula, moral standards in Christian organizations, forced transgender treatments at hospitals and health clinics, foster and adoption agencies could not prefer naturally married couples.

The author of that article lists five specific effects of the law:

  1.  It Undermines Everyone’s First Amendment Rights
  2. The Ambiguities in the Bill Threaten the Rule of Law
  3. Nudge Toward a Chinese-style Social Credit System
  4. Redefining Humanity By Outlawing Sex Distinctions
  5. It Enshrines Socially Destructive Identity Politics

Let’s see what the article says about #2:

The first thing that should hit any reader of the so-called Equality Act is the ambiguity of its language, especially with the bill’s outright emphasis throughout on “perceptions.”

[…]Consider how much the “Equality” Act would rely on bureaucratic and court actors to divine the “perception” of the perpetrator or victim of so-called discrimination: it would have to calculate your intent, read your mind, check out your body language, pick you apart for any suggestion of malice. For example, it repeatedly refers to sexual orientation and gender identity as “actual or perceived.” Many times throughout, the text notes that discrimination (or identity?) involves “perception or belief even if inaccurate” (emphasis mine).

This dependence on perception or belief about a person’s self-identity did not exist before. The language of this proposed law is more fluid than gender fluidity on steroids, and it’s wild stuff to push, especially at the federal level. It invites no end of accusations and lawfare that bodes ill for society and promises much human wreckage. The only people “empowered” by such a scam are those on the upper levels of this newly devised food chain who can call the shots.

Here’s more about #3 for those who didn’t know about the China social credit system:

If passed, we shouldn’t be surprised if it eventually produces a social credit system not unlike what is happening in China, whereby your livelihood, education, career, mobility, and access to goods and services is based on a literal “score” of your compliance with government policy. To paraphrase Sir Richard Scruton’s excellent observation of how that works in China, I’d say that the so-called Equality Act would help create robots out of Americans, with the state programming what they can say and do.

As more people self-censor because of the risk of losing their livelihoods and social status, they simply become more prone to robotic compliance and conformity with limits on their speech. This is fast becoming the case in China, where citizens feel the need to build up their “social credit” to be allowed access to jobs, education, housing, and who knows what other goods and services. The so-called Equality Act’s restrictions on First Amendment freedoms would be a big step in that direction.

A social credit system that scores you for conformity would be a logical effect of the intent of the Equality Act: to punish free expression in just about every sphere of life, including the workplace, at school, in the public square, and in all public facilities, and any place that might be connected with federal funding. (By the way, Scruton was punished—stripped of his chairmanship of an architectural commission in Britain—simply for explaining what the social credit system does to people in China. That should be another lesson for us here.)

Just to be clear, I live in a state with no SOGI law, and I still write about studies, etc. that are critical of the gay agenda from behind an alias. The second that this Equality Act becomes law, I would instantly have to delete this blog, my Facebook page, and my Twitter in case “discrimination” was “perceived” by an LGBT activist based on my previous writings, and they decided to investigate.

Watch: Democrat legislator harasses elderly woman praying outside abortion clinic

Pro-abortion Democrat, and misogynist
Pro-abortion Democrat, and misogynist

I follow Senator Ted Cruz on Twitter, and he tweeted out a video posted by the legislator in question. The legislator, from Philadelphia, is a Democrat. And he thought it would be a great idea to go to the local Planned Parenthood clinic, and film himself in an interaction with an elderly woman who was praying outside.

Here’s the video: (Must-see!)

(Another link, another link, another link – in case that video is taken down)

And Life News has the story:

A pro-abortion Democrat lawmaker posted a video of himself harassing a peaceful pro-life protester while invoking his office last week in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania state Rep. B**** S*** repeatedly bullied the pro-life woman in an unhinged rant as she stood alone outside a Planned Parenthood in his district in southeastern Pennsylvania.

S*** called the woman a “racist” and her sidewalk counseling “grotesque.” He followed her around, hurtling insults at her; and at one point, he got in her face with his camera and ignored her requests to leave her alone.

He wanted to get the woman’s address for some reason, maybe for vandalism, or something more violent. He’s famous for being an openly gay college football player, so he’s definitely strong enough to be a physical danger to her. People like to talk about toxic masculinity and bullying, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a better example of toxic masculinity than from this bully. He clearly has no idea how his greater height, physical strength, etc. would be perceived and experienced by an elderly woman. Or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t care.

I think a lot of Democrats like to think that they are representing women, but they are only nice to women who agree with them. If a woman is pro-life, or has actual Christian convictions, then this is how they get treated. This interview of the Democrat reports him saying that he’s an atheist. I thought it was interesting how a self-confessed atheist started lecturing a religious person on how to be religious. Not sure why so many godless people think that they should be trusted as an authority on religion. His biography says that he was raised Catholic and stopped attending church at 16. Whatever was going on in his head at the time, you can be sure that it wasn’t evidence that convinced him to do that.

Now a man is designed to have an inclination to protect children, animals, anything weak, from strong aggressors. But abortion changes all that. When a man decides that inconvenient children can be killed for the benefit of the selfish adults who made her, then all bets on morality are really off. He’s willing to kill an innocent unborn child that gets in his way. So anything is possible. She should really be afraid of him, even there in broad daylight.

I think the lady did the right thing, by calling the police.

Town Hall reports that he may have broken a state law:

Pennsylvania Democratic State Rep. B**** S*** thought it his duty to videotape and harass a pro-life woman protesting against abortion outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in his district, repeatedly telling the unnamed woman he had the same constitutional right to film as she did to protest. While Americans have the right to record protesters in Pennsylvania, the state also has a strict a two-party consent state, meaning even in public both parties involved in a conversation must give consent to be audio or video recorded. At various points in the video, Rep. S*** indicates he wants to have a conversation, to each time the women says no and does not give permission to record.

But this is Philadelphia, the city of Kermit Gosnell, so they have a habit of overlooking violence against women if abortion rights are at stake.

Life News says that this isn’t the first time that he’s tried to use coercion to bully those who disagree with him:

LifeNews recently learned of a second video that S*** posted several weeks ago where he made a similar request. He offered his viewers $100 to identify four pro-life women who were peacefully praying outside the same Planned Parenthood.

His requests suggest that the state representative may be trying to intimidate pro-life advocates through doxxing, an online practice where a person’s name and contact information are posted publicly online usually to encourage harassment.

The women, who he called “pseudo-Christians”, were just praying outside the clinic. I guess he thinks that if they were really Christians, then they’d endorse homosexuality, abortion, and the entire secular leftist platform – something which would be at odds with the Bible, and Christianity down through the centuries. But I guess his need to not feel “shamed” is more important than their freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. His feelings matter more than your rights, so he’s justified in silencing you.

I have spent a lot of my life studying scientific, philosophical and historical evidence for theism in general, and Christianity in particular, but there is another argument for Christianity that is personally convincing to me… although I would never use it in a debate. And that argument is how the Bible describes sin. I read how the Bible describes sexual sin in Romans 1, and then I see how sexual sin sometimes causes people to hate others and to use force to coerce, silence or destroy them. This is why the Bible calls some behaviors “sinful”, because people who do them know it’s wrong, but they think they can make the guilt from rebellion go away by coercing those around them to celebrate the sin. By the way, I include abortion, divorce, adultery, premarital sex and even drug or gambling addictions as sins.

He seems to be unable to control his temper when faced with people who haven’t turned their backs on the God of the Bible, and who are actually doing hard things in order to promote the moral values of the God of the Bible. There is something about Christians taking God seriously that offends him, and his response to their authentic self-sacrificial service to God is hatred and violence. It’s probably a good idea for us who take the Bible seriously to be seen acting self–sacrificially on our convictions. It bothers atheists, and that’s a good thing.

William Lane Craig explains the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement

I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

Probably one of the most common questions that you hear from people who don’t fully understand Christianity is this question: “why did Jesus have to die?”. The answer that most Christians seem to hold to is that 1) humans are rebelling against God, 2) Humans deserve punishment for their rebellion, 3) Humans cannot escape the punishment for their rebellion on their own, 4) Jesus was punished in the place of the rebellious humans, 5) Those who accept this sacrifice are forgiven for their rebelling.

Are humans rebellious?

Some people think that humans are not really rebellious at all, but it’s actually easy to see. You can see it just by looking at how people spend their time. Some of us have no time for God at all, and instead try to fill our lives with material possessions and experiences in order to have happy feelings. Some of us embrace just the parts of God that make us feel happy, like church and singing and feelings of comfort, while avoiding the hard parts of that vertical relationship; reading, thinking and disagreeing with people who don’t believe the truth about God. And so on.

This condition of being in rebellion is universal, and all of us are guilty of breaking the law at some point. All of us deserve to be separated from God’s goodness and love. Even if we wanted to stop rebelling, we would not be able to make up for the times where we do rebel by being good at other times, any more than we could get out of a speeding ticket by appealing to the times when we drove at the speed limit, (something that I never do, in any case).

This is not to say that all sinners are punished equally – the degree of punishment is proportional to the sins a person commits. However, the standard is perfection. And worse than that, the most important moral obligation is a vertical moral obligation. You can’t satisfy the demands of the moral law just by making your neighbor happy, while treating God like a pariah. The first commandment is to love God, the second is to love your neighbor. Even loving your neighbor requires you to tell your neighbor the truth – not just to make them feel good. The vertical relationship is more important than the horizontal one, and we’ve all screwed up the vertical relationship. We all don’t want God to be there, telling us what’s best for us, interfering with our fun. We don’t want to relate to a loving God if it means having to care what he thinks about anything that we are doing.

Who is going to pay for our rebellion?

The Christian answer to the problem of our rebellion is that Jesus takes the punishment we deserve in our place.

However, I’ve noticed that on some atheist blogs, they don’t like the idea that someone else can take our punishment for us to exonerate us for crimes that we’ve committed. So I’ll quote from this post by the great William Lane Craig, to respond to that objection.

Excerpt:

The central problem of the Penal Theory is, as you point out, understanding how punishing a person other than the perpetrator of the wrong can meet the demands of justice. Indeed, we might even say that it would be wrong to punish some innocent person for the crimes I commit!

It seems to me, however, that in other aspects of human life we do recognize this practice. I remember once sharing the Gospel with a businessman. When I explained that Christ had died to pay the penalty for our sins, he responded, “Oh, yes, that’s imputation.” I was stunned, as I never expected this theological concept to be familiar to this non-Christian businessman. When I asked him how he came to be familiar with this idea, he replied, “Oh, we use imputation all the time in the insurance business.” He explained to me that certain sorts of insurance policy are written so that, for example, if someone else drives my car and gets in an accident, the responsibility is imputed to me rather than to the driver. Even though the driver behaved recklessly, I am the one held liable; it is just as if I had done it.

Now this is parallel to substitutionary atonement. Normally I would be liable for the misdeeds I have done. But through my faith in Christ, I am, as it were, covered by his divine insurance policy, whereby he assumes the liability for my actions. My sin is imputed to him, and he pays its penalty. The demands of justice are fulfilled, just as they are in mundane affairs in which someone pays the penalty for something imputed to him. This is as literal a transaction as those that transpire regularly in the insurance industry.

So, it turns out that the doctrine of substitionary atonement is not as mysterious or as objectionable as everyone seems to think it is.