Tag Archives: Totalitarianism

News

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

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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

Supreme Court to decide whether it is legal to be a Christian after same-sex marriage

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Masterpiece Cakes

I had a really tough decision Monday night about what to write about for Tuesday’s post. I wanted to say something about the sexting and resume misrepresentation accusations against Ravi Zacharias. I also wanted to say something about the how the Democrats in the DOJ and the FBI protected Hillary Clinton from criminal charges while inventing a fake Russia-Trump connection. I wanted to say something about how the Supreme Court just allowed full enforcement of the Trump security measures against countries that are significantly influenced by radical Islamic terrorism. In the end, I chose the Supreme Court story, because it relates to free speech and freedom of association

There’s a good little video summary of the case here:

Ben Shapiro posted a great summary of what you need to know about the case at the Daily Wire:

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is slated to hear oral argument in the famed Masterpiece Cakeshop case. The case is a seminal one for religious liberty. It pits the ability of local and state governments to enforce “anti-discrimination law” against religious practice rights for businessowners; it essentially decides whether or not religious people can practice their religion in their business. This goes to the heart of freedom of religion in the United States.

The case revolves around a man named Jack Phillips. Jack is a baker. He makes and decorates cakes. He has a simple rule: he’ll sell anyone a cake. Gay, straight, transgender, green. Anyone. But he won’t make a custom cake for every event. As a religious Christian, this means that he sees it as sinful participation to make a custom cake celebrating a same-sex wedding. So he’ll make a cake for a same-sex wedding, but he won’t decorate it as such (no groom-groom wedding toppers, for example). He also refuses to make cakes that push anti-gay messages, anti-American messages, and adult-themed messages.

That’s his Constitutional right. But the Leftists at the Colorado Civil Rights Commission didn’t think so. They think that Jack must be forced to violate his own religious beliefs and decorate a cake for a same-sex wedding, or stop making any cakes at all. As a result of their ruling, Jack lost 40% of his business and more than half of his employees — all for abiding by his Biblical beliefs in the most tolerant possible way. He was even told that he had to re-educate employees, including his family members, and report to the government what his artistic decisions were, listing all the cakes he’d failed to bake and why.

Now, I know lots of people who claim to be Christians who support redefining marriage to eliminate the requirement of complementary sexes. I wonder how they would explain their support for SSM given this clear case of fascism by a secular government? Before this country redefined marriage, people on the right warned that there would be consequences for religious liberty.

Sometimes, it’s nice to read what is really happening in the world, with the politically correct spin removed.

Try this:

But this isn’t a religious case at all. It’s a freedom of association and freedom of speech case. Religious practice shouldn’t be bound to the home or church — religious life infuses every aspect of living. But by the same token, an atheist should be free to reject a Christ-themed cake, a Leftist speechwriter should be free to reject a right-wing politician, and The New Republic should be free to refuse to deliver to the Trump White House. Does this mean that people we dislike will be able to act in ways we dislike? Absolutely. But freedom lives in the spaces where we acknowledge that we have no right to another’s labor or approval. Tyranny grows when we refuse to acknowledge those spaces.

What’s really going on here is that there is a group of people involved in sinful, self-destructive activities. And their response to their own bad feelings about what they’re freely choosing to do is to try to generate happy feelings by forcing everyone around them to celebrate their decisions. You would never see a chaste person suing unchaste people to demand their approval. That’s because chastity is self-evidently virtuous. No outside celebration or affirmation is wanted or needed. But sinful people become obsessed with shutting out purity. And if they can’t shut it out, then they use the law to stamp it out.

That’s what this Supreme Court case is really about. We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that people on the secular left are Americans in any sense of the word. They don’t accept the Constitution, they don’t accept free speech, they don’t accept freedom of association, they don’t accept religious liberty. They accept their sexual desires. And the human rights of everyone else in the world has to give way to their sexual desires.

The loss of liberty for Bible-believing Christians isn’t a problem for fake Christians who think Christianity is about feeling good and being liked. It’s only a problem for people who actually do have a relationship with God in Christ. And that’s a very small minority of people who profess Christianity.

For a more thorough take on the legal aspects of the case, you can check out this editorial by Robbie George in the radical leftist New York Times, of all places.

News

FBI: if other people do what Hillary did then they will be prosecuted, but she won’t be

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

A round-up of reactions from around the Internet, on the right and on the left.

First, here’s radical leftist Chris Cilliza, writing in the radically leftist Washington Post, of all places:

FBI Director James B. Comey dismantled large portions of Clinton’s long-told story about her private server and what she sent or received on it during a stirring 15-minute news conference, after which he took no questions. While Comey exonerated Clinton, legally speaking, he provided huge amounts of fodder that could badly hamstring her in the court of public opinion.

Most importantly, Comey said the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails. And it even stands in contrast to her amended statement that she never knowingly sent or received any classified information.

[…]Comey said Clinton had used not one but multiple private email servers during her time at State. He said Clinton used multiple email devices during that time. (She had offered her desire to use a single device for “convenience” as the main reason she set up the private server.)

[…]It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She did send and receive classified emails. The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information.

Those are facts, facts delivered by the Justice Department of a Democratic administration. And those facts run absolutely counter to the narrative put forth by the Clinton operation: that this whole thing was a Republican witch-hunt pushed by a bored and adversarial media.

Andrew McCarthy in National Review:

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director JamesComey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.

David French in National Review:

[…]Comey noted that her personal e-mail server was less secure than Google’s Gmail:

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government — or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

[…]I defy any member of the military or any civilian not directly affiliated with Hillary Clinton to engage in such conduct and get away with it. The first thing that would happen is you would lose your security clearance. Next, you would lose your job. Finally, good luck escaping prosecution. Comey claims that prior FBI prosecutions included “some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.”

I blogged previously about how Clinton’s private unsecure e-mail server was was definitely compromised by foreign governments and hackers. She was the top diplomat of the United States of America. Clandestine agents and their sources would undoubtedly have been compromised.

The FBI has been focusing its attention on Christians and conservatives for quite some time, and letting the real criminals on the secular left go Scot free. So their refusal to enforce the law here is no surprise. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last time.

At the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro notes that the timing of this non-prosecution is suspect:

Just days after the Attorney General of the United States Loretta Lynch held a secret meeting aboard a plane with former President Bill Clinton – whose wife was under FBI investigation; just the day after Hillary leaked that she’d want Lynch for her own administration; just hours after the President of the United States Barack Obama flew Hillary – still under FBI investigation – down to North Carolina on Air Force One; just two hours before Obama was to open his campaign on behalf of Hillary Clinton, FBI Director James Comey announced that while Hillary Clinton had clearly engaged in criminal activity worthy of prosecution, he had recommended that she not be prosecuted.

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal:

After announcing his no-charge recommendation, Comey added:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

In other words, laws are for little people.

So let’s take stock. Nobody was prosecuted for the Clinton Foundation donations from foreign sources. Nobody was prosecuted for Fast and Furious gunrunning to Mexican drug cartels. Nobody was prosecuted for Benghazi. Nobody was prosecuted for the IRS persecution of Christians and conservatives. And nobody was prosecuted for the Clinton unsecure e-mail server.