It’ll do for a religious freedom zone. Note the mayor in the background.
And to think this was written five years before anybody thought of shutting down our churches in the name of you-know-what!
How big is government going to get before it bursts?
I wonder if I’m shadow-banned.
A federal appeals court in Florida, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has ruled that banning “conversion therapy” to get rid of unwanted same-sex attraction is unconstitutional (https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/appeals-court-rules-ban-gender-counseling-unconstitutional/).
The ban, said the court, is “content-based regulations of speech that cannot survive strict scrutiny.” That is, the government cannot force individuals or organizations to express a message chosen by the government. They can’t force you to say things you don’t believe in. Because–duh!–it violates the First Amendment’s free speech protections.
Conversion therapy, noted the court, is “only words”–and words are protected.
California and New Jersey, just to name two states that I know of, have banned conversion therapy.
Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government cannot lawfully force anyone to express a message chosen by the government.
Expect the LGBT crowd to howl and gnash their teeth.
P.S.–The picture of the happy puppy serves a purpose which I am probably wiser not to name.
Is it the law of the land, or not?
I’m sure we’ve mentioned once or twice that two competing and mutually opposed moral codes can’t co-exist in one society. Harvard University is about to find that out.
“Gay” Etc. students and staff are opposing Harvard’s plan to create a “religious liberty clinic” whose function we suppose, would be to protect everyone’s lawfully guaranteed, by the First Amendment to the Constitution, religious liberties (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14549). No way, says Far Left Crazy–not unless the clinic takes a pledge not to take any cases that might “impinge on the [undefined] rights of LBGTQ+ people.”
Those “rights” are not defined because organized sodomy demands supremacy–and veto power over the free exercise of religion. Wherever there’s a conflict, “gays” are supposed to win. They’ve grown accustomed to it.
So yeah, sure, you can have religious liberty–as long as you don’t say, write, believe, or do anything that the “gays” don’t like.
Doesn’t sound like liberty to me.
The overriding purpose of America’s colleges and universities, these days, is to crank out more Far Left Crazy zealots. Anything else they might accomplish is an afterthought.
The sooner most of them go out of business, the better–before they put America out of business.
Cute and cuddly, happy puppies!
Some countries in the Free World aren’t as free as they ought to be. Germany springs immediately to mind. It seems they just can’t kick their old authoritarian habit.
Germany already has a harsh “hate speech” law, enacted last year. But Chancellor Angela Merkel sounds like she wants to make it even more harsh (https://townhall.com/columnists/ianhaworth/2019/12/02/angela-merkel-and-german-freedom-of-speech-n2557309). In a speech she gave last week, she said, “Expressing an opinion does not come with zero cost.”
In fact, under Germany’s hate speech law, the cost is a fine of up to 50 million euros. A small price to pay if the government is going to “oppose extreme speech.”
Free speech has to have limits, Merkel says. “Those limits begin where hatred is spread.” Not allowed to hate. “They begin where the dignity of other people is violated.”
Uh-huh. And here’s the catch: In Merkel’s little utopia, the government gets to decide what speech is “hateful” and what speech isn’t. Don’t tell me you don’t trust the government to do that.
American liberals see this and lick their chops with envy. Oh, if we could only do that here! Confound that pesky First Amendment! Dash it all, we’re already doing this on all our college campuses! Why can’t we do it everywhere?
Freedom is not something that our self-anointed big shots like us to have. That’s why we have to protect it, day in, day out. Because otherwise some shadowy characters in Facebook, with the enthusiastic support of Democrats, will censor everybody who isn’t them.
This is America, not Germany. Let’s keep it that way.
Government: they always want you to worship their golden image
Laws used to mostly tell you what you couldn’t do. Now, increasingly, they tell you what you must do: including what to say and when to say it.
The state of Minnesota threatened a husband-and-wife videography team with fines and a jail term if they persisted in not filming same-sex “weddings,” which they would not do because it would violate their Christian religious beliefs. The couple sued the state, a court dismissed it–but now a federal appeals court has revived the couple’s lawsuit and ruled for it to go forward (https://www.saukvalley.com/2019/08/23/federal-appeals-court-rules-for-st-cloud-couple-seeking-to-deny-same-sex-wedding-film-services/aieyc6y/).
It is, of course, a First Amendment issue. Where is religious liberty, as guaranteed by our Constitution, if one can be forced to say and do things that are against one’s religion? Like, you have to obey the homosexual or else wind up in jail? What kind of country is that?
To the Far Left Crazy, homosexuality and other kinds of sexual aberration are sacred, holy, never to be questioned, and everyone must “affirm” and “celebrate” these abominable things or else be punished by the all-powerful State.
We reject this vision. We reject this false religion. We pray that the Minnesota couple’s lawsuit will succeed; but if not–
“O Nebuchadnezzar… If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou has set up.” (Daniel 3:16-18)
“Our mind is right, boss! Our mind is right!”
The California legislature has passed a resolution blaming “religious people”–the key words are “has caused”–for the high rate of suicides among homosexuals, lesbians, and other sexual aberrants (https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/27/ca-legislators-blame-religious-people-high-lgbt-suicide-rates/).
“The Legislature calls upon all Californians to embrace the individual and social benefits [?] of family and community acceptance” of those who practice the homosexual form of fornication. They do not tell us what those “benefits” are.
The reason this is only a resolution and not a law–yet!–is because the First Amendment to our Constitution prohibits any government from ordering the people’s religious beliefs. Without that protection, it’s a sure thing that these tinpot California fascists would be ordering all churches to “affirm” homosexuality as a positive good, and to erase all those sections of the Bible that do not affirm it. And there would be prison time for anyone who failed to obey.
The fact that it really is just about the easiest thing in the world to find a lamebrained liberal “affirming” church that affirms every sexual malpractice known to biology, cuts no ice with the legislature. It’s not enough for them that there are plenty of “gay-affirming” apostate churches. They won’t be satisfied unless all the churches are apostate.
And if they could literally dig their way into our brains and root out all the ideas they disapprove of, they’d do that, too.
Let’s say you’re a power-drunk government official who wants to suppress a news story that might embarrass the government and call your position into question.
Has there ever been a better time for doing that, than this?
Recently Australian police, armed with warrants, raided the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia’s equivalent of PBS), seizing files and computers, looking for evidence that an editor and two reporters broke some law when they reported that in 2017, some Australian soldiers in Afghanistan killed unarmed civilians (https://www.lmtonline.com/news/article/Australian-police-raid-public-broadcaster-seize-13938095.php). Someone, it seems, wants to track down whoever were the sources for that story and make them sorry for it.
We would not like to see this happen in America. Freedom of the press is enshrined in the First Amendment to our Constitution, and by long tradition.
Our problem is that our “free and independent press” has abused its freedom and turned itself into a 24/7/365 shill for the Democrat Party. Time and again we catch them making up stories, embellishing stories, leaving things out, putting things in–and then having to walk it all backwards once it’s been demonstrated that those stories aren’t true. Think Jussie Smollet, the Covington kids, and “Trump’s a Russian agent!”–all crapola. All designed to help the Far Left Crazy take over the country.
Consequently, tens of millions of Americans don’t trust the mainstream nooze media to tell the truth about anything–only because they’ve been caught lying so many times. All they ever do, anymore, is to attack Donald Trump and anyone who stands with him. All they want to do is drive the president out of office. Because their candidate, Hillary Clinton, didn’t win in 2016. Hence more than two years of wall-to-wall “Russian collusion” coverage… which turned out to be false. Even now they haven’t let it drop.
So who’s going to shed a tear if government agents raid, say, the Washington Post’s editorial offices? Who’s going to believe the New York Times, if their offices get raided?
A free press is a vital component of a free republic. But the press in our country has all but pissed away its freedom–voluntarily, to gain a political end. The government didn’t turn them into Pravda. They turned themselves into Pravda.
At this point you might want to ask me, “Well, what do we do about it? How do we fix the problem? How do we get our free press back?”
I think the noozies have to fix it themselves–and soon.
Uh-huh… And everyone who’s not you is a “bigot,” and everything they think and say is “hate.” Right.
Senator Ted Cruz told Campus Reform recently that Congress should stop funding colleges and looniversities where free speech is not allowed (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=12256). This comes following an executive order by President Donald Trump to stop granting federal research funds to colleges where the First Amendment is ignored.
“Congress should not fund colleges that do not support free speech,” Cruz said. “We’re not going to fund discrimination.” Colleges and universities commonly discriminate against anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the Far Left Crazy point of view.
We’ll see if Sen. Cruz goes so far as to introduce a bill to cut the funding–not that it’d get anywhere in the House, where neo-Stalinist Democrats are the majority. But maybe we, the voters, can pitch them out of the House in 2020 and the bill might stand a chance.
Otherwise we just continue with “higher education” as propaganda for the Left–and really expensive propaganda, at that.
Nevertheless, some small progress has been made. The president’s executive order is a reality. And two years ago no one in either house of Congress was saying what Cruz is saying now.
We should not be made to pay for the poison that our colleges are pouring down America’s throat.
Its days are numbered
In the wake of President Trump’s executive order cutting off federal research grants to colleges and universities that refuse to honor the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, 28 states have enacted free speech legislation (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=12186).
Not only that–16 more have introduced such legislation and are currently working on it. Hey, that’s 44 out of 50! Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kentucky are the latest to come on board, with Texas expected to join them in a few days.
In general, the new laws stop the colleges from restricting free speech to “free speech zones,” limiting the free speech rights of students and faculty, withholding resources from anyone whose ideology doesn’t match the college’s.
America’s colleges and universities are currently infamous for enforcing uniformity of speech and thought. They call it “diversity.”
We’ll see if they keep on doing this, once it starts costing them.
You asked for it–and now you don’t like it?
As they say in Canada, and among liberals here at home, “We don’t need no stinkin’ First Amendment!”
The Quebec legislature is considering a ban on “religious clothing”–that is, say, a cross on a necklace, a yarmulka, or a hijab–for all public employees: civil servants, teachers, nurses, bus drivers, lawyers, “and other people who interact with the public” (https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/religious-symbols-proposal-ignites-fiery-debate-quebec-62377627).
Although “all religions” are to be affected, the focus is on Islam, and especially on the head scarves and other coverings required of some Muslim women. Secular libs don’t like the headwear. They don’t like it, so Muslims can’t have it.
Uh, guys–this is Islam. Or at least some brands of it. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be importing it. “You can have your religion, as long as you don’t practice it.” What kind of sense does that make?
If your life turns sour on you because your kid’s teacher has a cross on her bracelet, or the bus driver is a Sikh with a turban, then you need to change your life. Isn’t it funny, though, how the “tolerance” crowd is always the most intolerant bunch of them all?
If this were happening in America, we would call it an unconstitutional attempt to establish secularism as the state religion. But a lot of the Quebec legislators are perfectly comfortable with that. They like the idea of themselves owning the state religion, before which all other religions must bow down and confess themselves inferior and wrong.
Isn’t that what they always accuse us Christians of doing?