Posted on 08/03/2015 8:34:32 AM PDT by wagglebee
WASHINGTON D.C. July 31, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- Revelations that a half dozen well-heeled liberal foundations are pouring millions of dollars into a concerted campaign to force religious organizations to accept same sex “marriage” have defenders of religious rights warning of a new “wave” of litigation.
“Attacking religious exemptions is the next big wave,” Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, told LifeSiteNews. “Gay rights are only the pretext. These groups won’t be satisfied till every trace of religion is erased from public life in America.”
After investigating their financial and annual reports, The Catholic News Agency has released the names of six foundations that have recently donated millions to groups and campaigns to eliminate any religious exemption under the First Amendment from federal, state or municipal human rights regulations, requiring couples in same-sex “marriages” be treated the same as heterosexual married couples.
The Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, the Gill Foundation, the Proteus Fund, the David Bohnett Foundation, the Arcus Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have contributed $4.8 million to the cause of suppressing religious rights.
According to Scott Walter, executive director of the Capital Research Center, Tim Gill, the homosexual multi-millionaire behind the Gill Foundation, was instrumental in turning Colorado from “a reliably red state to a blue state,” in the course of a decade, first using his money to win both state chambers for the Democrats, then the governor’s mansion, and finally both federal Senate seats.
“It’s called the ‘Colorado Miracle,” said Walter. “If Gill is turning his sights onto religious exemptions from same-sex marriage rights, defenders of religious liberty need to be very, very nervous. Gill has declared that homosexual rights is his number one interest. He has the money and he is incredibly effective.”
In Colorado Gill put together an alliance of like-minded donors and foundations, who funded or created public advocacy law firms, liberal financial watchdog groups, and paid for investigations and lawsuits, all without admitting their goal was getting Democrats into office.
The Catholic News Agency article quotes homosexual advocate Tim Sweeney, “a onetime program director of the Haas Fund,” as having told a conference of like-minded lobbyists early this year, “We are at a crossroads where the choices we make will mean we will fight religious exemptions for two to three years or have a protracted twenty year struggle on our hands.”
Sweeney warned the Out & Equal Executive Forum that victory was not complete with the Supreme Court decision overthrowing state laws defending traditional, heterosexual marriage. The homosexual and trans communities “face a new set of threats around religious exemptions to laws that protect us and our families,” he said.
Sweeney reportedly told his audience that state and federal religious freedom laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts and judicial decisions like the 2014 Hobby Lobby case (allowing the Christian owners of the Hobby Lobby company an exemption from insuring employees for contraception) are “all about using religious liberty as an excuse to discriminate against LGBT people and others.”
But Bill Donohue of the Catholic League makes the counterclaim that organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union are fighting against religious exemptions “to use the gay issue as a lever to eliminate religion from every nook and cranny.”
Lawyer James Bopp of the James Madison Center for Free Speech agrees that what is at stake is religious liberty. “We are facing a group that will insist on conformity on anybody in the public square. Churches are especially vulnerable,” he said, “because they can be threatened through their tax-exempt status.”
If the foundations and the advocacy groups they fund get their way, Donohue warned, Christian colleges would be forced to allow same-sex couples to use their married student housing. Schools would be forced to hire or prevented from firing homosexual couples that have undergone “marriage” ceremonies.
Jeremy Tedesco, senior legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, added, “The First Amendment protects more than just the freedom of religion, it protects the freedom of people to live and act according to their religious beliefs. These groups are wrongly attempting to relegate religious freedom to something that exists only in people’s churches and homes. That’s not religious freedom, it’s religious hostility.”
Peter Breen of the Chicago-based Thomas More Law Center told LifeSiteNews that states which have not pass laws legalizing same-sex marriage are particularly vulnerable to legal action restricting religious exemptions. Ironically, wherever states passed same- sex marriage laws, they included protection for religious freedom.
But states which never legalized same-sex marriage also never provided exemptions from anti-discrimination laws for Christians—whether bakers, or universities or churches with Scout troops. So States with old laws on the books intending to protect heterosexual married couples from discrimination will now cover same-sex marriages too.
“We need to alert state legislators that they are not providing the protection for religious groups their citizens want. And we need to help them draft very well-written religious protection laws.” Breen said the six foundations exposed by the Catholic News Agency “will try to stop those laws being made.”
The left has ALWAYS been hostile to religion.
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Let the IRS investigations into Unitarian churches begin
this is where I draw the line...
if fags want to “marry” down at the city hall, or start their own religion and “marry” there I do not care..
if you attack the very foundation of peoples religious beliefs, well then you are in direct violation of the constitution....
game will be over, fun time will end...
MOSQUE
I have a simple but effective way to combat this nonsense that will really piss them off. If they make such a silly law make sure it includes discrimination against straight couples as well then have said straight married couples should show up at gay churches. Do it to where a large group of straights show up at their churches at a time. Make them discriminate against us then make a big deal about how intolerant they were and get their exempt status yanked.
Nope. Not one time.
Bill Donahue is absolutely correct. Their goal is nothing short of making atheism the state religion by default.
The Oregon baker case was sponsored by the ACLU.
All denominations which do not want to see atheism as the de facto the state religion in America had best put their petty doctrinal differences aside (including even those differences they don't see as petty) and work together to defeat this Godzilla.
Gay “marriage” should be redesigned “pairriage”, as the intent is to form a dyad of two people, who might be co-dependents, rather than “soul mates”.
A person can’t be wrapped any too tight around the neural connections, if the homosexual life style holds such a strong appeal. It is contrary to every life impulse and urge, which is for the joining together of gametes, resulting in a zygote, which expands to its full potential through nurturing by parental units, and again produces the next generation of gametes.
And that is the whole point, that there be GENERATION. Degeneration is the polar opposite.
No problem, soon the Pope will claim homosexuals are okay in his book and we need to fight global warming and stealing all the money from others and giving it to the poor.
So start with the Catholic church
I always kinda wondered how may people were really involved. Seems its only a few people.
THE PRINCIPLE OF UN-INTENDED CONSEQUENCES
NEVER!
Yes, indeed. Why IS that?
For progs/libs, the enemy (Islam) of their enemy (Judeo/Christianity) is their friend. But, their mental condition precludes them from considering that their partner is also their own enemy.
Just more progressive/liberal self-imolation on display.
Do you think the priests in your parish would agree to perform same sex marriage?
Isn’t this a classic example of - “...or prohibit the free exercise thereof...” Part of the First Amendment?
Here, let the Bible talk:
2 Peter 2:2 And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; 2 Peter 2:3 and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.
2 Peter 2:4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment;
2 Peter 2:5 and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly;
2 Peter 2:6 and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly thereafter;
2 Peter 2:7 and if He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men
2 Peter 2:8 (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day with their lawless deeds),
2 Peter 2:9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,
2 Peter 2:10 and especially those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires and despise authority. Daring, self-willed, they do not tremble when they revile angelic majesties,
2 Peter 2:11 whereas angels who are greater in might and power do not bring a reviling judgment against them before the Lord.
2 Peter 2:12 But these, like unreasoning animals, born as creatures of instinct to be captured and killed, reviling where they have no knowledge, will in the destruction of those creatures also be destroyed,
2 Peter 2:13 suffering wrong as the wages of doing wrong. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, as they carouse with you,
2 Peter 2:14 having eyes full of adultery and that never cease from sin, enticing unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed, accursed children;
2 Peter 2:15 forsaking the right way they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness,
2 Peter 2:16 but he received a rebuke for his own transgression; for a dumb donkey, speaking with a voice of a man, restrained the madness of the prophet.
2 Peter 2:17 These are springs without water, and mists driven by a storm, for whom the black darkness has been reserved.
2 Peter 2:18 For speaking out arrogant words of vanity they entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, those who barely escape from the ones who live in error,
2 Peter 2:19 promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved.
Jeremy and others like you, if you won't listen to anything else, listen to the DONKEY. You might save your life.
Who cares as long as we have open borders? Bravo, who am I to judge, yada yada.
Not in my parish. In truth, not very many Catholic priests would agree, but some would, and some dioceses would agree to employing homosexuals in fag "marriages", and nothing would be done about it.
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