Posted on 04/04/2019 11:34:00 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism
The San Antonio Airport was rated as the sixth worst airport in the country. So, the city fathers got together and decided to fix the airport by banning businesses that donate to the Salvation Army.
Or at least one business.
“San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior," San Antonio Councilman Roberto Trevino declared, after blocking Chick-fil-A from opening at the airport.
Does Chick-fil-A prohibit gay people from buying chicken? No, but they donate to the Salvation Army.
Local media and ThinkProgress claimed that the move was in response to a report by the leftist anti-religious site accusing Chick-fil-A of giving charitable donations to groups with “anti-LGBTQ records”.
What are those groups? The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army.
Specifically, the Chick-fil-A Foundation donated $1,653,416 to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and $150,000 to the Salvation Army. The FCA was denounced by ThinkProgress for its “sexual purity” policy. And what did the bell ringers of the Salvation Army trying to raise money for the poor do wrong?
According to TP, the Salvation Army is an anti-gay hate group because it “at the time of the donations had a written policy of merely complying with local ‘relevant employment laws’” which “since changed to indicate a national policy of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The standards for being an anti-gay hate group have really gotten low.
It’s 2019.
Two years ago, Chick-fil-A donated money to the Salvation Army, which had a policy of “complying with local ‘relevant employment laws’”, and must now be banned from the sixth-worst airport in America.
According to Councilman Roberto Trevino, San Antonio is a “city full of compassion” and therefore no company that donates money to the Salvation Army’s efforts to help the poor is allowed is the city.
Nothing says compassion like banning companies that give money to the Salvation Army.
In ancient times, there was a biblical city also starting with an ‘S’ whose city council so institutionalized cruelty to the poor that they terrorized any travelers who winged their way through their ‘airport’.
Today, it doesn’t have an airport. It does have a pillar of salt.
San Antonio’s crackdown is especially bizarre since the Salvation Army is a popular destination for corporate gifts. Major donors include American Airlines, Delta, FedEx and UPS all of whom, hopefully, operate in the sixth-worst airport in America. Does San Antonio Airport plan to ban Delta flights?
The Salvation Army has a major presence in San Antonio running shelters and helping seniors. It’s scheduled for an event with former First Lady Laura Bush in San Antonio in May. Just not at the airport.
But this story of politically correct cruelty to the poor and religious discrimination gets even worse.
“I want the first thing see is a San Antonio that is welcoming and that they not see … a symbol of hate,” Councilman Manny Pelaez ranted. “I don’t want a restaurant that isn’t available on Sunday either.”
The first thing that Christians will see in the sixth-worst airport in America is that they aren’t welcome.
Sunday was the official excuse that San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg also gave for banning Chick-fil-A.
“There are many people in the community that are uncomfortable with Chick-fil-A,” Nirenberg rambled. “Have you ever tried to buy waffle fries on a Sunday? They’re closed! Fifteen percent of sales generated in the airport come on a Sunday.”
Chick-fil-A is anti-gay and should be banned. Also they don’t let me buy their waffle fries on Sunday.
The complaint that closing on Sundays will mean revenue losses is spurious. Chick-fil-A is the best-performing large fast food chain in the country. Its revenues across the country haven’t been hurt by closing on Sundays. There’s no reason to think that even in the sixth-worst airport in the country, its revenues will suffer by maintaining its religious values of setting “aside one day to rest and worship”.
Chick-fil-A opponents like Nirenberg and Pelaez seized on the ‘Sunday’ excuse because it sounded better than banning the eatery from the airport because it donated to the Salvation Army. But Chick-fil-A’s policy of closing on Sundays is a reflection of its founder’s Christian beliefs. San Antonio’s move is the equivalent of punishing an Orthodox Jew for closing on the Sabbath. And is completely illegal.
San Antonio’s council violated its own laws, the laws of Texas and the laws of the United States.
Councilman Roberto Trevino claimed that by engaging in religious discrimination, “the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion.”
Discrimination is the opposite of equality and inclusion. And now San Antonio is in trouble.
“The City of San Antonio’s decision to exclude a respected vendor based on the religious beliefs associated with that company and its owners is the opposite of tolerance,” Attorney General Paxton warned, opening an investigation into the city’s illegal discriminatory conduct.
The Trump administration's Department of Transportation has also been encouraged to take a look.
San Antonio’s discriminatory conduct exemplifies the brand of anti-Christian discrimination warned about by David Horowitz in his new book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.
“Today, the free exercise of religion has ceased to be a guaranteed right in America. Instead, it has become a battlefield,” David Horowitz wrote.
It’s only fitting that San Antonio, the home of the Alamo, should once again be the battlefield of the war for America’s freedoms. And before coming after freedom, Trevino and the bosses came for the Alamo.
The last time, Roberto Trevino and San Antonio’s leadership had disgraced itself this thoroughly was during the campaign to vandalize the Alamo site and move the Cenotaph. Back then, Trevino had claimed that the goal was breaking down the divisions caused by the Alamo story.
“We can tell stories without making any one group of people feel like they’re villains,” Trevino had whined. “This is a complex story. Even our heroes are flawed, and I think it’s a time to show that humanity is complex.”
First, they came for the Alamo and then for the First Amendment.
Around that same time, Councilman Trevino’s office was accused by his former council aide of abusing taxpayer resources by assigning campaign activities during working hours. Our heroes may be flawed. But we do have villains. And they, like Trevino, are more than just flawed. They are evil. And hate good.
Punishing a popular eatery for donating to the poor isn’t the behavior of flawed people, but of villains. The villainous religious discrimination championed by Trevino, Nirenberg and Pelaez is un-American.
Councilman Roberto Trevino can’t be satisfied with vandalizing the Alamo and instead decided to also trash the First Amendment. San Antonio has enacted discrimination in the name of fighting discrimination. Chick-fil-A was not discriminating against anyone in San Antonio. Its crime was donating to religious organizations whose views about morality and decency, Trevino didn’t like. Or perhaps he hated their policy of helping the poor, providing shelter to families in need and offering disaster relief.
It’s hard to know.
In San Antonio, as in another ancient city starting with an ‘S’, cruelty is called compassion, intolerance is justified as inclusion, and banishing religious people is depicted as the conduct of a welcoming city.
When everything is this upside down, it’s hard to know just how upside-down San Antonio is.
To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, when intolerance comes to America, it will be wrapped in inclusion and diversity. And it will land at the sixth-worst airport in America where the flights are always late, the seats smell like stale beer, and the only thing dirtier than the toilets are the agendas of the council members.
Note to Trump: Take away any Fed funds to the San Antonio airport due to religious discrimination, which UNLIKE the LBGT agenda is in the Constitution.
The long lines at Chick-Fil-A last week might have been in response to San Antonio’s announcement. Such things have happened before, more than once.
First they came for Southern heritage monuments and memorials then they came for the Alamo
And Jefferson and Washington and Custer and even Lincoln
Like I warned gleeful south bashers here two decades ago
And now Chil Fil A and the Salvation Army
Total destruction of WHITE CHRISTIAN CULTURE is their aim
That some freepers applauded this is nauseating
Wow.
I don’t know of alcoholism so I don’t know that a sip can send you back down to hell.
How sad. I feel for them.
I guess the equivalent non religious example would be me buying a one dollar scratch off and ending up in Atlantic City losing the mortgage money.
I DID lose rent money once upon a time when i was younger.
On more than one occasion.
It ended quite a few years before first house.
It had to be God listening to my mom, because I didn’t pray over it and she did.
I JUST LOST INTEREST one day, and I had a bad habit.
I KNOW it was God, I just don’t know why he did me the favor of letting it leave my body when I wasn’t very religions or spiritual at the time.
That helped.
With the teeny tiny cups generally used in modern Protestant communions, that’s probably true. That’s not enough alcohol to even get sleepy. They contain maybe a tablespoon at most.
There’s another modern factor, though, and that’s Antabuse. This could result in sickness even with one of those teeny tiny cups of wine. So it’s smart to use a no-alcohol symbol. I had an uncle who took Antabuse and went to a Roman Catholic church, and he would just wave the chalice by and take the wafer.
Your testimony isn’t uncommon. Praise the Lord. After enough practice taking in the Holy Spirit, the temptation is washed away.
I wasn’t open to it though!
I did nothing to deserve it.
I thanked God Afterwards.
But mom is pretty religious and she did some hard praying.
Not uncommon?
Wow. That’s great to know.
The Holy Spirit comes into different people in different ways. You don’t know what openings you really have, but God does.
But this isn’t an uncommon testimony. God can bless in you and through you in many ways before you’re aware of what’s happening.
The only eternally hopeless case is the one that refuses the Holy Spirit forever and ever in cold, dark purpose. If there is mere ambivalence, God can get in the door and sort things out, casting out the influence of Satan in stages.
I’d only want to warn that you could go through some stormy waters yet, even some that may have you half doubting. But you will emerge victorious on the other side of it, with what you already went through standing as a symbol of what the complete work will be. God is master of this thing called salvation.
Boy you write great.
Well the severe head injury over 10 years ago now and the STILL persistent leftover symptoms have not deterred my faith.
Actually made SIGNIFICANT progress after the 2 year “window” that doctors told me I had to heal.
that there is God.
I’d be thrilled to see a few airlines and a bunch of businesses boycott the SA airport-offensive and outrageous behavior like this by city officials should have financially and legally disastrous consequences to smack this behavior down hard.
I first lived in SA because I was going to college there-fresh from the ranch, I thought it was pretty nice and later lived in the burbs near there when hubby was in the military, to be close to work,etc-
The city of SA is so bad now that tourists from Mexico who come to stay at the guest ranches here don’t have any kind words for the airport there-bathrooms barely clean, rude people, luggage hassles, etc-so they just land at the airport, run to rent a vehicle and drive North to get to the hill country to stay and do stuff-I hope that ridiculous excuse of a city council gets their ass handed to them-along with a ruinous fine-in court-democrats turn every city they control into LA, NY or Seattle-I have visited those in the past 15-20 years-but I hear Chicago is even worse-never been there...
I have a great subject to write about. He deserves the praise. I had a childhood and later life full of trials. Now I see more clearly that Satan was getting after me trying to bring me down, but never completely succeeding.
God isn’t about utter shangri-la on earth. But it makes no sense that He would be. Once we accept that, and allow Him to take anything He wishes away in order to serve His larger purposes (which never violate His promises) then we find ourselves with many reasons for hope and joy as tables are prepared for us in the presence of our enemies.
Anyhow, I see no reason to panic when we see the power of the Spirit coming upon the people and we see the people beginning to accept it, however slowly. This will develop into yet another upset against Satan.
Why did God give us this catbird seat, even though Satan was busy pelting us with rocks as we sat there? I don’t know. But He is due the glory.
We have visited San Antonio several times, and even have family there. We also had planned a vacation there for this year, we even had reservations at a hotel on the Riverwalk. They have been cancelled, and the hotel was told exactly why we cancelled.
If anyone has ideas about a good vacation spot, let me know since we now have a spare week.
Hating the Salvation Army (the “other” SA) is kind of like hating puppies and kittens. That’s their public image. Satan bit off more than he could chew, IMHO.
That was great too.
You have the gift.
You need to write some books!
Only steers and queers come from the urban areas of Texas. And I don’t see them growing horns.
Please pray for me as God brings me to the appropriate place.
To have an effective ministry I have to learn how to shuck off pride and ego. He deserves the glory for what good I can bring forth. He originated it, He focused it. I stood there willing, but sometimes partially unwilling because the pain was so great that I just wanted to damn it all.
But as in gym training, no pain no gain. What we might have seen as senseless torment and ignominy was really the circumstances of spiritual training.
Essential to winning the game is treating it as a “we” game. Christians never solo. Christ called a community to salvation. They have clouds of witnesses and throngs of praying people to support them.
I will pray for you.
It seems like God has given you that gift to use.
And may God bless you to a great witness at a suitable time and place. Books you might not write, but you could speak volumes to the good.
I’ve actually been trying to write through songs, though ending up with some pretty eccentric pieces at first. I do kind of have a right to the “redneck” name from the social and geographic circumstances of my childhood, in Kentucky. I’ve written songs with redneck themes, and yet “by the loyal love of God above, the redneck gits-r-done.” Cleanse from it the demonic distortions of the Evil One and you get a great witness of God.
I HAVE hears some of your songs.
They were very good.
If you like the rustic-come to the hill country-you will be welcome, and we treat tourists right-come stay at a guest ranch, one of the nice lodges or book a rustic cabin on the river/in the woods. No city noise, smell, crowds or traffic, and shopkeepers are not rude, either-tourist business is bread and butter in our communities.
Go swim in the river, rent a canoe-or visit the antique shops from Pipe Creek to Kerrville, the apple orchard town of Medina, the farm to table restaurants in the boonies that serve organic locally produced food. No high city prices, either, so come on down...
If you want a list of accommodations, shops, restaurants operated by people my neighbors and I know and do business with, FReep mail me-we are proud of our local businesses...
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