Posted on 09/13/2009 8:04:02 PM PDT by RobinMasters
FORT WORTH, Texas -- Democrats and Republicans are divided over what to do about Maplewood Baptist Fellowship.
The North Richland Hills, Texas, church has operated as a polling place for more than 15 years but has recently drawn attention for a sign questioning President Barack Obama's citizenship.
Pastor Gary Hopkins said he put up the message "Where's the Birth Certificate?" on his church's sign about two months ago. He changed the message in recent weeks.
"I put it up to get people to ask questions, just to provoke thoughts and that's pretty much it," Hopkins said. "I do know there are a lot of people asking that question, and my understanding is that question has not been answered."
Local Democrats first noticed the sign last month. The Tarrant County Democratic Party posted a photo of the sign on its web site with the message: "Do you feel comfortable with this being a polling location?"
Tarrant County Elections Administrator Steve Raborn said he was sent the photo of the sign and contacted Hopkins about it. Raborn said the church can remain a polling place as long as it does not post any political messages during elections.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsobserver.com ...
Ping.
Another racist?
I can still remember the good ol' days when all the racists were only in Alabama.
It’s such a good PC thing that we don’t have to treat him like he’s white.
Frankly, I don't see that sign as questioning anything other than where is the birth certificate. Asking to see it does not mean Obama’s citizenship is being questioned!
ya sure is a good thing
He’s half white. The other half of the half is Arabs...
Even Jesus had a birth certificate...
and He wasnt hesitant to show it...
1 Certified copy of original birth certificate
2 Columbia University transcripts
3 Columbia thesis paper
4 Campaign donor analysis requested by 7 major watchdog groups
5 Harvard University transcripts
6 Illinois State Senate records
7 Illinois State Senate schedule
8 Law practice client list and billing records/summary
9 Locations and names of all half-siblings and step-mother
10 Medical records (only the one page summary released so far)
11 Occidental College Transcripts
12 Parent’s marriage Certificate
13 Record of baptism
14 Selective Service registration records
15 Schedules for trips outside of the United States before 2007
16 Passport records for all passports
17 Scholarly articles
18 SAT and LSAT test scores
19 Access to his grandmother in Kenya
20 List of all campaign workers that are lobbyists
21 Punahou grade school records
22 Noelani Kindergarten records are oddly missing from the the State of Hawaii Department of Education.
Anyone who cares about their country would be very concerned that a POTUS had hidden every scrap of information of his life that he possibly could.
.....Scholarly articles....
That one’s easy. There are none!!!!
He must have at least written some slovenly articles. Where are they?
the one has never screwed up. all his works are hidden.
TRUE PATRIOT!
(really, to any who cares to consider this...)
It is amazing how mixed up people can get; when a rule works well on behalf of our own interests, we love it, when it works against our interests, suddenly it’s a terrible rule.
Tax exempt status, as we know, is legally based on the first amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.
This does not state any limitation on Churches whatsoever.
It merely states two ideas:
1) the government must never decide on an official Jewish or Christian denomination (as religion in that day referred to the God of the Bible, and, in the New Testament Paul goes to great lengths to include both Jews and Gentiles and never even hints that Jews who do not accept Jesus Christ should be harassed or harmed in any way by Christians) and
2) the second half of the conjunction very clearly states that the government can not pass a law detrimental to the practice of said Judeo-Christian faith - or else it would be “prohibiting the free exercise”. It’s not just prohibiting the exercise, it’s prohibiting the free exercise. Free means no impediments, nothing blocking, or making difficult. Anything like that means we can’t freely practice our religion as most of our ancestors did.
There are many products, services and organizations that are tax exempt, and many that are not; the premise of this is that since the government does need tax revenue, it might as well choose what it will tax wisely, based on activities it wants to encourage and discourage, and also bear in mind that it must be as fair as possible. This is why real estate is taxed, consumption is taxed, income is taxed, etc., so in some way or another everyone is paying at least some tax, as it is unavoidable. For example, everyone who uses motorized transportation either directly or indirectly pays tax on fuels. In that same vein, taxing Churches would place a burden on them that is not placed on other tax-exempt organizations, hence, discouraging people from giving money to them. This conflicts with the “free exercise” clause of the second amendment.
The issuance of “tax exempt certificates” to Churches and the passage of laws in various states allowing them to incorporate began largely after WWII, and was a ridiculous attempt by governments to muzzle them. They start saying they’ll revoke the certificate once in a while when they get annoyed at having to listen to them, but, nonetheless, their tax exempt status is not affected in truth, it would just be very annoying to have it revoked.
Funny how elected officials view Churches - they love the voting block when it votes for them, but not when it wants representation.
Churches, whose rights are Not Limited by the Constitution, therefore, have the right to speak out and act politically, which they did during the Revolution, the Civil War and throughout U.S. history. As the Revolution was illegal from the view of the British government, the legitimacy of the Revolution was claimed by the Founders based on Biblical doctrine.
One example of religious political activity was Prohibition, which, coincidentally was misguided as the Bible does not once speak against against alcohol consumption amongst lay people, but drunkenness. So prohibiting a glass of wine with one’s meal was preposterous from a Scriptural point of view.
This was misguided, as many other laws were and are, but we must recognize that the Constitution was designed to withstand the vagaries of individuals and groups and their actions over the years, both for good and bad purposes.
In the balance, a large majority of the Founders, in many of their writings, extolled the importance of Christian faith in the lives of our citizens, as the morality of the citizen is the best we can expect from our government. The Founders knew that without morality, all the technological, artistic and financial advancements of the future would only eventually present a more glorious fall. And the only foundation for morality the 18th century educated American man had was the Bible.
For 2,000 years governments have sometimes sought to preserve and sometimes to destroy the Christian faith, which, of course, is an exercise in futility. The Bible itself gives us guidance regarding this, in Acts 5, verses 38-39, when Gamaliel, an esteemed Pharisee, is advising the men of Israel what to do about those who persisted in following the teachings of Jesus after His crucifixion:
38 “And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought:
39 But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.”
Amen.
Reminder:
This is America. Anyone can put up anything on a sign, anytime, on his own property.
The REAL issue of his lack of scholarly articles is how he got so far without them. Normally, one is elected editor of the Harvard Law Review because of the high quality of the articles one wrote for the Review. How then, did obama get elected the Review’s editor? How did he make Law Review in the first place? And how did he get into Harvard Law School at all?
How did he get a publisher to take one look at “Dreams From My Father”, let alone publish it? The list of “how did he’s?” gets longer and longer.
I know that there are wacko-sounding explanations that have been give for at least most of the “how did he’s?”. However, there is the need for a REAL scholar, or at least old-style investigative reporter, to carefully research the real reasons for how obama got as far as hie did, and to publish his or her findings.
I think that we will find out the the American people have been set up, and that this has been planned for a long time.
Yes, you are quite right. It is stunning that there seems to be no one interested in doing that research and the story.
Well, here’s a start:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html
It’s just a start, however.
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