City of Houston demands pastors turn over sermons [Dealing With Homosexuality]
Houston city attorneys subpoena sermons from pastors opposed to rights law ^
Posted on 10/15/2014 9:27:23 AM PDT by jazusamo
Churches have received subpoenas issued by the city of Houston demanding copies of sermons.
Houston is probing opposition to a ballot referendum pertaining to an ordinance proposing a local discrimination law affecting gays. (Bryan Preston posted this summary of the lawlessness taking place in Houston.) Over 50,000 petition signatures were gathered opposing the ordinance. Now the city, run by the first openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, is retaliating and demanding that churches turn over sermons.
You read that correctly.
This is the sort of government behavior that used to be confined to two-bit third-world regimes.
The gay rights movement was on solidly moral ground when it sought to end laws criminalizing private consensual conduct between adults. But like so many other elements of the “civil rights” movement, it abandons the moral high ground when it starts using the government to shake down political opponents.
This is the same species of shakedown the IRS conducted. Don’t like your political opponents? Then use government power to harass them. Send them intrusive inquiries and let them know who is boss.
In Houston, the boss is looking for payback.
You wonder if the officials pushing these subpoenas against the churches have ever been to church. Signs point to no — because how many “sermons” are actually reduced to a document?
Not all of the best ones, I can attest.
This is the same sort of thuggish behavior we saw out of the Tom Perez-run Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. Don’t like Christian and Catholic pro-life activists? Drag them to court on phony charges. Harass them and make them bleed. The process is the pain, never mind the merits.
But every one of these harassing actions requires a signature — a signature of someone willing to act in confederacy with thuggery from other petty officials throughout history.
No doubt the lawyers signing complaints and subpoenas see nothing wrong with what they do. They will offer a litany of reasons why their thuggish actions are justified, and are in fact not thuggish.
Here is one such complaint that details the lawyers behind the harassing lawsuit. This is the document the Justice Department used to launch an eventually discredited crusade against Mary Sue Pine, a peaceful pro-life protester in Florida. The federal court tossed the case as lacking merit. As Hans von Spakovsky has written about the case:
Judge Kenneth Ryskamp was left to wonder at the near-total lack of evidence offered by the prosecution. The government was unable to show that Pine had in fact violated any provision of the FACE Act; prosecutors had no evidence that she had injured, intimidated, or interfered with the people she spoke to on a public sidewalk. It was not even clear that the people she was talking to were entering the abortion clinic.
One DOJ attorney pressing a case against clinic protesters is Aaron Zisser. Von Spakovsky outed Zisser’s biases :
Aaron Zisser : Mr. Zisser joined the Special Litigation Section after working as a staff attorney at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, a branch of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Before that, he was a fellow at “Human Rights First,” where he traveled to Guantanamo Bay to observe the prosecution of Osama Bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan, before a military tribunal. He wrote a series of blog posts for the liberal American Constitution Society criticizing the prosecution of detainees and suggesting that such terrorists were being deprived of their rights (seehere, here, here, and here).
Before graduating to his criticism of U.S. terrorism policies, Mr. Zisser interned at the ACLU, the Southern Center for Human Rights, the Orleans Parish (La.) Indigent Defender Board, and the Santa Clara County (Calif.) Public Defender’s Office. A proud member of the American Constitution Society, he also participated in Georgetown Law School’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, where he advocated greater reproductive rights (read: abortion) for women.
Mary Sue Pine, and would-be Mary Sue Pines, got the message — act on your faith, be prepared to pay the price. What the progressives who launch this harassment may never quite appreciate is that people like Mary Sue Pine have been willing to pay the price for 2,000 years. A lawsuit or subpoena is relatively small stuff.
Whether the new mayor in Houston or the attorney general in Washington, D.C., activists with government paychecks have mastered the art of using their power to harass political opponents, particularly those who act on their religious convictions.
Time to storm the mayor’s office and run her sorry ass out of town on a rail, just like they did in colonial days.
If these clowns want to know the contents of church sermons then they should go to church. Morons.
CC
Amen to that and she should be arrested for abuse of power.
What ticks me off and what should earn the ZOT for some, are a few self-righteous a-holes on FR who back this mayor. I have been trying to stay off those threads, but don’t know how long I can hold out. :)
BUMP!
There’s nothing GAY about sodomy, especially when mixed with fascism.
This is a test case on whether a government entity can get away with obtaining reviewing authority of church doctrine. It’s reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s control of religious entities.
This is where a stand must be made.
Wait...what? There are people on FR who *support* this??
There’s nothing GAY about sodomy, especially when mixed with fascism.
Fixed it.
Absolutely...I'm no legal authority but I don't see how churches could lose the case.
Former Democrat (but still pro-homo) Michael Berry hosts a “conservative” talk radio show these days (really more of a chat show about what people do for a living, old videos he remembers from MTV, his private membership live music nightclub, etc.) and he berates his listeners for saying “Michael, I’m so glad YOU are saying the things I’m not allowed to.”
Well today he was mentioning his time on city council (as a Republican) when he sat there with Miss Parker also on council. He says that she would say the most ugly things under her breath about the black pastors she needed in her constituency. And then he didn’t reveal just what it was she used to say to use these religious black voters (and endorsers).
Evil thrives when good men do nothing. Same with Berry defending the homosexual community (including same sex marriage) and attacking the social conservatives (who are all upset about teh gays) but now sees something in the agenda (open bathrooms) he can’t swallow.
City of Houston demands pastors turn over sermons [Dealing With Homosexuality]
Houston city attorneys subpoena sermons from pastors opposed to rights law ^
A lot of churches and especially the mega-churches have their sermons posted online.
Bump
Sub culture want’s normal people to except them or else it will never work they are abnormal and dangerous.
This needs as much esposure as it can get. At some point I suspect
we’ll see SCOTUS involved if the issue continues to be persued.
Like who? Link please.
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