Houston to pastors: Forget your sermons, now we want your speeches

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Fox News:

Five Christian pastors will no longer have to turn their sermons over to attorneys for the city of Houston. Instead, they will be forced to turn over their speeches related to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

 

I don’t mean to point out the obvious here – but what do those attorneys think a sermon is? It’s a speech.

 

According to an amended motion filed Friday in Harris County, Texas court, the city’s attorneys will no longer demand sermons related to homosexuals, gender identity, or Mayor Annise Parker – Houston's first openly lesbian mayor.

 

The amended subpoenas do require the pastors to turn over “all speeches or presentations related to HERO” – along with 17 different categories of information.

 

The Alliance Defending Freedom is a religious liberty law firm that is representing the pastors. Attorney Erik Stanley tells me the amended subpoenas don’t solve anything.

 

“The city of Houston still doesn’t get it,” he said. “The subpoenas still ask for information that encompasses speeches made by the pastors and private communications with their church members.”

________

 

Ve vant your speeches, please...

[SrWoodchuck]

:

Five Christian pastors will no longer have to turn their sermons over to attorneys for the city of Houston. Instead, they will be forced to turn over their speeches related to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

 

I don’t mean to point out the obvious here – but what do those attorneys think a sermon is? It’s a speech.

 

According to an amended motion filed Friday in Harris County, Texas court, the city’s attorneys will no longer demand sermons related to homosexuals, gender identity, or Mayor Annise Parker – Houston's first openly lesbian mayor.

 

The amended subpoenas do require the pastors to turn over “all speeches or presentations related to HERO” – along with 17 different categories of information.

 

The Alliance Defending Freedom is a religious liberty law firm that is representing the pastors. Attorney Erik Stanley tells me the amended subpoenas don’t solve anything.

 

“The city of Houston still doesn’t get it,” he said. “The subpoenas still ask for information that encompasses speeches made by the pastors and private communications with their church members.”

________

 

Ve vant your speeches, please...

 

 

@WestVirginiaRebel

 

Same thing...different name. The Progressive Lesbian & her critters will not learn until they have been severely beaten with a cluebat.

 

"..............a sermon takes the form of a lecture or discourse given for the purpose of providing religious instruction or inculcating moral behavior. Using a text (or texts) from Sacred Scripture and Church teaching as a point of departure, a sermon directly addresses human conduct from a Judaeo-Christian.....perspective with the explicit intent to either exhort or to rebuke the people seated in the congregation.

 

The goal of a sermon is to get the people in the congregation to change their moral behavior as a sermon indicates...."

[Valin]

Govt tells Christian ministers: Perform same-sex weddings or face jail, fines
Officials threaten to punish senior citizen couple – both ordained pastors – if they decline to officiate same-sex ceremonies
Saturday, October 18, 2014

 

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order Friday to stop officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from forcing two ordained Christian ministers to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.


City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife Evelyn, both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, are required to perform such ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

 

(Snip)

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Will Churches Be Forced To Conduct Gay Weddings?
Not a chance. That’s just the scare tactic conservative groups use to frighten voters.
Emily Bazelon

Dec. 12 2012

 

Last June, Denmark’s parliament passed a law requiring churches to conduct gay marriage ceremonies. Priests can opt out, but if they do, the local bishop has to find a replacement to conduct the ceremony. When Maryland voters legalized gay marriage in November, a conservative friend sent me a link to the Denmark story to explain why he’d voted against his state’s ballot initiative. He says gay marriage doesn’t bother him, but he’s convinced that as it takes root, churches and other religious institutions will be forced to embrace it.

 

This objection makes me apoplectic. We are not Denmark! We have a deep-rooted, constitutional division between church and state and an equally deep-rooted constitutional protection of freedom of religion, which make us different from any other country. And the history of how our courts and government have safeguarded those religious rights weigh definitively on the side of allowing churches to refuse to perform weddings for gay couples for as long as they so choose. I’m not saying it’s a good thing for churches to do that. I’m saying that the law balances the civil rights of gay people against the civil rights of religious groups—and in that contest, the churches (and mosques and synagogues) win.

 

(Snip)

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

H/T Gay Patriot

[Valin]

Govt tells Christian ministers: Perform same-sex weddings or face jail, fines

Officials threaten to punish senior citizen couple – both ordained pastors – if they decline to officiate same-sex ceremonies

Saturday, October 18, 2014

 

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order Friday to stop officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from forcing two ordained Christian ministers to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.

 

 

 

 

New frontiers in freedom

Scott Johnson

October 19, 2014

 

I may be mistaken, but it has seemed to me for quite a while that the campaign for gay marriage is about something other than “freedom” or “acceptance” or equal “rights.” The point of the campaign seems to me to force us to get our minds right, to borrow the resonant phrase of the jailers in Cool Hand Luke. The proponents of “marriage equality” demand our inner assent. Disapproval is prohibited. If sexual practices are akin to racial characteristics there is a logic to the reorientation that the new civil rights regime means to engineer.

 

Consider the case of Donald and Evelyn Knapp:

 

(Snip)

 

The Knapps certainly don’t represent the end of the road we’re on. New frontiers in freedom beckon.

[Valin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ce89twG0I&list=UUgiNjSACl8Y7jpV8LwSXf1g