Dr. Eric Walsh Fired for His Religious Beliefs
While another case of religious discrimination rears its bigoted head, liberals with unseeing eyes and venomous tongues mock any suggestion that Christians are facing persecution. Worse still they virulently oppose the types of laws that would protect religious liberty—you know, the liberty guaranteed in our First Amendment.
The latest victim of religious persecution exercised by religious bigots is Dr. Eric Walsh, a physician who in his role as a lay minister in the Seventh Day Adventist church occasionally preaches sermons that affirm Seventh Day Adventist theological positions.
Dr. Walsh was offered and accepted a position as a district health director in Georgia, after which some employees in the Georgia Department of Public Health heard rumors that Dr. Walsh had preached sermons on, among other topics, homosexuality, Islam, and Catholicism. These sermons had created problems for Dr. Walsh in California, including a misguided call from Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Walsh’s firing.
After hearing these rumors, officials at the Georgia Department of Public Health watched hours of Dr. Walsh’s sermons on YouTube, immediately following which he was gleefully fired in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion.”
This week, the First Liberty Institute (formerly the Liberty Institute) “filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, alleging that the state violated Walsh’s rights under the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as well as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Ironically, this is the state where cowardly, unprincipled Governor Nathan Deal just two weeks ago vetoed a bill that would have offered protection of rights that even the First Amendment seems impotent to protect in the face of homosexual activism in collusion with activist judges, huge corporations, and hypocritical, intolerant entertainers.
In light of Dr. Walsh’s firing, read the feckless words of Deal in defense of his veto:
[Our Founding Fathers] had previously proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that Man’s Creator had endowed all men “with certain unalienable rights,” including “Liberty” which embraces religious liberty. They made it clear that those liberties were given by God and not by man’s government. Therefore, it was unnecessary to enumerate in statute or constitution what those liberties included.
In light of our history, I find it ironic that today some in the religious community feel it necessary to ask the government to confer upon them certain rights and protections.
The irony is not that people of faith were seeking to buttress the First Amendment from the attacks of those who deem homoeroticism a First Principle. The irony is that Deal spoke these dismissive words shortly after Dr. Walsh had been fired by the state of Georgia because of his religious beliefs.
Why do “progressives” get so much wrong about conservative positions on both religious liberty and anti-discrimination laws?
“Progressives” either misunderstand or intentionally misconstrue the desire of conservatives to exclude the term “sexual orientation” from anti-discrimination laws and policies. “Progressives” allege that opposition to the addition of “sexual orientation” to anti-discrimination laws and policies is motivated by ignorance and hatred of persons who experience homoerotic attraction and place such attraction at the center of their identity.
“Progressives” are wrong.
Conservatives oppose the inclusion of “sexual orientation” in anti-discrimination laws for multiple reasons:
- The specious term “sexual orientation” erroneously conflates homosexuality and heterosexuality, which are, in reality, ontologically distinct. It should be obvious that the term “sexual orientation” is a political contrivance used to provide cover for the inclusion of homoeroticism as a protected category in law in that no one is “discriminated against” because of their heterosexuality. In objective terms, all humans are heterosexual.
- Unlike heterosexuality which is constituted by objective conditions (i.e., anatomical structures and biological processes), homosexuality is constituted solely by subjective sexual feelings and volitional acts that are appropriate objects of moral assessment.
- Homosexuality is wholly distinct from other conditions that are included in anti-discrimination laws, like sex, race, age, and nation of origin.
- Homosexuality—constituted as it is by subjective erotic feelings and volitional sexual acts—is, however, analogous to other conditions similarly constituted, and therefore, its inclusion opens the door for claims that polyamory and paraphilias should be included in anti-discrimination law.
- Once conditions constituted by subjective, fluid, erotic feelings and volitional sexual acts are offered special protections, the religious liberty of people of faith will be compromised.
Only fools and liars deny that religious liberty is eroding through the sullied efforts of homosexuals and their ideological accomplices.
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