File this story in your now-bulging “Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned” folder.

Just three weeks ago, on September 19, 2019, the U.S. House Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee—chaired by John Lewis (D-GA) and composed of 7 Democrats and 4 Republicans—held a hearing portentously titled, “HOW THE TAX CODE SUBSIDIZES HATE.” Since conservative beliefs on sexuality are deemed “hateful” by regressives, such a subcommittee hearing should raise the alarm antennas of conservatives and libertarians concerned about assaults on the First Amendment by “progressive” thought police who roam the halls of Congress and the nooks, crannies, and interstices of social media.

What should also trouble them is that 3 of the 7 Democrats specifically mentioned or alluded to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as their source for identifying “hate groups.” (Full, shameless, and cheerful disclosure: the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) has been erroneously listed on the scandal-pocked SPLC’s “hate groups” list since shortly after I began writing for IFI in 2008.) Less than two hours after the beginning of the hearing, the Oversight subcommittee tweeted this:

“[H]omosexuality is a poor and dangerous choice, and has been proven to lead to a litany of health hazards to not only the individuals but also society as a whole,” The American Family Association, Tax Exempt Hate Group.

The first of the five witnesses to testify was busy-beaver homosexual activist Brandon Wolf, a “nationally-recognized advocate for LGBTQ issues” and  “Central Florida Development Officer and Media Relations Manager” for Equality Florida who survived the horrific Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida and said this:

[I]f you are not using everything at your disposal to snuff hate out, then you’re simply not doing enough. The time is now for us to fight harder, lead more courageously, and use everything we have to put an end to this cancer that is ravaging our communities…. Rather than use every tool at our disposal to combat hatred, we have chosen to subsidize it, embolden it…. Inaction in the face of hatred has consequences, and it’s high time that this Congress do something to protect those of us in the line of fire.

Wolf was urging Congress to use the IRS as a weapon to mow down moral views about homosexuality he hates and was doing so by deceitfully exploiting a tragedy that evidence suggests had nothing to do with “anti-gay” sentiment.

Journalist, constitutional lawyer, and (homosexual) co-founder of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald and co-author Murtaza Hussain published an article 18 months ago examining in detail the evidence for Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s motives:

Mateen went to Pulse only after having scouted other venues that night that were wholly unrelated to the LGBT community, only to find that they were too defended by armed guards and police, and ultimately chose Pulse only after a generic Google search for “Orlando nightclubs” — not “gay clubs” — produced Pulse as the first search result.

Several journalists closely covering the Mateen investigation have, for some time now, noted the complete absence of any evidence suggesting that Mateen knew that Pulse was a gay club or that targeting the LGBT community was part of his motive. 

…

By repeatedly emphasizing this anti-gay motive, U.S. media reports had the effect, if not the intent, of obscuring what appears to have been Mateen’s overriding, arguably exclusive motive: a desire for retribution and deterrence toward U.S. violence in Muslim countries.

…

Despite this mountain of evidence that strongly negates the original media-disseminated themes about Mateen’s life and his likely motive in targeting Pulse, the early myths remain lodged in the public mind and even in contemporary news reports. In part that’s because much of the evidence has remained under seal, in part because subsequent media debunking received a tiny fraction of the attention of the early, aggressively hyped inflammatory theories, and in part because there has been no political advantage to challenging the politically moving and useful narrative that the attack on Pulse was a hate crime against gay people.

Does anyone really believe full-time homosexual activist Wolf is unaware of this evidence?

Fortunately, one of the Republican members present at the hearing was Illinois’ own Darin Lahood (R-Peoria) who challenged references to the anti-Christian hate group, the SPLC:

[T]he IRS should not be used as a political tool to discriminate against organizations that differ in viewpoints…. We cannot use political disagreement as a metric to define hate speech or a hate group. This type of labeling can and has led to violent acts. I know my colleague just referenced the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2012, an armed man named Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the Family Research Council Washington headquarters with the intent to shoot and kill as many of its employees as possible. He was apprehended, but not before wounding the non-profit’s business manager. Mr. Corkins later told the FBI that he had seen the nonprofit group listed as an anti-gay hate group on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website.

Also testifying was UCLA law professor, the libertarian-esque Eugene Volokh who argued that with only very narrow exceptions, all speech is protected by the First Amendment:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear that tax exemptions can’t be denied based on the viewpoint that a group communicates…. The Court has also made equally clear that excluding speech that manifests or promotes “hate” is forbidden viewpoint discrimination…. The law may treat groups differently based on their actions, but not based on the views they express…. Groups may be denied tax exemptions for deliberately engaging in speech that falls within one of the few narrow exceptions to the First Amendment, such as true threats of criminal attack, or incitement intended to and likely to cause imminent criminal conduct. But “hate speech” writ large doesn’t fall within any such exceptions.

Our First Amendment rights will not long stand against the sexual appetites of the deviant who run amok among us. Neither our constitutionally protected religious free exercise rights, nor our speech rights, nor our assembly rights will be protected now that they have been subordinated to subjective and disordered sexual desires. And neither will our intrinsic privacy rights remain protected. Cultural critics warned about the dangers posed to this once-great Republic by 1. allowing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to Guinea-worm their way into anti-discrimination policies and laws, and 2. the Obergefelle U.S. Supreme Court decision, which has been interpreted as legalizing same-sex marriage everywhere in the United States. But conservatives largely dismissed such warnings out of either a failure to think deeply about the implications of these changes or cowardice or both.

Leftists are turning—not turning right—turning against the U.S. Constitution, and slowly they’re coming, step by step, straight for the First Amendment.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative to ask him/her to reject the SPLC’s definition of “hate groups,” which includes conservative and faith-based groups, such as IFI and AFA. Traditional Judeo-Christian teaching about human sexuality is neither “hateful” nor “vile.” Ask them to stand up for the First Amendment and protect religious liberty and speech rights by rejecting this effort to penalize so-called “hate” speech.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Slowly-Leftists-Turn-Step-By-Step.mp3

---

---

IFI depends on the support of concerned-citizens like you. Donate now

-and, please-

The intellectually incoherent U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) sought to apply an unconstitutional religious test for office today when interrogating nominee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Neomi Rao. Perhaps hoping everyone listening were idiots, he first attempted an indirect tactic by asking her this irrelevant question, the answer to which is none of his business: “Are gay relationships in your opinion immoral?”

Word to the seriously unwoke Booker: Americans—including judicial nominees and judges—are entitled to think sexual activity between persons of the same sex is immoral.

When Ms. Rao questioned the relevance of his inquiry, the smug Booker responded,

I think it’s relevant to your opinion. Do you think African American relationships are immoral? Do you think gay relationships are immoral?

Seriously, he actually said Rao’s opinion on the morality of homosexual relationships is relevant to her opinion on the morality of homosexual relationships.

But his reasoning—if it can be called that—is worse than circular. His questions imply an analogy between race and homosexuality when there are literally no points of correspondence between the two conditions. Does he understand what an analogy is and what it requires?

Here’s a primer regarding this particular and particularly unsound analogy for the dull-witted “progressives” among us: Race—as understood in such analogies—is a 100% heritable, non-behavioral condition, immutable in all cases, and objective. In contrast, homosexuality is a non-heritable, and in some—perhaps many–cases mutable condition that is constituted by subjective feelings and volitional behaviors that are legitimate objects of moral assessment.

A far better analogue for homosexuality would be polyamory, so, if Booker wants to continue his  moralistic and judgmental line of questioning on irrelevant matters with judicial nominees, he should ask them if they think polyamorous relationships are immoral, to which nominees should respond, “What possible relevance are my beliefs on the morality of particular types of sexual unions?”

Then Booker transmogrified from arbiter of morality to constitutional ignoramus by asking Rao,

Do you believe [“gay” relationships] are a sin?

Whoa, hold up there, cowboy.

The Constitution expressly prohibits religious tests for office, so what the heck was he doing asking Rao for her theological position on homosexual relationships?

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) took Booker to task for his egregious line of questioning:

The Senate Judiciary Committee should not be… an avenue for persecution.

We’ve seen a growing pattern among Senate Democrats of hostility to religious faith…. I was deeply troubled a few minutes ago to hear questioning of a nominee, asking personal views on what is sinful.

In my view that has no business in this committee. Article Six of the Constitution says there should be no religious test for any public office. We have also seen Senate Democrats attack what they have characterized as religious dogma, we’ve seen Senate Democrats attack nominees for their own personal views on salvation.

I don’t believe this is a theological court of inquisition. I think the proper avenue of investigation is a nominee’s record. So let’s look at your record, which is what this committee should be looking at, not our own personal religious views, or your religious views, whatever they may be.

Presidential-hopeful Booker nervously responded to Cruz’s remarks, defending himself with this patently absurd claim:

I would defend—die for—to protect the ideals of religious freedom in our country. And I was in no way trying to attack the nominee’s religious freedom. I was simply saying that discrimination under any standpoints, whether it’s religion, someone’s race, someone’s sexual orientation, should not be tolerated….[R]eligion was used as a ruse to discriminate against African Americans.

For someone who wasn’t trying to attack the nominee’s religious freedom, he did a pretty darn good job of doing just that by framing his question in a way that implied her unfitness to serve on the court. The hubris of Booker’s attempt to reframe his accusatory question about Rao’s moral and theological beliefs is mind-boggling. He would no more die for the right of theologically orthodox Christians to freely exercise their religion than CNN would fact-check anti-Trump news stories.

As Cruz alluded to, Booker’s not alone among U.S. Senate Democrats who engage in open religious discrimination. U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Bernie Sanders (D-VT) Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) have all revealed their brazen religious bigotry and attempted to apply a religious test for public office during U.S. Senate hearings over the past two years.

During the campaign, someone should ask armchair theologian Booker if he thinks theologically orthodox views of homosexuality are immoral and sinful.

This isn’t Booker’s first religious-test rodeo. Remember the Booker inquisition of Mike Pompeo in which Booker asked Pompeo if he thinks “it’s appropriate for two gay people to marry,” and asked, “Is being gay a perversion,” and asked, “Do you believe gay sex is a perversion? Yes or no.”

Someone should also ask Booker what he thinks should happen in cases where the rights of those whose Christian, Orthodox Jewish, or Muslim beliefs are central to their identity come into conflict with the purported rights of those whose homoerotic desires are central to their identity.

Lesbian Chai Feldblum, until recently a commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission whose reappointment was thankfully blocked by U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT),  said this about such conflicts long before the Obergefelle decision legalized same-sex faux-marriage:

[L]et us postulate that the entire country is governed – as a matter of federal statutory and constitutional law – on the basis of full equality for LGBT people….

Assume for the moment that these beliefs ultimately translate into the passage of laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation… [G]ranting this justified liberty and equality to gay people will likely put a burden on… religious people….

Let me be very clear…in almost all the situations…I believe the burden on religious people that will be caused by granting gay people full equality will be justified….

That is because I believe granting liberty to gay people advances a compelling government interest, that such an interest cannot be adequately advanced if “pockets of resistance” to a societal statement of equality are permitted to flourish, and hence that a law that permits no individual exceptions based on religious beliefs will be the least restrictive means of achieving the goal of liberty for gay people….

In blocking Feldblum’s reappointment Lee, said, “Don’t think for a second that you, your family, and your neighbors will be left alone if Feldblum gets her way.” The same can be said about Booker.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Booker-4.mp3

---

Christian Life in Exile
On February 22^nd, IFI is hosting a special forum with Dr. Erwin Lutzer as he teaches from his latest book, “The Church in Babylon,” answering the question, “How do we live faithfully in a culture that perceives our light as darkness?” This event is free and open to the public, and will be held at Jubilee Church in Medinah, Illinois.

Click HERE for more info…