The ACLU is lending its full support to the reintroduction of the “Do No Harm Act” to make sure that religious freedom guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution and under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) doesn’t allow Christians and others of faith to deny services to homosexuals and transgenders. Passage of the Do No Harm Act, says the ACLU, will “prevent discrimination under the guise of religious liberty.”

But Matt Barber, founder of Barbwire.com and a constitutional attorney, says the ACLU is really fighting to create a license to discriminate against Christians.

“They presume with no real logic or history in law or any constitutional support that – as Chai Feldblum, President Obama’s appointment to the EEOC, once said – When religious liberty comes into conflict with so-called ‘gay rights’, gays win, Christians lose,” Barber says, paraphrasing Feldblum’s original remark.

He adds that nothing can be further from the truth. As he explains, the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the right to the free exercise of religion.

“The ACLU wants enumerated civil rights for these new-fangled gay rights, but these are not rights; they are gay wrongs,” Barber tells OneNewsNow. “These are behaviors and temptations that the Founding Fathers called a crime against nature.”

Barber concludes that imagining the Constitution supports “gay rights” is mind-boggling.

The Do No Harm Act to amend the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was reintroduced to Congress on July 13, 2017, by Democratic Congressmen Joe Kennedy (Massachusetts) and Bobby Scott (Virginia).

This article was originally posted at OneNewsNow.com

The Trump administration’s Department for Civil Rights at the Department of Education has issued a memo to schools stating that civil rights investigations will be launched against individuals at schools who refuse to address transgender students by their preferred gender pronouns.

The memo, signed by Candice Jackson of the Office of Civil Rights reads in part:

“OCR may assert subject matter jurisdiction over and open for investigation gender-based harassment… (i.e., based on sex stereotyping, such as acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex or sex-stereotyping, such as refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred name or pronouns when the school uses preferred names for gender-conforming students.”

This directive equates a refusal of a student or teacher to refer to another student by their preferred name as “verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility.” A student can decide that one day they want to be referred to by one name and another day an entirely different name, and if a teacher or another student refused to address them by that name, that teacher or student would be penalized.

Practically speaking, this means that the federal government will pressure teachers and students to refer to transgender students as “ze, em, ver, xyr, perself,” or a whole multitude of other gender pronouns. For teachers, the consequences of not complying could easily look like being forced to resign, and students could possibly be expelled for non-compliance.

Don’t teachers and school districts already have enough problems to deal with? The last thing teachers need to be concerned about is whether they could get fired if they forget each transgender student’s preferred gender pronoun or preferred name. The last thing students need to deal with is a multitude of gender pronouns confusing their proper learning of the English language.

Family Policy Alliance notes:

…[P]erhaps the directive shouldn’t have come as a big surprise.  The person who issued the memo, Candice Jackson, is the acting director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education.  Given that she was appointed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – who has been attacked mercilessly by the Left – some may assume that Jackson is a pro-family conservative.

Yet Jackson, who has been in a same-sex marriage for more than ten years, is known for her vocal support of the LGBT movement. In January, she tweeted an article about the gay community getting an ally in Trump, adding the comment: “Reasonable LGBT citizens (as opposed to the militant leftwing LGBT movement) have reason to cheer POTUS Trump; he’s shifting the GOP.”

This directive must be rescinded or altered or it will continue to pose a threat  to free speech and religious liberty of faculty and students across the entire nation.

Fulfilling a campaign promise to get rid of the “Johnson Amendment,” President Donald Trump, according to Liberty Counsel, “signed an executive order today that promotes religious liberty throughout the federal agencies in general and in certain specific areas”:

The executive order declares that it is the policy of the Administration to protect and vigorously promote religious liberty, directs the IRS to exercise maximum enforcement of discretion to alleviate the burden of the Johnson Amendment, and provides regulatory relief for religious objectors to Obamacare’s burdensome preventive services mandate.

The Johnson Amendment, named for then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and enacted into law in 1954, restricts tax-exempt organizations, including churches and religious organizations, from endorsing or opposing candidates for elected office. The executive order will provide some relief by directing the IRS to relax its enforcement of the provision.

For decades, the Johnson Amendment has deterred many church pastors and leaders from speaking about the moral issues of the day due to the fear of having their tax-exempt status revoked. Unfortunately, it was also used as an excuse to avoid controversial matters of morality that, over the years, became dominated by politics.

In an article earlier this year, Dr. Michael Brown wrote that he believes “it is the fear of man that has muzzled us and it is our desire to be affirmed by the world that has silenced us”:

The Johnson Amendment, as wrong as it is, is quite limited in its scope, primarily prohibiting “certain tax-exempt organizations from endorsing and opposing political candidates.”

It does not prohibit pastors from speaking out against political corruption. It does not prohibit pastors from speaking out against LGBT activism. It does not prohibit pastors from speaking out against abortion.

Nevertheless, many pastors and leaders have feared losing church members or offending those who disagreed. Now, with the loss of the excuse of the Johnson Amendment, Christian pastors and leaders can now, in the words of Dr. Brown, get back to the business of helping believers “sort out” cultural matters  “based on Scripture.”

“This is an appropriate way to commemorate the National Day of Prayer,” said Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver, “as our President commits to protect and promote religious freedom.”

To learn more about the Johnson Amendment and what churches can and cannot do, click here.

Please join the Illinois Family Institute in thanking President Trump.

Take ACTION: CLICK HERE to thank President Trump for keeping his promise to protect free speech and religious liberty.

Editor’s Note:  Today’s action is a great first step in restoring First Amendment religious liberty rights, however it doesn’t change some of our nation’s most troubling laws, like the 1954 Johnson Amendment, or state laws that tyrannize Christian business owners.  We must keep in mind that this Executive Order could easily be overturned by the next president…  so we still have much work to do.

Lawmakers in Washington D.C. and Springfield must still follow through in making real changes to defend religious liberty against despotism.

Image credit: Liberty Counsel.

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Before Christmas, I warned how Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity laws, or SOGI laws, as they’re called, create new protected classes of people based on inclination and behavior, not biological realities of race and sex.

I also warned that so-called compromises to carve out religious exemptions for churches and religious organizations would not only fail to protect people of conscience not in religious organizations, it would mark all of us seeking exemptions as bigots with a Scarlet B.

Now it seems that we’re at an impasse, but not really. I’m grateful how the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson has demonstrated, in a new report, that fighting discrimination and protecting religious liberty do not have to be mutually exclusive.

A key point of the report, which is entitled “How to Think about Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Policies and Religious Freedom,” is that proponents of such wide-ranging SOGI laws have failed to prove they’re even needed. In fact, as Ryan says, there’s “no evidence that people who identify as LGBT have been turned away by a single hotel chain, a single major restaurant, or a single major employer.”

Even so, like all laws, SOGI laws will have a pedagogical role in our society, teaching that the Judeo-Christian worldview is “not only false, but discriminatory and rooted in animus.” They will impose a new orthodoxy concerning human sexuality “by punishing dissent and treating as irrational, bigoted, and unjust the beliefs that men and women are biologically rooted and made for each other in marriage.”

So at their core, Anderson writes, “SOGI laws are not about the freedom of LGBT people to engage in certain actions, but about coercing and penalizing people who in good conscience cannot endorse those actions.”

So what’s the way forward? First, as Anderson suggests, we should identify real-world instances of discrimination and then tailor-focus responses appropriate for the need, rather than implementing sweeping SOGI legislation. We might even find, as we look for specific real-world instances of discrimination, that government action is not even necessary—if “social, economic, and cultural forces” (are) sufficient to address the needs on their own.

Second, Anderson points out, both sides need to carefully define terms. There is a difference, for example, between discrimination and making distinctions. Sex-specific bathrooms and locker rooms, for instance, are not based on discrimination, but upon observable physiological and common-sense distinctions. And here’s another distinction: religious adoption agencies “decline to place the children entrusted to their care with same-sex couples not because of their sexual orientation, but because of the conviction that children deserve both a mother and a father.”

Another term to define is “public accommodation.” If a church holds a spaghetti dinner and welcomes the public, does that make it a place of “public accommodation” subject to SOGI laws? No. But the commonwealth of Massachusetts seems to think so.

Ryan concludes, “if other policies are adopted to address the mistreatment of people who identify as LGBT, they must leave people free to engage in legitimate actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other. This would,” Anderson asserts, “leave all Americans—not just the lucky few who are sufficiently well-connected to be exempted from SOGI laws—free to act on those convictions.”

I encourage you to read Anderson’s report. Then send the report to your state and federal representatives, as well as to friends and relatives open to a common-sense discussion of these very choppy waters. Finally, consider adding your name to our statement on SOGI Laws. You can find it at our website: BreakPoint.org.

BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life. Begun by Chuck Colson in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print. Today BreakPoint commentaries, co-hosted by Eric Metaxas and John Stonestreet, air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Feel free to contact us at BreakPoint.org where you can read and search answers to common questions.

Three and a half years ago in an article titled “Frightening The Horses,” writer and editor Rod Dreher opens giving a fellow writer kudos. “Ben Domenech calls it,” Dreher notes, and then excerpts him:

I think they have really been arguing against the rise of something which has a much larger impact than just a small number of homosexuals getting married — they have instead been arguing against the modern concept of sexual identity. And this is a much tougher task, considering how ingrained this concept has become in our lives.

During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense — “I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses” — and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar — in much the same way religion is for others.

After commenting on that, Dreher goes back to Domenech again:

So the real issue here is not about gay marriage at all, but the sexual revolution’s consequences, witnessed in the shift toward prioritization of sexual identity, and the concurrent rise of the nones and the decline of the traditional family. The real reason Obama’s freedom to worship limitation can take hold is that we are now a country where the average person prioritizes sex far more than religion.

. . .

In a nation where fewer people truly practice religion, fewer people external to those communities will see any practical reason to protect the liberty of those who do.

I highly recommend Rod Dreher’s entire article, where he weaves together several more excerpts from others, including the late Justice Antinon Scalia. Ben Domenech’s article The Future of Religious Liberty is also worth your time. Their point — that opening the door to mandated acceptance of everyone’s choice of identity has serious negative consequences.

Let’s turn to our next identity. A few years ago the Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins wrote an article titled, “Whole: A New Documentary on a Troubling Disorder.” Here is the opening:

The new documentary Whole, which recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, explores the troubling topic of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). This disorder, which I have mentioned in several articles, used to be called apotemnophilia.

Those who suffer from BIID identify with amputees and seek to have their bodies align with their psychological identity. That is to say, they seek to have healthy limbs amputated. Many of those who suffer from BIID (known colloquially as “amputee wannabes”) recount feeling these desires from a very young age. Some have accomplished their goal through self-mutilation, and at least two have been facilitated in their quest by a doctor in Scotland.

Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page (emphasis added):

Body integrity identity disorder (BIID, also referred to as amputee identity disorder) is a psychological disorder wherein sufferers feel they would be happier living as an amputee…

BIID is typically accompanied by the desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs to achieve that end. BIID can be associated with apotemnophilia, sexual arousal based on the image of one’s self as an amputee.

So, next on our list of basic and important questions: How will society respond to “After the Ball” type efforts to normalize BIID, remove it from the DSM’s (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) list of mental disorders, and demonize those who disapprove of it?

It is their identity, after all, and you shouldn’t be a bigot.

Up next: Transgenderism.

Written by Josh Hetzler

I hear a lot of faulty rhetoric these days repeated ardently in the public square – rhetoric that is often self-contradictory and so intellectually weak that it hardly merits retort. Among the clearest examples of this sort of rhetoric can be heard all around us in the following phrase, or similar versions thereof: “Discrimination is discrimination, period, and discrimination of any kind is wrong.” Without exception, this statement is followed up with: “Therefore, the government should prevent and/or penalize all forms of discrimination.”

No doubt you’ve heard this line before. It has quickly become one of the favorite talking points of those who seek to impose every radical perversion of sex and gender ideology onto all those remaining who have not yet gotten on board with their “progressive” thinking. Elevating the concepts of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to specially protected classes is just the most recent crusade of these immoralists.

At surface level, the rhetoric sounds great, right? It appeals to our better side, which tells us (correctly) that we should treat all people with equal dignity and respect. At an emotional level, we would personally feel bad to treat a person differently than others for fear that it might be unfair or even hurtful to that person. And understandably, most of us don’t want that. But once past the surface, the rhetorical value ends.

As with all things, we must take the next step and actually think about what is being said and ask ourselves: Is it true? Is it sound? Is it consistent with objective reality? Does it foster and promote a better and freer society for all?

On all counts, the answer must be “no.” In fact, nothing could be more absurd to the habits of a free people.

After all, freedom itself requires discrimination because it necessitates an endless series of choices, and a choice is nothing if not the exercise of discrimination – for any number of a million different reasons – in favor of some things to the exclusion of others. I choose pizza over salad. You choose women to be your close friends over men. I choose to buy a house in a particular neighborhood instead of others. You choose to practice this religion over that one. And regardless of whether or not we agree with everyone’s choices, we should all agree that each person should be free to make those choices. Not only do those choices enable us to live freely, but they also highlight our uniqueness as individuals.

In reality, every single conscious decision each of us makes in life is an act of discrimination. We weigh our values, convictions, preferences, and interests with every scenario we encounter, and then we apply them in making decisions about how we will live our lives, with whom we will interact, and what things (or people) we will avoid. We are always discriminating. There is no freedom without it. And we all love freedom, don’t we?

Simply put, freedom IS discrimination.

It can be of no value then to simply say that “discrimination is discrimination,” since you are not really saying anything at all except what is already obvious. (e.g. 2 = 2) A reasonable person might then suspect that what the declarant is really doing is injecting some unknown definition of “discrimination” into his statement, without ever bothering to define it. Thus, what he puts forward as obvious is actually anything but obvious, and knowing this, he hides behind the purposeful confusion he has created since the truth simply will not support his agenda.

Moreover, he cannot really mean that all discrimination is wrong and should therefore be unlawful. To say this is to say that we ought to have a totalitarian state that makes all the decisions rather than a free one in which individuals make their own decisions according to their own values.  Yet as I consider the actual direction this rhetoric is taking us, I’m beginning to think that a totalitarian state in which the declarant makes the decisions for all people is precisely what he’s after. Getting his way means that you lose your freedom. He knows this, but he isn’t about to state it openly – preferring instead to declare that he is against all “discrimination.” Ironically, this “anti-discrimination” for which he advocates is exactly the kind of discrimination that free societies cannot tolerate without ceasing to be free.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that individuals sometimes abuse their freedom in ways that are hurtful to others. As neighbors and fellow citizens, we ought to find constructive ways to address and correct those abuses. Freedom, rightly understood, comes not only with rights, but duties also – both to God and our fellow man.

In light of this understanding, as a matter of public policy then, the relevant questions when it comes to discrimination are these:

1) Which, if any, bases for discrimination should be prohibited by the government (and by which government)? And if any,

2) In what contexts and to what degree should those bases for discrimination be prohibited?, and

3) Since freedom is itself the ability to discriminate based on various self-determined criteria, does the claimed need for the prohibition of a particular basis of discrimination in a particular context outweigh the corresponding loss of freedom?, and

4) To what extent do our federal or state Constitutions guarantee the protection of certain freedoms so as to make the answers definitive?

But these questions are virtually never even acknowledged since they require a thoughtful and reasoned analysis, along with a recognition that these issues are not always so cut and dry as some would like you to believe. It’s high time for “progressives” to be honest about the issue of discrimination because only then can we begin to reach any common ground on how best to deal with it. Their faulty rhetoric thus far has served only to distort the real issues while resulting in a mass deception. Despite how pathetically shallow the rhetoric is, it has nevertheless continued to captivate the simple-minded. But in a free society, although freedom cannot be said to exist where not all ideas are permitted, the same freedom can only be sustained where the faulty ideas are being constantly challenged, scrutinized, and demolished.

Let’s hope more sensible minds prevail in demolishing this particular rhetorical nonsense, since the freedom of us all depends upon it.

This article was originally posted at The Family Foundation blog.

In the wake of England’s historic Brexit vote, and during America’s own Fourth of July celebrations, we’re reminded that man’s longing for individual freedom is a contagion, and that to declare independence from overreaching governmental control is a big part of the cure.

Still, while the UK’s recent “Declaration of Independence” from a decidedly socialist European Union was largely driven by socio-economic considerations, not to mention a desperate attempt to remedy Britain’s demographic suicide cocktail of political correctness, multiculturalism and deadly immigration jihad, America’s own freedom revolution was driven by a longing for both fiscal independence, and, to a larger extent, an effort to secure the unalienable right to individual and corporate religious liberty – particularly the free exercise of Christianity.

“The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity,” observed John Adams, our second U.S. President. “I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”

At our founding America at once declared independence from tyranny and reaffirmed our dependence on the one true God of the Bible.

We must do so again.

Or perish.

The historical record is irrefutable. Consider this formal statement issued by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 1854: “Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle… In this age, there can be no substitute for Christianity… That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.”

Sadly, today’s secular left has indeed declared war against Christianity, the “religion of the founders of the republic,” which was “expected [to] remain the religion of their descendants.”

And the war has reached fever pitch. It’s high time this anti-Christian “revolution” was “strangled in its cradle.”

Indeed, contrast the above Judiciary Committee declaration with one recently made by Hillary Clinton: “Rights have to exist in practice – not just on paper,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee recently said in the context of some phantom “right” to sacrifice undesirable infants on the altar of “choice.” “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed (emphasis mine).”

“Religious beliefs have to be changed.” And change them (or, more accurately, criminalize them) they intend.

As I detail at length in my latest book, “Hating Jesus: The American Left’s War on Christianity,” God’s natural created order, His immutable, scientific and transcendent moral precepts, as well as the very lives and livelihoods of Christian Americans, are under vicious attack today at a level unprecedented in American history.

This is, in every way conceivable, anathema to what the founders, and the U.S. Constitution, intended.

“Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. … What a Eutopia – what a Paradise would this region be!” pined John Adams. “Without [Christianity], this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company: I mean hell,” he added.

Yet it bears repeating: Jesus continually warned that this anti-Christian war declared by the pagan left would occur: “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. …” (John 15:18-20)

So what should we do?

Jesus commands His followers to be His hands and feet – to be salt and light in a rotting world that loves darkness (Matthew 5:13-16).

While it is true that salt preserves; in an open wound, it also burns. Today’s anti-Christian, moral relativist culture is an open wound.

While it is true that light’s bright glare can be illuminating to those eager to see, it is likewise blinding to those whose eyes have become adjusted to darkness. When the light of Christ is shined, it sends lovers of evil scurrying for the shadows.

For this reason, Christ also warned, “You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:22).

For Christians, those times when the right people call us the wrong things are among those times we should “rejoice in our sufferings.” I received two emails this week alone that have given me great cause to rejoice. Because, as John Adams put it, I very publicly advocate the “general principles of Christianity,” I receive from those who hate Jesus, dozens of the following types of communications each month.

“Your fate is the same fate as ISIS. The only difference between you and them is the religious symbol on your armband and the fact that in their countries they can get away with murdering those who do not and will not bow down to their perversion of religion,” emailed someone identified as Mark Anderson (MA1779@gmail.com). “ISIS deserves to die and so do you,” he continued, “and when the United States government puts both of you rabid savages down the world will be a better place.”

Thank you, Mr. Anderson.

Someone calling himself Anthony Marks (AM999@aol.com) continued with the same theme: “You, Matt Barber, deserve to be riddled with the same bullets that took down the Orlando Terrorist. You deserve to hang at the neck just as Heinrich Himmler would have had the anti-LGBT savage not killed itself before it could be punished for its crimes against humanity. You deserve to be burning in Hell. … You are a non-human abomination worthy of death and you will get what you deserve…you disgusting barbarian filth.”

Thank you, Mr. Marks.

People ask me, “How do you take this kind of hatred day in and day out? Does it frighten you? Does it upset you?”

To which I reply, “No, I count it all joy.”

In fact, while I’m always buoyed by notes of encouragement, it’s the vile hate mail and death threats that lift my spirits more than anything else. They bless me. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me” (Matthew 5:11).

I pray for these people. They’re not my enemies. They’re lost. I hurt for them. I want those who hate Jesus to come to know Him as their Lord and Savior.

Their eternity depends on it.

And then I once again declare my dependence on God.

This article originally posted in Town Hall.

“Progressives” who view the cultural embrace of deviant sexuality as good seek to eradicate the last cultural obstacle to its universal embrace: biblical truth. Since that’s not possible, they seek instead to eradicate religious liberty by incrementally narrowing the cultural terrain in which the “free exercise of religion” is permitted to roam.

“Progressives” committed to the absolutely free exercise of sexual deviance view religious liberty as exercised by theologically orthodox Christians as a malignant tumor that harms the health of the republic. In order to destroy this insalubrious tumor without destroying the host, religious liberty must be excised slowly and carefully, tissue by tissue.

There’s no clearer evidence that “progressives” believe religious liberty has no place in the public square than the virulent response to reasonable laws proposed or passed in a few states to protect that which the First Amendment already protects.

Of course, since foolish inconsistency is the hallmark of little “progressive” minds, religious liberty for those who affirm heterodox or heretical religious beliefs is hunky dory because such beliefs neither prescribe nor proscribe. When it comes to sexuality, such beliefs affirm anything and everything. And affirmation of desire is the Left’s supreme truth.

But do all “progressives” share the beliefs of  New York Times columnist Frank Bruni who ordained that religious liberty should be restricted to “pews, homes and hearts.”

Here’s what Michelle Obama said about faith:

Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well, especially…when …we’re making those daily choices about how to live our lives.
 
We see that in the life of Jesus Christ.  Jesus didn’t limit his ministry to the four walls of the church. We know that….And our charge is to find Him everywhere, every day by how we live our lives. That is how we practice our faith. You see, living out our eternal salvation is not a once-a-week kind of deal.  

And here’s what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

…

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God…. 

…

I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

…

I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?“ 

…

In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. 

Whose words more comport with the First Amendment: Frank Bruni’s or Martin Luther King Jr.’s? Whose words have inspired courageous, noble, and sacrificial works? Whose words more resonate with truth?

While children in elementary schools are being taught the body and soul-destroying lies that homoerotic activity is good, that families in which children are intentionally deprived of either mothers or fathers are good, that rejection of one’s physical embodiment as male or female is good, and that marriage has no intrinsic nature, many Christians say and do exactly what “LGBTQQAP” activists want them to say and do: nothing.

And now the government is ordering Christians to use their labor, their gifts, and their property in the service of a type of event that God hates. Such unjust laws and court decisions must be resisted. Christians must resist all efforts to undermine the liberty that Michelle Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. urge Christians to embrace and make visible through works.

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men,
knowing that from the Lord you will receive the
inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”
~Colossians 3: 23-24

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Openly homosexual New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni has announced his generous support for the right of people of faith “to believe what they do and say what they wish—in their pews, homes and hearts.” (emphasis added).

Wow, thanks, Mr. Bruni.

The hubris of “progressives,” particularly “progressives” of a particular rainbow-hued stripe, seems to know no bounds. According to Bruni, conservative Christians must relinquish their constitutionally protected right to the free exercise of religion on his altar to the god of homoeroticism.

A peevish Bruni starts his screed by moaning that he feels “chafed” by claims that homosexuals like himself are a threat to religious liberty and then proceeds to argue for a breathtaking limitation of religious liberty to only pews, homes, and hearts—which is actually no liberty at all. In so doing, Bruni reveals his lack of understanding of both the history of religious liberty and of what faith entails for followers of Christ.

The First Amendment was intended to protect the right of people of faith to practice their religion unencumbered by government, which has the unruly tendency to intrude into areas of human life into which it ought not intrude. The Free Exercise Clause was intended to provide broad protections for the exercise of religion—which is not limited to pews, homes, and hearts, and not abrogated by homoeroticism.

Homosexuals and their “progressive” ideological allies who condemn orthodox Christian beliefs are trying to arrogate to themselves the right to determine what the free exercise of religion for orthodox Christians entails. For true followers of Christ, the practice of religion is a holistic endeavor—at least as holistic as homosexuals claim their romantic and erotic desires are. Imagine someone saying that he supports the right of homoerotically-oriented men and women to believe what they do and say what they wish only in their churches, homes, hearts, and maybe the Center on Halsted.

Or imagine if those homosexuals who attend churches that embrace late 20^th Century, heterodox theology and as a result support legalized same-sex faux-“marriage” were told that they could believe what they wish and say what they wish only in their pews, homes, and hearts. In other words, they should lose the right to affect public policy or allow their business practices to reflect their religious beliefs.

In a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish, Bruni asks, “why should a merchant whose version of Christianity condemns homosexuality get to exile gays and lesbians?” Exiling gays and lesbians? Wow again.

The inconvenient truth for Bruni is that Christian florists and bakers are seeking neither to exile homosexuals nor to refuse to serve customers who affirm a homoerotic identity. Rather, they’re refusing to use their time, gifts, and labor to make a particular product that celebrates an event that the God they serve abhors. In reality, these same florists and bakers have actually served on multiple occasions the very homosexuals who are suing them for not making products for their “weddings.”

Bruni then digs in with his floppy shovel, suggesting that not making a cake or floral arrangement  for a same-sex “wedding” is analogous to a Muslim store-owner refusing to serve a woman whose head is not covered or a Mormon hairdresser turning away clients “who saunter in with frappuccinos.”

In other words, Bruni suggests that when a baker chooses not to make a particular product for a particular type of event—and a type of event for which this baker has never made a product—it is analogous to a business-owner demanding that a customer adopt the owner’s religious practices in order to be able to purchase a product or service.

But of course, no Christian florist or baker has demanded that customers adopt his or her religious practices or beliefs in order to purchase a product or receive a service. Conservative Christian bakers sell their cookies and cupcakes to homosexuals. Christian photographers take photos of homosexuals. Christian florists sell flowers to homosexuals. No Christian has turned away customers who saunter in wearing a PRIDE t-shirt. And Christian business-owners do not demand that customers wear crucifixes or take Communion in order to be served.

It’s important to note this critical distinction: A ceremony that celebrates the union of two people of the same-sex is not identical to a ceremony that celebrates the union of two people of opposite sexes. Such a ceremony is the antithesis of a marriage, which is why many orthodox Christians will not use the terms “wedding” or “marriage” to describe the union of two people of the same-sex.

Calling a homoerotic union a “marriage” does not make it a marriage in reality. Just as legally construing a human as 3/5 person would not make him in reality only 3/5 a person, the foolish decision of foolish people to recognize legally a homoerotic union as a “marriage” does not make it in reality a marriage.

So, the request of homosexuals for a cake for their “wedding” is not the same as a request from a heterosexual couple for a cake for their wedding. Homosexuals are seeking to compel bakers to make a product for an entirely different type of event, and one which the bakers believe mocks real marriage and offends God.

Bruni trots out and beats the dying but still useful homosexuality = race horse: “As these lamentations about religious liberty get tossed around, it’s worth remembering that racists have used the same argument to try to perpetuate segregation.” It’s also worth remembering that the fact that one group of people with a gross misunderstanding of Scripture appealed to religious liberty to defend evil practices does not mean all groups who appeal to religious liberty are guilty of engaging in evil practices or of grossly misinterpreting Scripture.

Moreover, it makes no rational sense to compare a condition like race that has no inherent connection to either feelings or volitional acts to homoeroticism which is constituted solely by feelings and volitional acts.

Since Bruni is busy declaring the boundaries in which people of faith may exercise their religion, maybe Bruni can help us out by answering these questions:

• Should a male Muslim massage therapist whose faith prohibits him from touching unrelated women be required to give massages to unrelated women?

• Should a Mormon hairdresser whose faith teaches that polygamy is profoundly sinful be required to use her skills to style the hair of brides in a polygamist’s commitment ceremony?

• Should a Christian whose faith teaches that racism is sinful be required to bake a cake decorated with a white supremacy message for a Neo-Nazi event?

• Should a baker who identifies as a “gay Christian” and attends a theologically heterodox church—perhaps a Metropolitan Community Church or a Dignity USA chapter—be compelled to make a cake for a National Organization for Marriage event?

Bruni makes clear the error in his thinking when he says that Christian bakers, photographers, and florists “are routinely interacting with customers who behave in ways they deem sinful. They don’t get to single out one group of supposed sinners. If they’re allowed to, who’s to say they’ll stop at that group?”

Bruni’s rendering of the plight of Christian owners of wedding-related businesses is backwards. Christian owners of wedding-related businesses are not singling out and refusing to serve a particular group of sinners. Rather, some members of a particular group of sinners are trying to force Christian owners of wedding-related businesses to participate in their sin.

Bruni presumptuously proclaims that “Baking a cake, arranging roses, running an inn: These aren’t religious acts…”

Well, God may beg to differ with Bruni:

• “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).

• And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17).

• “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men…” (Col. 3:23)

• “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness…” (Jer. 22:13).

• “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

• “For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.  Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.  Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.  For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret” (Eph. 5: 5-12).

Due to the astonishing influence of homosexual and “trans” activism and the unbiblical cowardice of Christians—including especially Christian leaders—we’re going to see the government increasingly making demands on Christians with which Christians ought not comply. It is during those times that Christians should remember that we are commanded to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The Truth Project

First Annual IFI Worldview Conference
featuring Dr. Del Tackett
April 10-11, 2015

CLICK HERE for Details

Note: now that rogue and renegade federal judges have struck down amendments that protect natural marriage in Mississippi and Arkansas, passed with 86 percent and 75 percent of the vote respectively, it’s time once again to review the solution: courageous governors.

There is one and only one short range solution to a runaway judiciary on the issue of sodomy-based marriage: a governor with the testosterone to stand up and just say no.

Governors take an oath of office to uphold the federal constitution and the constitution of their own state. Any governor in any state with a marriage amendment as a part of his constitution has the right, nay, the duty, to refuse to comply with any judicial order to recognize same-sex marriage.

The Constitution is utterly silent on the topic of homosexuality and marriage, which means, according to the Constitution the Founders gave us, this is an issue reserved exclusively to the states.

Any ruling from any federal court that imposes domestic policy on a state is by its very nature unconstitutional, and no governor has any obligation to obey it. In fact, quite the opposite. He must refuse to comply with it, for to comply would mean he must violate his own sacred oath of office.

A governor’s oath is to defend the Constitution of both the federal government and his own state. Defending something by definition means protecting it when it is under attack, regardless of where that attack comes from — even if the attack comes from a federal judge, a federal court, or the Supreme Court itself.

Governors have been meekly capitulating to judicial tyranny, one after the other, and timidly abandoning their posts.

Americans have no understanding of how little power the federal judiciary actually holds. It was designed by the Founders to be the least powerful branch of the federal government, with its jurisdiction limited to settling matters of dispute between individual states and matters of international controversy. The Supreme Court met in a closet for the first several decades of its existence, a sign of the lowly stature it occupied under the Constitution as written.

But the federal judiciary has mutated into a gargantuan beast, looming over liberty, freedom and the Constitution itself, and imposing its own benighted and twisted version of morality on the entire country with no legal, statutory, constitutional or moral authority.

But it has no police force it can order to arrest or detain anyone. If its unconstitutional rulings are ignored, what will the Supreme Court do? It can issue an arrest order, I suppose, but if a governor will not allow it to be executed, what can the Court do? The answer is nothing.

President Andrew Jackson once said, of a decision handed down by the chief justice of his day, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”  What happened in the face of this defiance from a co-equal branch of government? Precisely nothing.

The truth is the federal judiciary is impotent apart from the good will of the American people. Once the American people realize that the Supreme Court is a co-equal branch of government, not the superior branch of government, they can get back to governing themselves rather than deferring to black-robed oligarchs to make all the important decisions for them.

For a governor to stand up and refuse to cower to a federal court would not be civil disobedience at all. It would be constitutional obedience — obedience to the Constitution and its provisions in the ninth and 10th amendments, obedience to his own state constitution, and obedience to the oath he took before Almighty God.

Governors do not take an oath of allegiance to the Supreme Court. They take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. It’s time they started acting like it.

For an organization that frequently goads government into advancing an atheistic viewpoint on everyone within reach, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) talks a good game about how wrong it is for some people to “impose their beliefs on others.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June in favor of Hobby Lobby and another Christian-owned company that refused to comply with Obamacare’s abortifacient mandate has sent the leftwing legal group into ongoing apoplexy:

“While religious freedom gives us all the right to make personal decisions about how to practice religion,” the ACLU states, “it doesn’t give institutions or individuals the right to impose their beliefs on others.”

Really? Doesn’t requiring the Christian owners of Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood Products to cut their conscience to fit the ACLU’s atheism constitute a situation where the ACLU itself is trying to use the law to “impose their beliefs on others?”

According to the ACLU’s reading of the First Amendment, it’s okay to have “freedom of worship,” which means keeping religious stuff strictly in your head or behind church doors. But God help you if you try to live it out in the real world, where the ACLU prowls for “victims.”

On the bright side, the ACLU is doing us all a favor by keeping track of its many religious freedom challenges to the oppressive Obamacare contraceptive mandate across the nation.

“To date, 101 cases have been filed challenging the rule as an infringement on religious liberty,” the ACLU states on its website. “Eighty-nine of these cases are currently pending: 41 cases brought by nonprofit organizations, 45 cases brought by for-profit companies, and 3 cases brought by both nonprofit and for-profit plaintiffs.”

The devil’s law firm and other atheistic groups are also actively attacking religious freedom by contending that religiously-affiliated schools cannot require employees to live by religious standards.

In 2012, in the Hosanna-Tabor case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the government cannot interfere with religious groups’ faith-based employment qualifications. But the lawsuits keep coming.

In 2013, San Diego Christian College dismissed an employee, Teri James, who had become pregnant out of wedlock. She retained feminist camera hog attorney Gloria Allred and sued the university, even though Ms. James had signed a covenant as a condition of employment agreeing not to engage in certain behaviors, including premarital sex. But what’s a promise or a contract worth?

“Women out there should not have to worry about losing their income and independence just because they are carrying a child,” Ms. James said in a statement.

Independence? She means that the school has a duty to support her in the manner in which she is accustomed even if she breaks their rules. The ACLU summed up the situation this way:

“There are cases … of religious schools firing employees who are unmarried and pregnant, for example, in the name of religion.”

Well, yes. A Christian school should have the right to employ people who abide by Christian values, such as keeping sex within marriage. What’s the point of having an expressly Christian organization if the people within it openly defy its values?

Would the ACLU be comfortable hiring someone who opposes abortion on demand or same-sex “marriage?” How about an anti-porn advocate?

In Missouri, the American Humanist Association is threatening to sue because one recruit was made uncomfortable when he spotted some donated Gideon Bibles on a shelf at a National Guard intake center in St. Louis. Maybe the recruit would benefit from a stint in a country not yet influenced by Christianity’s unique respect for individual rights.

The ACLU is the point of the spear, legally speaking, of a larger Leftist campaign to fundamentally transform America into a place where fornication of any kind under the sun trumps all other human rights. It’s the only freedom we’ll have left after they establish government-enforced diversity re-education to stamp out anything resembling traditional religious values.

Achieving diversity used to mean ending discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or other immutable characteristics. Now it means dividing people into groups based on grievances and then constantly inflaming those sore points. Google the “war on women” for more details.

For good measure, anyone resisting this onslaught is said to be “obsessed” with it, as if the activists demanding a wholesale moral meltdown are, by contrast, only casually involved.

In his classic, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’s professorial devil instructs his demon nephew that in order to make it easier to steal souls, “All extremes except extreme devotion to [God] are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period.

“Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.”

For decades, the ACLU has been reading the devil’s mail and acting accordingly.

They’ve learned only too well how to “impose their beliefs on others.”

This article was originally posted at the TownHall.com website.

Written by Ryan T. Anderson

Earlier today, President Barack Obama issued an executive order barring federal contractors from what it describes as “discrimination” on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Employers should respect the intrinsic dignity of all of their employees, but as I explain in greater detail at the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal, today’s executive order undermines our nation’s commitment to pluralism and religious liberty.

The order does not contain any religious-liberty protections — though it does leave in place an older federal regulation that permits religious organizations that favor employment of co-religionists to continue such practices. But there is no protection for organizations that hire based on mission — not on affiliation — to continue to do so. This in effect excludes taxpayers who hold conscientious beliefs about sexuality that run counter to Obama’s from being eligible for federal contracts funded with their own tax dollars:

Today’s order is problematic for four reasons, but there is at least one thing that can be done in response.

1. Today’s order undermines our nation’s commitment to reasonable pluralism and reasonable diversity, as it disregards the consciences and liberties of people of goodwill who happen not to share the government’s opinions about issues of sexuality. All Americans should be free to contract with the government without penalty because of their reasonable beliefs about morally contentious issues. The federal government should not use the tax code and government contracting to reshape civil society about controversial moral issues that have nothing to do with the federal contract at stake.

2. Today’s order treats conscientious judgments about behavior as if they were insidious acts of discrimination akin to racism or sexism. But sexual orientation and gender identity are not like race. Indeed, sexual orientation and gender identity are unclear, ambiguous terms. They can refer to voluntary behaviors as well as thoughts and inclinations, and it is reasonable for employers to make distinctions based on actions. By contrast, “race” and “sex” clearly refer to traits, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, these traits (unlike voluntary behaviors) do not affect fitness for any job.

3. Today’s executive order also does not contain a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ) exemption. BFOQs allow employers to make employment decisions so long as those decisions are honestly related to job qualifications. For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act contains a BFOQ that allows employers to take sex into account: hiring a female camp counselor at an all-girls sleep-away summer camp, for example, which might otherwise seem to be “sex discrimination.”

4. Today’s executive order is unnecessary. Voluntary market forces are already eliminating true discrimination, as making employment decisions based on non-relevant factors hurts one’s ability to compete. But the federal government should not penalize those contractors that do conscientiously judge sexual orientation or gender identity to be relevant to their mission and purpose.

5. In response to this executive order, Congress has an opportunity to protect religious liberty and the rights of conscience. Policy should prohibit the government from discriminating against any individual or group, whether nonprofit or for-profit, based on their beliefs that marriage is the union of a man and woman or that sexual relations are reserved for marriage. The government should be prohibited from discriminating against such groups or individuals in tax policy, employment, licensing, accreditation, or contracting. This is the policy approach proposed by the Marriage and Religious Freedom Act (H.R. 3133, S. 1808). 

Protecting religious liberty and the rights of conscience fosters a more diverse civil sphere. Indeed, tolerance is essential to promoting peaceful coexistence even amid disagreement.

This article was originally posted at the National Review Online website.

The mask is off. All pretense has been dropped, and the anti-Christian left’s boundless depth of hatred for individual liberty, our First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is now on full display.

I wrote last week about the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby opinion, a rather tepid acknowledgement of every American’s non-negotiable right to religious free exercise (yes, that includes Christian business owners). I observed, among other things, that “the secularist left’s utter meltdown over having but a small measure of control over others wrested away is highly instructive.”

The meltdown continues. This week brings two new developments: 1) Democrats in Congress have readied a legislative “Hobby Lobby fix” that stands exactly zero chance of passing and would be struck down as unconstitutional even if it did, and 2) The ACLU, AFL-CIO, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Lambda Legal and a hodgepodge of other left-wing extremist groups have withdrawn support for the ironically tagged “Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” the crown jewel of homofascism, because the bill’s paper-thin “religious exemption” does not adequately outlaw the practice of Christianity.

The Hobby Lobby ‘fix’

Addressing the high court’s Hobby Lobby decision last Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., fumed, “We have so much to do this month, but the one thing we’re going to do during this work period – sooner rather than later – is to ensure that women’s lives are not determined by virtue of five white men.”

To which Justice Clarence Thomas replied, “Say what, honky?”

“This Hobby Lobby decision is outrageous,” continued Reid, “and we’re going to do something about it.”

Well, “do something about it” they shall try. TalkingPointsMemo.com reported on legislation Democrats introduced Thursday that would do away with religious liberty protections altogether:

“The legislation will be sponsored by Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Mark Udall, D-Colo. According to a summary reviewed by TPM, it prohibits employers from refusing to provide health services, including contraception [and abortion pills], to their employees if required by federal law. It clarifies that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling against the mandate, and all other federal laws don’t permit businesses to opt out of the Obamacare requirement.

“The legislation also puts the kibosh on legal challenges by religious nonprofits, like Wheaton College, instead declaring that the accommodation they’re provided under the law [there is none] is sufficient to respect their religious liberties.”

This reactionary response to the Hobby Lobby ruling is, of course, little more than an election year fundraising scheme for the Democratic National Committee.

Withdrawn support for ENDA

The Washington Post reports, “Several major gay rights groups withdrew support Tuesday for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would bolster gay and transgender rights in the workplace, saying they fear that broad religious exemptions included in the current bill might compel private companies to begin citing objections similar to those that prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court case last week. …

“But the groups said they can no longer back ENDA as currently written in light of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down a key part of President Obama’s health-care law. The court ruled that family-owned businesses do not have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the owners’ religious beliefs,” concluded the Post.

Gary Glenn is a candidate for the Michigan State House. He’s also president of AFA Michigan. Glenn has been a national leader in defense of religious liberty for well upon two decades. In an email, Glenn wrote, “The extremely limited religious exemptions typically included in discriminatory homosexual and cross-dressing ‘rights’ laws have always been mere window-dressing with no real protection or effect, as witnessed by the ongoing persecution and discrimination under such laws against Christian business owners and community organizations such as the Boy Scouts, Catholic Charities, Salvation Army, and even the United Way.

“But now that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision threatens to give real teeth to such exemptions, the AFL-CIO’s in-house homosexual activist group has announced it will no longer support discriminatory ‘sexual orientation’ legislation that includes even limited exemptions for religious institutions.

“If this zero tolerance stance spreads to larger groups such as the Human Rights Campaign and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force [it now has], this could become the sticking point which hamstrings future attempts to pass federal, state, and local homosexual ‘rights’ legislation. These supposed religious exemptions, which the AFL-CIO’s homosexual lobby at least now says it will no longer support, have been a key propaganda point in blunting the opposition of churches and citizens concerned about the obvious threat such laws pose to religious freedom.”

According to its leftist proponents, ENDA would merely insulate people who choose to engage in homosexual conduct (sexual orientation) or those who suffer from gender confusion (gender identity) against employment intolerance. In truth, however, this legislation effectively would codify the very thing it purports to combat: workplace discrimination.

Though in its current form ENDA contains an extremely weak religious exemption that might – and I mean might – partially protect some churches and religious organizations (until they’re sued by “gay” activists), this so-called exemption would leave most others, such as Bible bookstores and many Christian schools and para-church organizations, entirely unprotected. It would additionally crush individual business owners’ guaranteed First Amendment rights.

Any “religious exemption” is meaningless. Last year Harry Reid promised homosexual pressure groups that Democrats would remove all protections for Christians and other people of faith on the flipside – after ENDA passed. The homosexual news site Washington Blade reported that homosexual activist Derek Washington of “GetEqual” confirmed Reid’s promise. In a conference call with homosexual activists, Washington admitted that Reid vowed, as goes any religious exemption, “the main thing to do was get the vote taken care of, and then deal with it later. As oftentimes happens, you don’t get something perfect the first time around, you go back and fix it later, so that was basically his take on it.”

According to the Blade, “That account was corroborated by Faiz Shakir, a Reid spokesperson, who said the Democratic leader understands the concerns, but wants to get the bill passed first, then go back and address the exemptions.”

They’ve stopped pretending, folks. This is about criminalizing Christianity. The Hobby Lobby decision has merely made secular liberals forget themselves momentarily. It’s blown back the propagandist curtain to expose their truly sinister aims. Hobby Lobby hasn’t put the “culture war” to rest. It’s taken a gavel to the “progressive” hornets’ nest.

Break out the popcorn and Jujubes. It’s about to get interesting.

One year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, this much is clear: Justice Antonin Scalia is a prophet.

Back in 2003, when the court handed down the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down all criminal statutes against homosexual acts, Scalia declared that the stage was set for the legalization of same-sex unions. That was 2003.

“Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as a formal recognition in marriage is concerned,” wrote Scalia.

He was proved to be absolutely prophetic when, just ten years later, the court ruled in United States v. Windsor that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional — thus striking down the federal statute defining marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman.

Once again, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, while Scalia handed down a fiery dissent. As before, Scalia was prophetic.

Even though the Court did not rule that same-sex marriage must be legal in all states, it set the stage for that to happen. As Scalia wrote: “As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.”

One year later, it is abundantly evident that we did not have to wait or listen for long.  Almost immediately, challenges to state laws and constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriages erupted.

In a staggering series of decisions at the federal and state levels, judges explicitly cited the nullification of DOMA and the central arguments of the Windsor decision in striking down those laws and constitutional amendments.

A year after the death of DOMA, not one major decision has defended any of these statutes or amendments. Kennedy’s opinion has been cited as authoritative in virtually every one of these judicial actions.

This has meant that in a single year, the legalization of same sex marriage has become a reality or received a positive judicial action in states including Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon and a host of other states far from where such unions had previously been recognized.

A year later, it is clear that the Supreme Court remains the central political institution of moral transformation in America.

A year later, it is also clear that the court was riding a vast change in public opinion.

We must also see that the time is almost at hand for that transformation to be made complete, at least in terms of the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

What was not clear a year ago was the velocity of this transformation. Even the architects of the revolution are expressing surprise at the speed of these judicial actions.

By the end of this summer, the Supreme Court will likely need to revisit the question once again, this time responding to the cavalcade of lower court decisions the high court spawned.

There is very good reason to expect a decision mandating same-sex marriage coast-to-coast in the Court’s next term, with a decision to be handed down just a year from now, almost to the day.

Furthermore, the Obama administration has been pushing the agenda vigorously, with the federal government now aligning all agency policies in line with the Windsor decision – even extending to areas the decision was never intended to reach.

Where does that leave committed Christians?

Those of us who believe that human flourishing depends upon the recognition and honoring of marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman see this transformation of marriage into something radically different as a grave threat to human society and human happiness.

We do not argue that these damaging effects on society and its individuals will be immediately apparent, but we are sadly confident that the subversion of marriage will bring devastating effects over time.

In retrospect, we can also see that previous subversions of marriage set the stage for the radical redefinition of marriage in our times.

Our failure to answer the challenge of rising divorce rates was, eventually, fatal to our effort to defend marriage against its redefinition in terms of gender. Some of us saw this danger at the time, but there was no adequate effort to oppose the devastating impact of divorce.

The larger sexual revolution also plays an incalculable role in this transformation. The moral separation of sex and marriage among millions of Americans removed any hope of establishing a lasting consensus on the central importance of marriage and its essence as a monogamous man-woman union.

A year after the death of DOMA, it is also clear that very real threats to religious liberty now loom before us. This is perhaps the inevitable consequence of a moral revolution of this scale.

Will the government now coerce the consciences of churches, religious institutions, schools, colleges, social service agencies, and the like? There is now strong evidence that government at every level will attempt such coercion. Will America abandon religious liberty for the sake of erotic freedom?

Those of us who believe same-sex marriage to be a moral impossibility now face a very daunting challenge — how to live in a society that is moving so rapidly against our moral worldview, even as the society shared that worldview for over 2,000 years.

We face the challenge of finding how to relate to our neighbors and contribute to the common good when we see that very society undermining human flourishing in the name of sexual liberty.

A year after the death of DOMA the listening and the waiting are almost over. The revolution is almost complete. The shoe is dropping fast.

One thing is clear to all – no one was exaggerating when the Windsor decision was declared by both sides to be revolutionary.

We can all agree on that much, just one year after the revolution was declared.

This article was first published on the CNN Belief Blog.