The heavy hand of misused government power is getting heavier by the day.

Given the Obama Administration’s vast abuses of executive power, it’s not surprising that lesser lights are following the Chief Executive’s example and waging “lawfare” on their opponents.

In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a pastoral couple who own a wedding chapel are facing a 180-day jail term and a $1,000-per-day fine if they continue to refuse to “marry” homosexual couples. The city says the couple are violating the local anti-discrimination law, which includes “sexual orientation.” Religious freedom? Not so much.

In Houston, it probably seemed like a good idea to Mayor Annise D. Parker, an activist lesbian, for city attorneys to serve five pastors with subpoenas ordering them to turn over all sermons, e-mails, and other communications involving a petition drive against a transgender statute that she had championed.

After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Cuba’s Raul Castro, and Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner routinely misuse the law to crack down on opponents.

Wait. This is America. This is Texas, land of the Alamo, where the U.S. Constitution is supposed to restrain would-be tyrants.

Faced with a hurricane of a backlash, the mayor backed off, sort of, reducing the demand to the content of sermons. Let me translate: “Here’s a gun to your head, pastor. Turn your remarks over – or else. By the way, God bless America.”

What should happen swiftly is her removal from office and civil damage lawsuits filed by the targeted pastors. Jesus said to turn the other cheek when faced with insult, but that does not mean stepping aside and allowing bullies to go on to their next victims. By standing up to anti-religious bigotry and unlawful lawfare, the pastors fight for all of us.

As Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz said recently, “Caesar has no jurisdiction over the pulpit, and when you subpoena one pastor, you subpoena every pastor.”

The mayor, who misused her power to block a referendum a few years ago that would have curbed the city’s lucrative use of red-light revenue cameras, is not exactly an outlier. Liberals across the land reflexively reach for the big gun or gavel when someone disagrees with their agendas. They live to use government power to force their morals, or lack thereof, on everyone else.

The targets include anyone standing in the way of their imagined utopia of pansexuaity, windmills, bureaucratic supremacy, political correctness and a cowed populace dependent on government handouts.

When judges overturn voter-approved state constitutional amendments protecting natural marriage in the law, they know full well that they’re unleashing the legal equivalent of the hounds of hell on millions of Americans who are punch-drunk from repeated outrages committed by judicial tyrants. Increasingly, people are asking what has happened to our self-governing republic and how do we get it back?

In Wisconsin, a vindictive, partisan state district attorney, John Chisholm, has engaged in lawfare to harass conservative groups working with Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Agents have raided people’s homes and offices, looking for evidence that groups violated campaign finance laws by advocating for policies favored by the governor. A court has since ruled against Mr. Chisholm and halted the witch hunt, but not before it had the intended effect: frightening away contributors to Mr. Walker and conservative groups while Mr. Walker faces a tough re-election against a public-union-backed Democrat.

The tactic is similar to the Internal Revenue Service’s well-documented harassment of Tea Party groups, such as multiple. punitive audits of True the Vote, its founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, and her family’s business, and piling on by other Obama-run federal agencies like OSHA.

Back in Texas, the Travis County prosecutor’s office got a grand jury to indict Republican Gov. Rick Perry on two felony counts in September because he vetoed funding for a statewide public integrity unit run by Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg. She had refused to step down after being convicted of drunk driving. The governor thought, not unreasonably, that this disqualified her as an “ethics” officer. The ludicrous charges against the governor will at some point be dismissed, but that doesn’t matter. The idea is to get the media to portray Mr. Perry, a possible Republican presidential candidate, as damaged goods.

The Travis County office is good at this. It’s the same unit that took out Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (TX) when hyper-partisan Democrat Ronnie Earle filed bogus money-laundering charges in 2005. Although Mr. DeLay finally was exonerated in September 2013, Earle’s use of lawfare removed one of the most effective Republican leaders and fundraisers for several years.

In Alaska, two partisan federal prosecutors withheld exonerating evidence and managed to get Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens convicted of making false statements about a home renovation just days before the 2008 election. This cost Mr. Stevens, who died in a plane crash in 2010, his long-held seat and elevated Mark Begich, who gave Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate through which Majority Leader Harry Reid rammed Obamacare.

This year, Mr. Begich’s re-election campaign, unaided by lawfare, is counting on the power of his main message: “Obama Who?”

Elections have consequences, and so should misuse of the legal system by unscrupulous politicians who wage lawfare.

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

Written by Matthew J. Franck

Today, we face a movement to accomplish on a societal level what those who embrace morally condemned behavior have always sought as individuals: rationalization.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas recently made waves when he was asked whether he thought homosexuality is a disorder. He replied that he was not professionally qualified to pronounce on a medical or mental health question, and then added, “Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that . . . I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.” As you might expect, this answer—which many millions of Americans might honestly have given—caused a bit of a ruckus.

If you wonder whether you would feel confident giving Perry’s answer, or have doubts whether it is even a defensible answer to give, you should read Robert R. Reilly’s latest book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything. This is a very important book, and Ignatius Press should be commended for publishing it.

Among the “LGBT” activists and their allies who have lately been so successful in transforming our culture’s understanding of love, marriage, and sexual integrity, Reilly’s book will be hated and denounced. It is likely that many of those who denounce the book most strongly will not actually read it. They will certainly not squarely confront or refute its arguments.

By contrast, among those who feel beleaguered by the culture war over same-sex marriage, who have shrugged and decided to live with the fraud of “marriage equality” in hopes of obtaining some civil peace, Reilly’s book will probably just be ignored. That is unfortunate, because Making Gay Okay is a very powerful account of how LGBT activists have so successfully conquered—or at least subdued—the hearts and minds of such people. It is also unfortunate because LGBT activists will not allow for a civil peace on any terms that friends of a free society can accept.

From Tolerance to Cultural Conquest

This must have been a hard book to write. Sometimes, it is a hard book to read. Reilly tries to keep the descriptive material to a minimum, but some degree of rather unsettling description is unavoidable, given his thesis. That thesis is that the overturning of longstanding laws against morally proscribed sexual acts, the push to change the psychiatric profession’s view of sexual “orientation,” the drive for acceptance of open homosexuality in the military, in the Boy Scouts, and in our educational system, and the campaign for same-sex marriage are all about one thing: transforming our society’s attitude toward sodomy. As he puts it in one concise formulation:

The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest because the rationalization upon which it is based requires the assent of the community to the normative nature of the act of sodomy.

Reilly’s insistence on the centrality of the act of sodomy to our culture war over marriage and sexuality is bound to be off-putting even to some readers inclined to his overall view. He has multiple chapter titles beginning “Sodomy and . . . ,” and he refers throughout the book to “sodomitical relationships.” But this blunt and fearless way of arguing only illustrates the Nietzschean “transvaluation of values” our society has undergone. It is now widely considered a violation of the norms of decency in civil discourse to remind people publicly of what were only a generation ago the norms of decency in private behavior as well as public life.

Reilly is right, however, to be tough and unyielding on this point. His touchstone is nature, and his argument is that nature has equipped men and women to enter into one-flesh unions that are both unitive and procreative (here he might have usefully referred to a book powerfully supporting his view, What Is Marriage?). We human beings have a nature both sexual and rational, and our flourishing and happiness cannot be achieved except in accord with our nature.

What distinguishes some persons from others where “sexuality” is concerned is not a different nature, as though “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were distinct human types or “identities,” but different desires, propensities, and, finally, behaviors. The choice to engage in particular sexual behavior is a matter of free will about which moral judgments can be made. Reilly relentlessly stresses the question of behavior, asking whether we are willing to consider sexual behavior, like other behaviors, as properly governed by the ends of human nature and human flourishing. Thus also his insistence on naming the behavior that one side in the “sexuality” wars wants approval for, and that the other side would rather not think about or talk about.

This is not a book that relies on revelation or scripture in any way. As Reilly notes, it was the ancient Greek philosophers who first came to the insights about nature on which he relies. By contrast, the idea that our nature is malleable, that we can remake ourselves to suit our desires, was ushered in by Rousseau. Only with the dominance of this distinctly modern notion did it become possible for age-old moral strictures on sexual behavior to be burned to the ground and replaced by new strictures of our own making. Only a Rousseauian view that nothing about human nature is fixed could give rise to a culture in which it is possible to redefine marriage to include relationships once considered to be intrinsically immoral.

Privacy Jurisprudence, Sex, and Diapers

Ours is a famously tolerant age. One may search high and low, without success, for advocates of reinstating the harsh legal consequences that once attended the discovery of sexual relations between man and man, or woman and woman. In most American jurisdictions, the criminal laws on sodomy were repealed, modified, or simply unenforced long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas struck them down in 2003. Therefore, that ruling did not change much about the practical dangers of running afoul of the law for committing sodomy; they were practically nonexistent already.

But it is one thing for a culture to become increasingly relaxed about such things, as some people reject old moral norms and others are persuaded to think no great harm will come from decriminalization. Such a change is a matter for social negotiation to work out and for prudence to decide. It is quite another thing for the highest court in the land to declare that criminal laws reflecting age-old moral sensibilities about the harm that comes from disordered sexual behavior—sensibilities that are still as defensible as ever—violate a constitutional “right” that can only be derived from fraudulent premises in constitutional law.

Such a ruling embeds new norms of right and wrong in law. Standards of right that were once expressed in the law are now condemned as wrongful discrimination, while conduct once considered degrading and shameful is now considered fitting and proper. The road from the Lawrence ruling to the judicial pronouncement of same-sex marriage as a constitutional right is a short one (as events quickly proved), especially when it is paved with platitudes about the “dignity” of an alleged “class” of persons who can only be identified by reference to their avowed interest in “intimate” conduct with others. This is question-begging with a vengeance.

Reilly rightly notes that “it would be wrong to assign the major share of blame” for the legal somersaults of recent years “to the homosexual apologists.” The blame largely belongs to the partisans who gave us the “privacy” jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court, which began in Griswold v.Connecticut (1965) by breaking “the first link in the chain connecting sex and diapers” and declaring a right of married couples to use contraception. The progression continued in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1971) and Carey v. Population Services (1977), which declared single adults and minors had the same right. Most horrifyingly, Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) declared and reaffirmed a right to kill the unborn child in the womb. “Abortion,” Reilly remarks, “brings to completion the denial of procreative sex by nullifying its effects, which are seen as accidental.”

In this legal regime—pioneered by people with no particular interest in homosexuality—the constitutional “rights” to commit sodomy and to obtain recognition of same-sex relationships as “marriages” are not very surprising. The “freedom” to do what the law hitherto condemned seems easy to justify once human sexuality’s unitive and procreative nature is denied, and the “equality” claim soon follows for the relationships most deeply characterized by this denial.

Casualties of the Assault on Nature

What are the casualties of this assault on nature? The first one is truth. We must believe, contrary to the evidence of our own experience and observations, that sexual “orientation” is somehow immutable, fixed from birth. (Yet we must also believe that “gender identity” is a “social construct.”) We must believe that no one with same-sex attractions can or should do anything to resist them, though we may know people who have done so and believe it has been good for them.

A second casualty is our institutions. We must believe that institutions from the military to the Boy Scouts will suffer no ill effects from the introduction of open homosexual relations in their midst. We must believe that it is good for students from kindergarten to college to be marinated in a sexual ideology that runs contrary to the moral and religious beliefs of the adults who brought them into the world and desire a morally healthy future for them. Our medical and mental health professions must have their notions of healthy and normal behavior sacrificed on the altar of political pressure.

Our faith communities must be turned inside out by revolutions in received doctrine that have been their patrimony for centuries. Our diplomacy must be compromised by the espousal of an ideology that offends the governments and populations of other nations whose friendship is important to the United States. Our Constitution, the rule of law, and republican self-government must be traduced in order to manufacture a specious “marriage equality.”

A third casualty is the next generation. We must believe that the institution of marriage itself will not be wounded further by a fundamental redefinition, after the injuries already inflicted by the sexual revolution’s message of “liberation” through contraception, “population control” through abortion, and no-fault unilateral divorce. We must believe, on the basis of shoddy “social science” backed by ruthless ideologues, that children are no better off being raised by their own biological parents, married to one another in a lifelong union, than in a household headed by people who are in and out of sexual relationships with other adults, whether of the same or the opposite sex. We must believe that dads and moms are optional, interchangeable parental units. Better social science about children’s welfare, as well as the accumulated wisdom of human history, must be suppressed or discredited, by fair means or foul.

The final casualty is freedom itself. We must believe. No public deviation from the new orthodoxy can be permitted, and even private deviations are suspect. No baker, photographer, or florist can be permitted to dissent from the redefinition of marriage, even or especially on explicitly religious grounds. No employer—public, commercial, nonprofit, or religious—can be permitted to demur from the redefinition of marriage in its conditions of employment or the benefits it attaches to marital status. No social service agency or religious charity can be allowed to act on the conviction that children should be placed with a married man and woman as adoptive or foster parents. No couples seeking to adopt or foster children can be allowed to do so if they hold retrograde opinions on sin, sex, and marriage. No one who holds such opinions may be permitted to teach young people, from pre-school to graduate school. No one must be allowed to counsel confused youngsters who have questions about where their sexual desires are leading them, if the counseling offered does not affirm the new ideological normal.

We must believe. As Robert Reilly underscores in this searingly effective book, what we face today is a movement to accomplish, on a collective and society-wide basis, what those who embrace morally condemned behavior have always sought to accomplish for themselves as individuals: rationalization that what’s wrong is right. If we are to remain true to the cumulative wisdom of our civilization about human nature and the conditions of human flourishing, we must respond as fearlessly as the author of Making Gay Okay and say—it’s not.

Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute.

This article was first published on The Public Discourse website.

In the war between life and death, all eyes are on Texas as the Lone Star State legislature is poised to pass a sweeping late-term abortion ban. Gov. Rick Perry has pledged to sign the bill into law. The lines have been clearly drawn surrounding this progress toward equality and civil rights for pre-born Americans. Not surprisingly, as the pro-abortion side loses legislative battle after legislative battle, its “true colors” are coming into focus. Those colors are darker than many might have imagined.

During all civil rights struggles there occurs, it seems, some flashpoint in time that indelibly sears into the mind of a culture, with clarity, the profound realization that one side represents good and the other side evil. Who can forget the images in the 1960s of law enforcement officials turning the hoses – and the dogs – on peaceful African-America demonstrators for merely petitioning their government for racial equality? Millions of fence-sitters across America witnessed this gross injustice on television, sat up in their chairs and finally said: “This is wrong. I will not stand for it.”

Although, our pro-abortion media will not likely give it much coverage, a similar such flashpoint of clarity occurred this past Tuesday in the Texas State House as pro-abortion activists, throughout the day, shouted “Hail Satan!” in an effort to drown out pro-life speeches and an impromptu rendering of “Amazing Grace.” CNN’s Josh Rubin confirmed this astonishing display by tweeting on site: “Crowd of anti-abortion activists giving speeches while a group of people chant hail Satan in the background.”

I would like to take a moment to pause and personally thank our Satan-hailing friends for their brutally wicked honesty. What may have seemed, at the time, a glib bid to mock the peaceful Christians in attendance has, instead, demonstrated to the world exactly from whom (or what) derives the revolting inhumanity that is all things “pro-choice.”

Understandably, many leftist now complain that this frank display of “pro-choice” allegiance to the prince of darkness has hurt the multi-billion dollar baby-killing biz. They’re right. It has. It’s blown away the smokescreen of euphemistic “pro-choice” rhetoric and propaganda to expose, naked beneath, that which lies at abortion’s inglorious core: Death, death and more death.

Indeed, the very Satan they hail was the first “pro-choicer.” While Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life,” Satan is the end, the lie and death itself. While Christ is the “author of life,” Satan is the author of abortion. Our “pro-choice” friends in Texas have now revealed that they at least intuitively recognize this reality.

Matthew 12:34-37 admonishes, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”

Do you consider yourself “pro-choice”? Perhaps it’s time to reconsider. When “pro-choicers” find themselves shouting “hail Satan!” over a chorus of “Amazing Grace” at a gathering geared toward saving babies, maybe it’s time to dust off that ol’ worldview and give it a second look.

Scripture warns: “The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.” (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12)

If you answer to “pro-choice,” you’re only deceiving yourself, my friend. You’re “delighting in wickedness.” Pro-choice to do what? Pro-choice to dismember alive a baby girl in her mother’s womb. That’s wicked. That’s evil – objective, absolute evil – every time and without exception.

That’s abortion.

Abortion is death. If you’re “pro-choice,” you’re pro-abortion and, consequently, pro-death. As the babies you should be protecting perish, so, too, do you perish. You are perishing in the spirit, which is a fate worse than physical death. It’s forever.

The precious aborted babies you refuse to defend – the babies you condemn to death – will see God. Ultimately, they will have eternal life. But because you “refuse to love the truth” and “delight in wickedness,” Scripture warns that, unless you repent and are saved, you will not. If you believe that this is about “women’s reproductive rights,” then you’re laboring “under a powerful delusion.” You “serve the lie.”

Whether you know it or not, you serve Satan.

Open your eyes.

As goes the refrain, “I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.” You can still be found. You can still see. A big step in the right direction is to first admit this painful truth: “Pro-choice” is pro-death.

Join the right side of history. Join the side of good over evil. Join the side of life over death.

Be pro-life.

This article was originally posted at WorldNetDaily.com 

Six GOP presidential candidates are battling it out in the great “early voting states trifecta.” Voters launched the process in Iowa last week to select the Republican Party’s nominee to challenge President Barack Obama in November. The remaining weeks in January citizens in New Hampshire and South Carolina will make their voices heard. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney seems to have a lock on the Granite State while the more conservative presidential hopefuls have better prospects in South Carolina.

Poll Watch?

A recent 7 News/Suffolk University tracking poll has Romney receiving 41 percent support, Texas Congressman Ron Paul was second in the poll with 18 percent and in third 8 percent of likely voters say they support former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who has made New Hampshire the focus of his bid for the GOP nomination, came in at nine percent.

But the world saw what a difference a caucus makes in Iowa. The social conservative, Santorum, who two months ago had one percent support among likely South Carolina Republican Primary voters, now is running a close second there with 24 percent of the vote. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sits in third with 16 percent of the vote. Bringing up the rear is Texas Governor Rick Perry with five percent and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman at two percent, according to Rasmussen Reports. Another two percent of these likely primary voters like some other candidate, and 11 percent remain undecided.

Evangelical Christian voters prefer Santorum over Romney 33 percent to 17 percent.  But Romney leads among other Protestants, Catholics and voters of other faiths with roughly one-third of the votes from each group.

Vying for the Evangelical Vote

For weeks now Santorum, Perry, Gingrich, and in some regards Paul, have all vied for the important evangelical Christian vote.

Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) says developing the right message and a good strategy is critical if a candidate hopes to receive the nomination.

“They’re saying Mitt Romney, who looks like he’s a shoo-in in New Hampshire, if he could have a good, strong showing in Iowa and go through New Hampshire and on down and win South Carolina, he’d be well on his way to the nomination,” King reports. “It’d be awfully hard to reverse it at that point.”

Even if a conservative candidate did not do well in Iowa, he suggests a good showing in South Carolina can sustain a campaign through the summer months.

“On the other hand, a candidate who may not finish first here in Iowa has an opportunity to go to South Carolina, and if they do well there, they can keep their fundraising going enough to get to [the January 31 primary in] Florida,” the congressman adds.

After leading in the pools, Gingrich did poorly in Iowa as a result of millions of dollars was spent in negative attack ads by pro-Romney PACS (political action committees).  Rick Tyler, senior adviser for Winning Our Future, a super PAC for Newt Gingrich, says fundraising has been robust of serious of ads hit the Internet pushing back.

“We intend to lay out the record of all the people in the race and let people make a decision as long as we don’t make a false witness,” said Tyler. “We will extol Newt’s record as a solid conservative who can beat Barack Obama.”

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