“‘Religious Freedom’ which has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with a license to hate/discriminate”, Gavin Newsom, Twitter, July 2016.
Parse the tweet. His Honor Gavin Newsom, and the constellation of lefty groups in the Democratic Party’s gravity field, believes that “Religious Freedom” must be defined by sexual activists of the cultural Left. Make no mistake about it, the Bible in their excitable imaginations must be compelled to bow before their fashionable ideas on matters of sex.
You should not be allowed to take its sexual injunctions seriously, and so says California voters. They, in their hip “wisdom”, have overwhelmingly entrusted the matter to the donkey party and its zealots in near super-majority numbers in the legislature – 29/11 Senate, 60/20 Assembly.
Here are the California Democrats at their state convention in May of 2017 announcing their dislike for President Trump, John Burton at the podium. It’s a message that could equally apply to his evangelical supporters.
Soon, anti-Bible laws will take the pace of anti-sodomy laws. Oh, they say you’ll be okay if you keep the faith in the sanctuary. Don’t dare, though, operate an orphanage, school, hospital, or charity. Birth control, sexual reassignment surgery, abortion, nonchalant bathroom rules, curricular pandering, carte blanche in couplings in adoptions, and censorship in any pastoral message to drunk and drug-addled street people are just over the horizon.
What about the sanctuary? Is it really sacrosanct? If you naively presume it to be, I bring you “Houston, we have a problem”, the 2014 edition. Houston Mayor Annise Parker and her cabal on the city council passed one of those all-inclusive anti-discrimination laws that ropes in “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”. Innocent enough, right? No, it’s the camel’s nose under the tent.
Pastors in the city were worried about the ordinance’s reach into their long-held faith and practice. They helped organize petitions to repeal the edict. In a subsequent lawsuit, the city subpoenaed any sermons and related documents reflecting on Her Honor, the edict, and her fellow power brokers.
These grand ukases on sex in the guise of anti-discrimination laws cater to the barkers of the new sexology. Yet, they won’t be satisfied with a legal abstraction. They want it materialized in the here and now. So their sexual license in policy inevitably will rub up against the First Amendment.
To clarify for the confused, tax-exempt status doesn’t repeal the First Amendment, if that rambled into your head. Restrictions apply to candidate-advocacy, not issue-advocacy. When fashionable policy trends stray into longstanding faith and practice, quite rightly these battles erupt.
Well, surprise to the disconnected and unaware. The Bible is the centerpiece of Christian faith and practice. Of great importance is its definition of the Godly life, and that includes injunctions on the subject of sex. For many, you can’t take the book seriously and embrace gender fluidity and sodomy without twisting yourself in knots.
And you can’t do to the Bible what the lefties have done to the Constitution. That is, interpreted it out of existence.
California is positioning itself as the first state to bring back the concept of the “state church”. The only approved form of Christianity (and any other religion for that matter) will be the kind bleached of any advice on sex. Like textbooks, the Bible will have the uncomfortable passages excised.
Newsom and the gang is coming for any denomination outside the officially sanctioned doctrines. You’ll have no place in the Golden State if you don’t conform. Time to load up the U-haul.
RogerG