Homosexuality and Evo, Creo, and ID

It isn't as simple as you put forward. The anti-gay group sued the city after their petition was found to contain too many irregularities. The city then sent subpoenas to the pastors involved in getting the signed petitions. The problem was that the language in the subpoena was much too broad, and counsel on both sides have agreed on this matter. Like many subpoenas, they are written as broad as possible in order to gather as much evidence as they can, and sometimes they overreach as this one did.http://thinkprogress.org/...tors-subpoenas-religious-freedomEdited by Taq, : No reason given.

The irregularities were trumped up by Feldman, the City something or other, AttorneyI think but the woman responsible for counting signatures stopped counting after nineteen thousand because she'd validated the necessary percentage if those to inow that the fifty five thousand submitted would contain the same percentage of validated signatures. Only seventeen thousand were needed, they got fifty five thousand. Feldman just invented an excuse to disqualify them out of thin air. To disqualify that many show fraud. The excuse that the language was too broad is ridiculous. They took out the word "sermon" as if that would make a difference. But just a few days before that the mayor had tweeted that sermons are fair game if there is anything political in them, so we know the word "sermon" was not the issue. But there is no excuse at all to subpoena the opinions of a pastor for objecting to her insane ordinance. This is sheer political harassment. Reminds lots of us of how Nazi Germany operated against its political enemies. This is no longer America if a mayor does such things.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The point being, the anti-gay group is the one who started the lawsuit. When you start a lawsuit, you open yourself up to subpoenas. They are certainly within their right to subpoena records as they pertain to communication between the leaders and the people getting the actual signatures. What they should not have done is extend it to sermons, as they admitted afterwards. Also, it stops being a sermon once it becomes political activity.The lesson here is simple. You can't start a lawsuit and then complain about subpoenas.

The lawsuit was about the fraud of disqualifying the signatures. That has nothing to do with opinions about the ordinance. Clearly the mayor's office is guilty of political harassment.

The lawsuit is over the allegations of fraud. Neither did the subpoenas. The subpoenas were after the instructions that were given by the pastors to the people gathering the signatures. The mayor's office did not sue the anti-gay group. The anti-gay group is the one who started the harassment with the lawsuit.

I think it's a typical case of American Christians playing make-believe that they're being persecuted, so that they can feel that lovely warm glow of self-righteousness, anger, and hatred that they derive from imaginary martyrdom without any of the inconveniences attendant on actual martyrdom. I think that if that was all there was to it, they would merely be delusional morons, but that since there are people in the world who suffer from actual religious persecution, their behavior is also vulgar and disgusting.

It has to start somewhere, and government control of the churches and other inconvenient groups started with similar actions in Nazi Germany. Legal stuff. Laws that required church registration, also firearm registration and surrender for instance. Keep in mind that this action by the Houston mayor against pastors is absolutely unprecedented in America. Let me know if you still see it the same way in a few months to a year, if there's anything around to remind you.What would you say if I tell you I've noticed that since I wrote a slightly incendiary post about homosexuality at my blog six days ago, actually pushing it some because I was wondering if it would attract censorship, my daily viewing stats have dramatically dropped since then? For years they've usually fluctuated between about 140 to 180 a day, rising above 200 with the more popular topics, the highest ever being over 700, but over the last three days they dropped to 68 on the 3rd, 40 yesterday and 10 today. Unprecedented. I've written a few posts on different topics since the questionable one. Seems to me cutting off viewers is a form of censorship though not a method I would have anticipated.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

When you hammer yourself to the cross, who do you have help with the last nail? We can find tons of examples of subpoenas being served for voter irregularities. When he was acting as a political activist, he was not a pastor. Religious freedom does not cover political activities.

Freedom of speech in America SPECIFICALLY covered political speech, the right to criticize those in power. That was because silencing criticism is the first step to government control and tyranny. Before the Revolutionary War pastors preached fervently on the political issues of the day, most of them in favor of fighting against the tyranny of the English king. They carried their muskets to church anticipating the war. The First Amendment was written after that, pretty much guaranteeing the right of pastors to preach politics from the pulpit. Seems like a pretty basic right to me but you are actually siding against it. Amazing how far this nation has sunk from its original conception. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Some pretty clear exaggeration there. An overbroad subpoena to gather evidence to defend against a lawsuit seems a long way from government control of churches.And a drop in readership is not sufficient evidence that anyone is cutting off viewers to your blog. How could they ?

Once it starts it goes fast.We'll see if the statistics pick up again. Then I'll figure it was some kind of glitch. Doesn't look that way at the moment, however.I can control whether I get viewers or not, surely Blogger or Google can also.

Perhaps God is teling you to stop publishing offensive material?

It hasn't started, though. And it doesn't seem likely to start.And the statistics matter far less than the reason behind your statistics. If you have made ANY effort to investigate the cause you haven't mentioned it. You simply jumped to an implausible assumption of censorship.

How on earth would I "investigate the cause?" I'm so low-tech I only discovered the statistics page late in my blogging career and eventually figured out that certain topics make the number go up. A certain percentage come off the search engines but what percentage I don't know, and others are more or less regular readers or friends of the blog who show up from time to time but I don't know how many of those there are either. Otherwise I have NO idea what drives the statistics and no way to investigate them. Such an unusual change raises questions for sure. The assumption of censorship may be wrong, I hope it is, but it isn't implausible considering that I allowed myself to say some things I expected would be more than usually offensive about homosexuality. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If you know any regular readers, you could ask them if they' em read your blog lately and if they haven't you can find out why.If you think that your blog is being blocked you could just try to read it yourself. If you think that there is a block that you can bypass get a friend to do it, or use public internet or a cyber cafe.i can't think of any reason why you would get a significant number of referrals from search engines.But it is not at all likely that you are being censored. I know that your post must have been really disgusting if you thought it was bad. Maybe it drove your readers away. That's a lot more likely than censorship targeting you.