United Methodist Church lifts 40-year ban on LGBTQ clergy

The church was going the wrong way before. Now it still it’s still going that way. It leaders and others in that church need to truly repent. If not it for sure will face the judgment of the Lord.

Baseball and faith along with good values don’t mix

The baseball team at Stony Brook University won’t be able to travel to Mississippi next month for a three-game series with Southern Miss. But it’s not the weather keeping them home – it’s New York’s governor.

Governor Mario Cuomo has banned all non-essential travel to Mississippi because of the Magnolia State’s “religious freedom law” – which is formally known as the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act (HB 1523). It took effect in October.

Tim Wildmon, president of Mississippi-based American Family Association, says the Stony Brook Seawolves will miss out on the chance of some warmer weather baseball against a quality opponent. The three-game series was scheduled to take place in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, between February 23 and 25.

“What usually happens during college baseball season is that teams from the North come south so they can play baseball in February,” he tells OneNewsNow, “and it’s oftentimes difficult to play baseball in February, even in the South.”

Wildmon

 

Mississippi’s law protects people from discrimination who, because of their faith, believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that sex should be reserved for marriage, and that one’s gender is set at birth.

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BreakPoint: Jack Phillips Before the Supreme Court “Tolerance Is a Two-Way Street”

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I was honored yesterday to rally in support of Jack Phillips on the steps outside the Supreme Court. Now I’d like to tell you what went on inside.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Eric Metaxas and I have given you the details before, of Colorado master cake designer Jack Phillips who declined to design a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

As David Brooks wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, “Phillips is not trying to restrict gay marriage or gay rights; he’s simply asking not to be forced to take part.”

Neither the couple or the state of Colorado saw it that way. Phillips was found to have violated the state’s anti-discrimination law, and forced to choose between his convictions and losing forty percent of his business. Phillips appealed to the Supreme Court.

While Phillips’s actions were grounded in his religious beliefs, the legal argument was primarily about whether Colorado had violated his right to free speech.  Unlike those commentators who disparaged the idea that creating custom cakes constitutes a form of speech, yesterday the Court took the question seriously.

Phillips’ lawyer, Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, argued that “the first amendment protects bakers such as Mr. Phillips against being forced to express any belief, and that as a custom-cake maker, he sketches, sculpts and hand-paints—in other words, he’s an artist.”

Waggoner had barely gotten started when the questions began.

Responding to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she reiterated that neither she nor her client were challenging his obligation to sell his ordinary wares to everyone. In fact, he offered to sell the couple any already-made cake in his store.

Custom cakes, Waggoner told the Court, were a different matter. The use of writing and symbols convey a message in a way that a cake off the shelf does not.

Inevitably the comparison to race came up. The best answer was given by U. S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco. Francisco, in response to several justices, argued that discrimination on the basis of race, such as refusing to serve an interracial couple, was different than refusing to participate in a ceremony.

He also argued that upholding Phillips’ free speech rights would not damage civil rights protection because it would only apply to “a small group of individuals” in “narrow circumstances.” However, Justice Breyer disagreed.

But the roughest treatment was reserved for Colorado’s Solicitor General Fred Yarger because of Colorado’s treatment of Phillips throughout the whole ordeal. Justice Kennedy—likely the swing vote in this case—told him that tolerance must go both ways, adding that, “It seems to me the state has been neither tolerant nor respectful” of Jack Phillips views.

He cited a comment by a member of the Civil Rights Commission, who called Phillips’ religious beliefs “one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric.” He then asked Yarger to disavow the comment. After Yarger lamely replied that he wouldn’t counsel a client to say a such a thing, Kennedy pressed him, and Yarger disavowed.

It’s never a good thing when a judge asks you to disavow your client’s statement.

So where are we? Justice Kennedy definitely seems troubled by the way Phillips was treated, and it’s encouraging that he insisted tolerance is a “two-way street.”

Heartening as well was Justice Breyer’s asking Yarger if some kind of compromise might be possible. Whatever else Breyer is thinking, he seems to be concerned that Colorado didn’t make sufficient allowance for people with dissenting views.

I can’t tell you whether Phillips will prevail, but there’s reason to be encouraged. It’s also possible that Kennedy could side with Phillips, but in a narrow opinion that would open the floodgate for future cases. Even then, that better, far better than a Phillips loss.

So let’s continue to pray earnestly that Phillips, and freedom, prevails.

 

Jack Phillips Before the Supreme Court: “Tolerance Is a Two-Way Street”

As both John and Eric have stated, this free speech case is extremely important. So continue to pray for the justices of our Supreme Court, that God would guide them in their deliberations and decision in this free speech and religious freedom case.

Resources

All eyes on Kennedy

• Emily Belz | WORLD magazine | December 5, 2017

The Great Supreme Court Cake-Off: Christian Bakers vs. Gay Weddings

Kate Shellnutt | Christianity Today | December 5, 2017 

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The Truth About The American Bar Association

The American Bar Association has recently tipped its hand, showing how very partisan it has become.
Joe Palazzolo, writing at the Wall Street Journal, reports that “tensions between Senate Republicans and the bar association, the largest organization of lawyers in the nation, have escalated in recent weeks after the ABA pronounced a Nebraska lawyer unfit to serve on the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.”

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It’s getting cold up north for us Godly souls

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It’s getting cold up north. For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

Yes, climate change is real—at least in Canada. But I’m not talking about the weather. I mean the increasingly hostile climate for Canadian Christians.

This week the Canadian Supreme Court will hear a case involving Trinity Western University, a Christian school in British Columbia. Trinity wants to open a law school, but two Canadian law societies will refuse to accredit it. Trinity Western obliges students to uphold marriage between a man and a woman and to refrain from sex outside marriage.

The law associations say that’s anti-LGBT discrimination. Obviously, the Court’s ruling will have huge implications for Christians up north.

Then there’s this. A couple in Alberta have been turned down as prospective adoptive parents. Why? They’re Christians who believe in Christian sexual morality. Not only did Alberta’s Child and Family Services turn them away, but Catholic Social Services withdrew their recommendation of the couple. Insane. Pray for our brothers and sisters in Canada. And beware… these Canadian cold fronts could be moving south.

Resources

Canada rejects Christian couple for adoption 

• Kiley Crossland | WORLD magazine | November 17, 2017

Prestigious Christian University Heads to Highest Court: What It Means for Canada’s Christians

• Wendy Griffith | CBN News | November 20, 2017

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Too Catholic for Georgetown

Will Catholic students be allowed at this Catholic school? For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

Love Saxa, a student group at Georgetown University, the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit school, advocates “a monogamous and permanent union between a man and a woman.” But for a number of fellow Georgetown students, that’s a problem.

Leaders of campus LGBT groups have lodged complaints that Love Saxa supports hatred and homophobia, demanding that Georgetown defund and remove it as an officially-recognized student group.

Love Saxa’s views on marriage, of course, are just identical to the teaching of the Catholic Church. As one theology professor at Catholic University of America remarked, “I suppose the question for Georgetown is whether they think Catholic kids can still be Catholic there.”

Of course, Georgetown isn’t a conservative school. But the fact that LGBT leaders there don’t think the historic Christian view on marriage should exist on campus says a lot. The strategy’s familiar: Paint all who dissents from the new orthodoxy as unworthy of a place at the table. It’s a purge, not a debate. And whatever happens at Georgetown, it won’t stop there.

 

 

Resources

Georgetown students have filed a discrimination complaint against a campus group promoting heterosexual marriage

• Mary Hui | Washington Post | October 25, 2017

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I went to a hate group meeting

I spent last week with a hate group. How ‘bout you? For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

Last week, ABC and NBC copied and pasted a label from the Southern Poverty Law Center and ran it as a headline on their website. “Jeff Sessions Addresses anti-LGBT Hate Group.” The group they were referring to wasn’t the Klan or doesn’t have any history of violence. It was the Alliance Defending Freedom, a premier legal organization defending religious liberty. In fact, ADF just won their seventh case in seven years at the Supreme Court!

Look, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the SPLC, a group that has far strayed from its roots, adopted a wholesale liberal agenda, and incited violence against conservative organizations, would call ADF “a hate group.” That just demonstrates how much of an extremist organization they really are.

But for the major media outlets like ABC and NBC to use that terminology for a respected legal organization, even if they did put the words in scare quotes, is simply slander. And they should apologize.

Same sex couple was mean

Awhile back a column writer for my local paper wrote a story on a same sex couple who have two children. The couple is married. So were the children from bad homes who the couple took in ? Nope they hatched with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.
Now I don’t believe same sex couples should be foster parents, or be able to adopt kids. However even if you do, don’t you agree it is cruel to create a child who in this case will just have two mothers. It is hard enough growing up today with so many parents getting a divorce. The truth is children do better in a home where there is a mother, and father. Can children make it when the odds don’t favor them. Yes, they can at times because of hard work along with the grace of God. Other times it is just the grace of God which keeps young people going the right way.
I find it to be child abuse to produce a child who will be born to a same sex couple.
The couple the column writer  wrote about,this year took their children to the Chicago Pride Parade. Those poor kids. They should let them be kids. No way should they had been produced to make this couple happy. We should think of what is best for the children. What this couple along with those who helped them did was cruel, and yes child abuse. However in our PC culture I am sure souls like me will get the label as mean. Still truth doesn’t change just because everyone doesn’t embrace it.

Star player says yes to God and rejects the world, along with rainbow flag

The pressure on Christians to wave the rainbow flag may be new, but the issue is as old as the church.

Imagine for the moment that you’re a world-class soccer star. You’ve worked for this all your life. Day after day and year after year you get up early, run, work on drills to hone your God-given talent. You’ve sacrificed many other things to rank among the best in the world. And now you may have to choose between your career or your faith. Why? Because you refuse to sell out to the crowd.

This is not make-believe. This is the plight of Jaelene Hinkle, a Christian athlete with the U.S. national soccer team. Jaelene, you see, has suddenly been thrust into a harsh spotlight—not for anything she’s done on the pitch, as they say, but for her decision not to play in games in which her team must wear rainbow jerseys in support of “LGBT Pride” month in June.

Now, Jaelene is not trying to make waves but simply says she’s bowing out for “personal reasons.”

But her views on the matter are pretty clear. When the Supreme Court legalized what is called “same-sex marriage” in 2015, Jaelene stated on Instagram, “I believe with every fiber in my body that what was written 2,000 years ago in the Bible is undoubtedly true …. This world may change, but Christ and His Word NEVER will.”

After calling on Christians to become more loving, she added, “The rainbow was a [covenant] made between God and all his creation that never again would the world be flooded as it was when He destroyed the world during Noah’s time. It’s a constant reminder that no matter how corrupt this world becomes, He will never leave us or forsake us.”

Good, strong words! The rainbow, in case you haven’t noticed, has been appropriated by the LGBT rights crowd.

The response to Jaelene’s latest stand has been mostly vitriol. One of the few printable reactions in opposition was, “It’s so nice when the trash takes itself out.”

To this point however, Jaelene’s decision hasn’t cost her a spot on the national team. And one fair-minded gay sports blog said, “Hinkle has a right to her personal beliefs and if that means skipping a chance to play, that is also her right.”

It’s been clear for a while now that sport, like many other realms in our culture, is under siege from the forces of political correctness, sexual license, and marriage redefinition. A few years ago, the NFL threatened to take the Super Bowl away from the state of Arizona because of a religious freedom bill that the LGBT activists opposed—so Arizona’s governor vetoed the bill. North Carolina was threatened by the NCAA with economic blackmail over its so-called “bathroom bill”—and changed the law. And now the Seattle WNBA team is donating a portion of ticket sales to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. I wonder what any Christians on the team think of this.

But it isn’t just about sports. The pressure to conform is being ratcheted up everywhere—in business, politics, even religion. On a recent episode of “The Point,” my colleague John Stonestreet bemoaned that the LGBT “rainbows” have even turned up everywhere—even on bags of French fries! And I can sympathize.

Yet all this isn’t really a surprise, is it? Christians have always faced a choice between following God or the world, Christ or Caesar. In the early church, Christians such as Polycarp, who was bishop of the church in Smyrna, also had to choose. Polycarp, who was an old man, simply had to say “Caesar is lord” and offer a pinch of incense before Caesar’s image—or face torture and death. He refused to give in, saying, “Eighty-six years I have served Christ, and He never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

The pressure to go along with the world on human sexuality is probably only going to intensify. For the sake of God’s honor, the truth of His Word, and our neighbors’ flourishing, we simply cannot wave the rainbow flag. Thank God, Jaelene Hinkle hasn’t.

Orthodox Jewish grade school in UK fails inspection for refusal to teach about sexual orientation

An orthodox Jewish girls’ elementary school in London has failed a government inspection for the third time because it refuses to teach students, who range in age from 3 to 8, about homosexuality and gender reassignment.

( Read the rest of this story.)