If you don't want to miss anything posted on the Americans For Truth website, sign up for our "Feedblitz" service that gives you a daily email of every new article that we post. (This service DOES NOT replace the regular email list.) To sign up for the Feedblitz service, click here.
Houston’s lesbian mayor put her pro-homosexuality politics above the rule of law.
“The homosexual political movement is a hate movement that discriminates against Christians….It is absurd to base minority status upon a person’s chosen behavior.”–Dr. Steven Hotze, Campaign For Houston
The following was released Friday by Conservative Republicans of Texas and the Campaign For Houston:. To read the Texas Supreme Court ruling, go HERE.
_____________________
July 24, 2015
For immediate release:
Contact Jeff Yates, Campaign for Houston: (832) 545-7644
Texas Supreme Court Decides in Favor of Houston Voters Mayor Parker’s (Un)Equal Rights Ordinance To Be Voted On In November
The Texas Supreme Court ruled today that “the legislative power reserved to the people of Houston is not being honored. The City Council is directed to comply with its duties, as specified in the City Charter, that arise when the City Secretary certifies that a referendum petition has a sufficient number of valid signatures. Any enforcement of the [Equal Rights] ordinance will be suspended…If the City Council does not repeal the ordinance by August 24, 2014, then by that date the City Council must order that the ordinance be put to popular vote during the November 2015 election.” In Re Jared Woodfill, Texas Supreme Court, No. 14-0667, p. 11-12 (July 24, 2016)
This means that unless the Houston City Council repeals the ordinance, the citizens of Houston will have the right to vote on Mayor Parker’s personal, liberal, pro-homosexual agenda this November.
“He who says to the wicked, “You are righteous, “peoples will curse him, nations will abhor him, but to those who rebuke the wicked will be delight, and a good blessing will come upon them.” (Proverbs 24:24–25)
Last year, Houston’s lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, and the Houston City Council passed an ordinance that violates religious freedom of businesses and individuals, grants minority status to those who choose to participate in homosexual activities and allows men, if they claim to be transgender or feel like they are a woman that day, to use women’s public restrooms and locker rooms. This is the reason that the ordinance was known as the ‘Sexual Predator Protection Act’ by the opponents of the ordinance.
The Houston City Charter requires only 17,169 signatures [to repeal an ordinance or put it up to a popular vote]. Almost 55,000 signatures were collected on petitions to allow the people an opportunity to vote on this very important issue. Anna Russell, the City Secretary, certified that there were adequate signatures but Parker refused to accept them.
“Mayor Parker arrogantly ignored the will of the people and the city charter, and unlawfully rejected the petitions,” said Dr. Steven Hotze, President of Campaign for Houston.
Jared Woodfill, Steven Hotze, M.D., Rev. F.N. Williams, Sr. and Rev. Max Williams then filed suit against Parker,Woodfill v Parker. During the course of the litigation, Mayor Parker issued subpoenas to several pastors who were not parties to the litigation, ordering them to turn over all communications regarding the ordinance, the mayor, homosexuality, and other related topics, including sermons regarding these topics.
After a month of trial, Democrat Judge Robert Schaffer ruled in favor of the city and against the people, denying Houstonians an opportunity to vote on this issue. Fortunately, the Texas Supreme Court quickly reviewed Judge Schaffer’s decision and concluded he was wrong and that Mayor Parker had broken the law. Despite Mayor Parker’s efforts to keep her personal, pro-homosexual agenda from the people, Houstonians will now have an opportunity to vote on this ordinance in November.
Baylor University removes ban on ‘homosexual acts’ from its sexual conduct code
Sodomy-Friendly Baylor–More ‘Caring’ than God? The “Christian” university dropped its ban on “homosexual acts” from its sexual conduct code.–because Baylor officials didn’t believe the Bible-based sodomy proscription “reflected Baylor’s caring community.”
It’s by design. As I, and others, have repeatedly warned, the establishment of so-called “gay marriage” as a newfangled federal “right,” and the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment simply cannot coexist in harmony. Things diametrically at odds cannot possibly occupy, with any coherence, the same time and space.
The secular left is tripping over itself right now to prove my point. In the wake of last month’s Obergefell v. Hodges opinion – an opinion that somehow divined a top secret “constitutional right” for Patrick Henry to “marry” Henry Patrick – liberals are now demanding, as both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito predicted, that Christian universities immediately abandon recognition of, and obedience to, God’s unequivocal natural sexual order, and adopt, instead, the new pagan orthodoxy.
In a July 14 article in The Atlantic headlined, “Gay Marriage and the Future of Evangelical Colleges,” University of Tampa professor David R. Wheeler asks, “Now that same-sex couples have the right to wed, will higher-ed institutions that condemn LGBT students still be eligible for federal funding?”
Wheeler is not alone in asking. “As cultural evolution on the issue of LGBT rights continues to accelerate, it’s inevitable that some Americans will start asking hard questions about whether it makes sense to allocate scarce public resources to institutions that are not only anti-gay, but proud of it,” opines anti-Christian bigot Barry Lynn, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “For starters, can federally supported educational institutions bar married same-sex couples from living together in student housing? I doubt it,” he adds.
In other words, Christian universities must together embrace and facilitate homosexual sin, or lose, at once, both tax-exempt status and access to all students who choose to fund their education via federal loans and grants (which is most of them).
The Deviant Roots of a Sin Movement: Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s Table 34 showing timed “orgasms” for babies and young children–apparently supplied to him by a child molester. This table appears in Kinsey’s celebrated 1948 book, “Sexual Behavior and the Human Male,” which also greatly exaggerated the number of people practicing homosexual behavior in American society. Homosexual activists seized on Kinsey’s book to argue that homosexuality was widespread and normal. See AFTAH Point 12 below. Click on graphic to enlarge.
There will be revisions and additions to this list, but here is AFTAH’s first draft of core principles and beliefs.–Peter LaBarbera, President, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality
______________________________
1) Homosexual behavior and trans-gender rebellion are morally wrong as they defy Nature and Nature’s God.
2) Homosexuality is not the basis for a healthy self-identity; embracing homosexual or transgender lifestyles/behaviors is a very bad and destructive choice.
3) Homosexuality is about What You Do, not Who You Are. Everyone is responsible before God for his or her sexual conduct. “Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity”–the notion of an innate or inherent nature centered around proclivity toward sex- and gender-confusion–are the misguided foundations of self-serving “gay” ideology. These concepts seek to justify immorality by essentially removing one’s moral responsibility for his or her actions.
4) Homosexualism and gender confusion are not the basis for civil rights. Equating the campaign for homosexual “rights”and same-sex “marriage” to the Black civil rights movement insults Black Americans and their noble struggle against slavery and institutional racism (e.g., Jim Crow). Christians in past days were wrong to misuse the Bible to ban interracial unions. Interracial marriages produce beautiful children and families; homosexuality cannot produce life. Creating “rights” based on moral wrongs and sexual/gender perversions naturally undermines other people’s rights, especially the freedoms of religion and conscience enshrined in the United States Constitution. As John Adams, the second president of the United States and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote: “[W]e have not government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our constitution was made only for a moral and spiritual people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
5) All people as human beings created in the image of God deserve respect; all behaviors and ideologies do not.
6) Unlike race and ethnicity, homosexuality is not immutable: people can pursue virtuous change and leave aberrant sex- and transgender lifestyles behind. Oddly, the same LGBTQ activists who champion men and women who abandon their marital spouse and children to live a homosexual life–or the DNA-defying notion that people can change sexes–often excoriate and dehumanize EX-“gays.” Nevertheless, thousands of people have successfully left homosexuality behind, and their wholesome transformation should be celebrated. Legal and legislative efforts to ban pro-heterosexual change therapy for minors are cruel, antithetical to liberty and parental rights, and demonstrate the totalitarian mindset of homosexual advocates and their allies. [AFTAH highly recommends Restored Hope Network, an umbrella group of Christian ex-“gay” ministries.]
Sin Advocate: Young and winsome Matthew Vines is working hard to win Christians to the idea that committed homosexual relationships should be blessed before a holy God. Despite his apostasy, Vines was recently welcomed as a “brother in Christ” by Rev. Caleb Kaltenbach, lead pastor of Discovery Church in Simi Valley, CA. See Vines’ curiously named “Reformation Project.“
“We are to have no fellowship with darkness. We can’t ‘dialogue’ with any professing Christian who’s in open rebellion against the Word of God. We can’t ‘dialogue’ with anybody who is deceiving and misleading the Body of Christ on any sin while claiming to be a Christian!”–Janet Mefferd
______________________
I welcome my friend Janet Mefferd to the pages of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality. Janet is a former longtime radio talk show host with the Salem Radio Network–and, I must say, as someone who cumulatively chatted a few hours in on-air interviews with Mefferd over the years–she was one of the best in the business (Christian and secular). We look forward to seeing what’s next in Janet’s career, but until then we are delighted to publish her work.
Regarding this issue of “dialogue” or “bridging” with homosexuality advocates, I recall an article by the late Alan Medinger–a man who walked away from homosexuality with the help of the Savior he loved, Jesus Christ. Medinger, who founded Regeneration Ministries in Baltimore, wisely cautioned against an internal Church debate over homosexuality because there is nothing compelling it except outside, anti-biblical agitation. The sinfulness of same-sex behavior is a settled matter in both the Bible and thousands of years of Church/Old Testament tradition, argued Medinger, and we need not debate it now within Christendom any more than we should debate, say, adultery.
Read this beautiful tribute to Medinger by Regeneration’s Josh Glaser–then decide if the same Spirit of Christ that impelled Alan lies with Matthew Vines, who–by trying to redefine Christianity to accommodate homosexual relationships and “gay marriage”–propels the very same debate that Medinger rejected on principle. Below Mefferd ably applies what I call the “Sexual Sin Substitution Test.”— Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH; Twitter: @PeterLaBarbera
“Evangelicals Open Door to Debate on Gay Rights.” Just the kind of headline I never enjoy, but it ran June 8 in The New York Times over a story about “influential evangelicals” meeting with homosexual activist Matthew Vines at Biola University last month, complete with a Times reporter and photographer on hand.
Vines, you may recall, is author of 2014’s controversial “God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships,” which manipulates biblical terminology in an unconvincing attempt to argue against the sinfulness of homosexuality.
Worse, the book was published by Crown Publishing Group’s Convergent imprint, which shared staff and operations with and was a sister imprint of evangelical Christian publisher WaterBrook Multnomah. Among other repercussions for printing such unbiblical garbage, WaterBrook Multnomah resigned its membership from the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). (Crown later separated the two imprints.)
Vines also runs an apostate group called The Reformation Project, which claims to exist “to train Christians to support and affirm lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Through building a deep grassroots movement, we strive to create an environment in which Christian leaders will have the freedom to take the next steps toward affirming and including LGBT people in all aspects of church life.”
I hope Bryan Fischer is wrong and that Justice Ginsburg was instead defiantly affirming the fiction of a “Constitutional right” to homosexual “marriage” at the immoral ceremony over which she presided. We’ll know soon. — Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH; Twitter: @PeterLaBarbera
________________________________
Ginsburg Tips Her Hand – The Fix Is in on Sodomy-Based “Marriage”
It’s time for social conservatives to prepare for a post-apocalyptic world. The Supreme Court will issue a ruling in late June imposing sodomy-based “marriage” on the entire country. It’s a done deal. The fix is in. You can take it to the bank.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 28, and then, according to custom, immediately adjourned to vote. So the results were known to the other members of the Court by close of business that day. The only remaining matter was for Chief Justice Roberts to assign the writing of the majority opinion.
Under normal circumstances, the results of these immediate Supreme Court votes are a jealously guarded secret. No one is supposed to breathe a word. No one is supposed to know the outcome until the ruling is actually released, which will almost certainly be at the very end of the session in late June.
But we now know the result of the vote beyond any shadow of doubt. How do we know? Ruth Bader Ginsburg told us over the weekend.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was a guest last Sunday at a homosexual “wedding” ceremony presided over by Justice Ginsburg herself.
The wedding took place in a glitzy setting, the Anderson House in the Embassy Row neighborhood, which houses a club for descendants of soldiers, both French and American, who fought in the Revolutionary War.
Here are the telling paragraphs from Dowd’s column (emphasis mine):
“But the most glittering moment for the crowd came during the ceremony. With a sly look and special emphasis on the word ‘Constitution,’ Justice Ginsburg said that she was pronouncing the two men married by the powers vested in her by the Constitution of the United States.
“No one was sure if she was emphasizing her own beliefs or giving a hint to the outcome of the case the Supreme Court is considering whether to decide if same-sex marriage is constitutional.
“But the guests began applauding loudly, delighted either way. Justice Ginsburg, who has officiated at same-sex weddings in the past, also seemed delighted…”
Well, the guests may have pretended to be unsure of the significance of Ginsburg’s words, but we don’t have to be. When she emphasized the word “Constitution” and did so with a “sly look,” Ginsburg was most emphatically not “giving a hint” about the outcome of the Supreme Court’s vote, she was telling us as plainly as possible.
Ginsburg was informing us that the Supreme Court has already decided that marriage based on what Massachusetts’ state law still calls the “abominable and detestable crime against nature” is now a right guaranteed in the Constitution.
Calls work of faithful Christian ex-“gay” ministry Restored Hope Network “reprehensible”
Traitor to the Truth: Alan Chambers, one-time “ex-gay” leader turned apostate, now says God is “cool” with homosexual “marriage.”
Folks, I have a hard time fathoming the pride and massive ego of Alan Chambers, the man who destroyed the “ex-gay” Christian umbrella group Exodus International, using a twisted “grace” message. Now Chambers has the audacity to speak for the Creator Himself, giving the Almighty’s endorsement of a blasphemous perversion (!) by saying God is “cool” with homosexual “marriage.” [See the 11:50 mark in the video as Chambers responds to “gay Christianity” advocate Jeff Chu.]
Christians need to pray for these poor, confused souls who are practicing disobedience and rebellion against God and leading people away from righteousness and holiness. If Alan truly loves Jesus, why does he profane God’s holy Word by celebrating sin?
I agree with my friend Stephen Black–whose First Stone Ministries created this 37-minute compilation–that many faithful Christians still are unaware of Chambers’ and Exodus’ apostasy. Thank God that Restored Hope Network–whose Christ-honoring work Chambers slanders as “reprehensible” [see 7:55 mark]–rose out of the ashes of Exodus! Please support RHN and First Stone with your gifts and prayers — and show this important video to Christian leaders and pastors, so that they will not be deceived. — Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH
Below the video is First Stone’s description of it:
This is Alan Chambers in his own words from the Level Ground interview – February 2015 and from his own words when speaking at the Glory Tabernacle, October 2014. In Alan Chambers’ Own Words Part 1 and Part 2 were created by a Scriptural mandate to correct, rebuke and expose those who are teaching false doctrines leading souls to hell. Matt. 18:17, Acts 20:29-31, Jude 1:4, Gal. 1:6-8, 1 Tim. 5:20-21, Titus1with :10-16, 2 Peter 2:1-22, 2 Peter 3:14-18. Both Parts, 1 and 2 of Alan Chambers’ in His Own Words were created to warn leaders in the Church globally of the perverse grace teachings of Clark Whitten, former Exodus Board Chairman and Alan Chambers’ pastor. Clark Whitten has mentored Alan Chambers for years. Whitten also helped Alan Chambers with closing Exodus as he was the Chairman of the Exodus Board of Directors in 2013. This video and Part 1 reveals Alan Chambers’ inconsistencies in his own words and grave heretical teaching of perverse grace. These videos were also created to call the Board of Directors with Exodus to accountability and responsibility. Exodus imploded, but… There is hope! There is the Restored Hope Network with many ministries and counselors to help! (http://www.restoredhopenetwork.org)
Folks, it was an honor to speak at my friend Cliff Kincaid’s America’s Survival conference on “Cultural Marxism”–along with Kincaid, former U.N. Amb. Alan Keyes, Jim Simpson, and Matt Barber, AFTAH Board Member and founder of Barbwire.com. This information-rich event was held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 21, 2015. My talk is below. AFTAH will post each of the presentations, but for now you can see them at AS’s YouTube channel. Thanks to Cliff for organizing this event. Truth remains the best answer to the proliferation of lies from the pro-LGBT Left.— Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH
The following is the press conference organized by my friend, Janet Porter, of Faith2Action Ministries. It was held directly in front of the U.S. Supreme Court April 27, 2015, the day before oral arguments at the Court on legalization of homosexual “marriage.” Congratulations to Janet and Dr. Steve Hotze of Conservative Republicans of Texas for putting on this fine event. It was a privilege to stand with these awesome leaders in defense of genuine marriage. — Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH
