We all knew it was coming but in Idaho of all places.
"Two Christian ministers who own an Idaho wedding chapel were told they had to either perform same-sex weddings or face jail time and up to $1,000 in daily fines, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court.
Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Donald and Evelyn Knapp, two ordained ministers who own the Hitching Post Wedding Chapel in Coeur d’Alene.
“Right now they are at risk of being prosecuted,” attorney Jeremy Tedesco told me. “The threat of enforcement is more than just credible.”
The wedding chapel is registered as a “religious corporation” limited to performing “one-man-one-woman marriages as defined by the Holy Bible.”
However, the chapel is also a for-profit business and city officials said that means the owners must comply with the local nondiscrimination ordinance.
That ordinance, passed in 2013, prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and it applies to housing, employment and public accommodation.
City Attorney Warren Wilson told The Spokesman-Review in May that the Hitching Post Wedding Chapel likely would be required to follow the ordinance.
“I would think that the Hitching Post would probably be considered a place of public accommodation that would be subject to the ordinance,” he said.
He also told television station KXLY that any wedding chapel that turns away a gay couple would in theory be a violation of the law “and you’re looking at a potential misdemeanor citation.”
Wilson confirmed to Knapp in a telephone conversation that even ordained ministers would be required to perform same-sex weddings, the lawsuit alleges.
“Wilson also responded that Mr. Knapp was not exempt from the ordinance because the Hitching Post was a business and not a church,” the lawsuit states".
Sweet. We shall simply sweep aside any pesky concerns about 1st Amendment issues by declaring your ministry a business and proceeding accordingly.The irony of the situation: "until last week gay marriage was not legal in Idaho"
The two basic truths of Life: There is a God. He isn't me.
Mark Steyn's latest work, “The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned”, addresses this very issue. I happen to believe Mr Steyn is, as usual, spot on though that is a most worrisome thought.
Though his new collection of essays, “The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned” (Regnery), recounts many of the biggest political events of recent history, bestselling author Steyn says that’s not the real battleground. While everyone is focused on the 2014 midterms, the question about where our country is headed is being decided in our entertainment and our schools. Here, in an excerpt from the book, he explains how culture is king.
"Over the past few decades, I’ve seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar Alexander, Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson, Alan Keyes. . . .
Would it have made any difference to the country had any of these fine upstanding fellows prevailed? Or would we be pretty much where we are anyway? Aside from a trade agreement here, a federal regulation there, I’d plump for the latter.
You can’t have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that’s the position the Republican Party is in.
After the last election, I said that the billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign on robocalls and TV ads and all the rest had been entirely wasted, and the Electoral College breakdown would have been pretty much what it was if they’d just tossed the dough into the Potomac and let it float out to sea. But imagine the use all that money and time could have been put to out there in the wider world.
Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November — and then are surprised that it doesn’t make much difference.
Culture trumps politics — which is why, once the question’s been settled culturally, conservatives are reduced to playing catch-up, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why gay marriage is really conservative after all, or why 30 million unskilled immigrants with a majority of births out of wedlock are “natural allies” of the Republican Party."
"Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture."
It was a very shrewd decision of the collectivists to concentrate on infiltrating the media, news organizations, education, and large corporate type religious bodies so as to replace our traditional culture.
Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov said the Soviets spent much more money on subversion of culture than espionage. the result:
" . . . They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible . . ." Yuri Bezmenov 1984 http://uselessdissident.blogspot.com/200...part-three.html
All warfare is based primarily on the deception of an enemy. Fighting on a battlefield is the most primitive way of making war. There is no art higher than to destroy your enemy without a fight—by SUBVERTING anything of value in the enemy’s country. Sun Tzu Chinese philosopher http://uselessdissident.blogspot.com/200...a-part-one.html 500 B.C.
Who knew so many would come to their aid in the destruction of our culture? Immigration in swarms from the outside and humanism in the schools and courts on the inside. These changed America drastically: from the "Ask not" culture to the "Gimme more!" culture. This has all happened in one full generation. Remember what RR said about freedom?
******************* “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.” ¯ Richard P. Feynman