I wish I could say this is unbelievable, but its actually getting rather common:
The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.
“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”
ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.” …
Yeah, it is all that. What is at issue is an absurd law passed by the Houston City Council which opens all public restrooms to whoever – you know, feeling a little female today? Then go ahead into the ladies room. Stupid, politically-correct, liberal bull. But liberals know what they are doing – they are trying to criminalize non-liberalism. Rational people figure that it’d probably be best to keep men and women separate in the whole restroom experience, but liberals know that if the can make it illegal to be rational, they can then direct the power of government against reason (and, thus, against non-liberal thought and actions), and that is what they are doing here.
Of course the case will be decided on First Amendment issues – and I fully expect the pastors to prevail – but that isn’t the point. The point is to intimidate – while the pastors in this case won’t suffer legal consequences, all pastors – and, indeed, everyone who takes exception to liberalism – will be intimidated. Everyone has got a life to live and while we know what is good and true, if we’re to be hauled into court by liberal fascists every time we speak the truth, then maybe we should just not mention certain things? The territory of truth will be circumscribed and liberalism will have another area of total dominance, which is what the liberals want.
The cure for this is to pass laws making liberals – especially liberal office holders – responsible for their actions. It won’t do any good, really, to just get an injunction against the city council prohibiting them from taking punitive action against the pastors – the actual, individual liberals who are on the council and who took this action must feel pain for their action. It should be, in such cases, when a court finds the government body in error – that they have violated the rights of the citizens – then the members of that body have to pay, out of their own pockets, punitive, monetary damages to the citizens they oppressed. Make that city council member pony up $100,000.00 and future council members will think twice before they go along with this sort of thing.
We have to get a handle on this – liberals want an end to liberty. If we don’t punish them for trying, then they will just keep on trying.
Blogs For Victory 
Our ancestors had an excellent remedy to deal with such people (the city councilmen, not the pastors): tar, feathers and a piece of split rail fence.
Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) usually puts that as the tag end of a comment on liberals acting all fascist, “tar, feathers”. It is a good remedy.
I’m not in favor of having open season on Liberals, but I do think at some point there will be some kind of push-back from Conservatives. I can’t imagine that we will ever get to the point where Christianity will be pushed underground, unless, of course, the Muslims take over.
“…they are trying to criminalize non-liberalism”
Enter the Thought Police.
Read Orwell. Read the history of the USSR. The Left, in its inexorable quest for total domination, has to dominate the thought as well as the deed. We already have Hate Crimes, crimes based on the (often assumed or assigned) THOUGHTS of the criminal, not on his actions.
This is also yet another example of Leftist hypocrisy. They are fine with Left-leaning churches, and pastors, hosting Leftist political candidates who give campaign speeches that may or may not be claimed to be “guest sermons”, and with those pastors instructing the congregation on how to vote. But let a Catholic priest instruct his congregation that supporting abortion is a sin, and the shrieks and squeals of outrage from the Left are deafening, if there happens to be a pro-abortion putative Catholic candidate out there somewhere.
If a Christian church cannot teach that something is a sin, then neither can a Muslim mosque. If a Christian church can’t teach that homosexuality is wrong, then a Muslim mosque shouldn’t be allowed to teach that the Koran instructs Muslims to kill infidels. If we can march into Christian churches with demands that the government be allowed to review and approve what it teaches, then we had damned well better be doing the same in mosques, particularly if the Christian approach to sin is to pray for the sinner, and the Muslim approach is to cut off his head.
Or destroy his government.
Ultimately, the reason the liberals don’t go after the Imams is because of fear – they know the Muslims will do something horrible to them. That is why I want laws in place to hold the individual government officials personally liable in civil court for their actions – no more suing the city and getting a million dollars from the taxpayer: now, sue the city council and get 100k from each council members. Its not quite a vigorous as a Muslim action, but it is effective.
If this is a demand to review, and presumably edit or restrict, “……any sermons dealing with ………… Annise Parker…” this is clearly a violation of the 1st Amendment. Parker is an elected official and there cannot be any restriction on discussing her or her job performance or anything else unless it is first clearly proved to be of a slanderous or libelous personal nature—-and possibly not even then.
I was just reading this story and came over here to write an article about it but you beat me to it Noonan. This is liberal insanity at it’s finest. The question you need to pose to liberals before you mention anything about this is if they think it would be ok to subpoena Mosques around the country for any “speeches, sermons, writings, etc, that are critical of America”. You will then enjoy watching their head explode, only to present this case to them afterwards. I am curious as to their answer then.
Couldn’t leave this story hanging too long. But remember the real purpose: to intimidate. Now the mayor has backed off – but the message has been sent: stray from the party line and we will come down on you! So, next time, fewer pastors will be willing to stand up. Until we punish the liberals who do this, it will only get worse.
Agreed but there are more important liberals to punish for this “top down” culture of obedience starting with Valeri Jarrett, who in reality runs the White House. Political correctness has now finally reached “ebola” like levels and has infected and is slowing killing the host.
I have a feeling that the Lefties in question simply didn’t see anything wrong with this. They were elected, right? So doesn’t that give them the right to do and say whatever they want?
This is the attitude from the White House on down. “I won.” It seems that the very concept of being governed according to a rule of law is surprising to them, and kind of alien. They are in charge—THEY are the law. It is what they say it is
And those who are not part of what they see as the solution are part of the problem, and must be brought to heel.
As we don’t have a thread addressing the government reaction, or non-reaction, to the Ebola threat, I’ll just post this here.
This is not the first time the government has withheld information about deadly or potentially deadly agents. Remember the furious attacks on Bush for claiming that there were still WMD in Iraq, and that there were none after all? Well, it turns out that there were, we knew about them, we had military people injured by them, and this was never made public.
I seldom link to the NYT but this is an excellent article.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons This is not a direct link to the article, but to a page that has a link to the article.
“From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.
In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”
……………………………………………………
“…….the American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.
The group, led by Charles A. Duelfer, a former United Nations official working for the Central Intelligence Agency, acknowledged that the American military had found old chemical ordnance: 12 artillery shells and 41 rocket warheads. It predicted that troops would find more.
The report also played down the dangers of the lingering weapons, stating that because their contents would have deteriorated, “any remaining chemical munitions in Iraq do not pose a militarily significant threat.”
…………………………………………….
Late in 2004, roughly simultaneous to the release of the Duelfer report, the Army signaled internally that it was concerned about the risks of chemical weapons by distributing detailed new instructions for treating troops exposed to warfare agents.
One of the memorandums, by the Medical Command, stated that “exposure to chemical weapons is a continuing and significant risk to our deployed forces.” The instructions required blood and urine tests for patients and follow-up tracking of the exposed — for life.”
This was not a case of risking the lives of millions of Americans through incompetence or corruption, as the Ebola crisis seems to be, but it IS an example of the government making a decision to hide important information because of a political calculation, and failing to provide adequate protection and then care for those most likely to be injured.
As we don’t have a thread addressing the government reaction, or non-reaction, to the Ebola threat, I’ll just post this here.
I just started a draft of such a post this morning as a follow-up to a comment I made a couple weeks ago that much, if not most of what the government and CDC were telling us about Ebola is/would be untrue. There has been so much misinformation, out right lies and shear incompetence so far, it’s going to take a bit of research just to sort it all out.
UPDATE After a couple hours of research this afternoon, I’ve changed my mind. I just don’t have the time or inclination to do justice to the topic. A book could be written about the mismanagement, misinformation, lies and contradictions put forward by the officials connected with the Ebola mess. Dr. Freiden alone has contradicted himself numerous times, sometimes in consecutive sentences.
And that’s just one issue. The compounding of incompetence, failures, and lies that emanate from this administration is hard to keep on top of. I think of writing something on one issue only to be inundated with multiple other issues to write about within the next day or two. It’s on a scale I have never seen before.
Trivia question: what do you do with a lawyer, political insider, former Gore and Biden Chief of Staff, distributor of stimulus funds (includingSolyndra)? Why you make him Ebola Czar of course. YCMTSU!!
To Obama and the liberals, Ebola is nothing but a political issue – being liberals, they are confident that the will never catch Ebola and don’t care how many poor people end up catching it (as long as said poor aren’t the household help). Their only concern is the ill effect this is having on Obama and, by extension, Democrats as a whole…so they’ve brought in the hackiest of political hacks to see if they can get it fixed up so that some how or another, the GOP gets the blame. The campaign in the last few days to say that lack of funding is the problem is Step One in the blame shifting exercise. I don’t think it’ll work, but they are sure in heck going to try.
That’s a tough question Spook.
But, since the CDC, Dr. Friedan, HHS, Sylvia Mathews Burwell or anyone else associated with the Obama Administration has any better ideas-I say what the hell; give this guy a shot.
Couldn’t hurt, right?
We just need to remember that we are approaching this thing from a completely different perspective. Our take on it is that the problem is the possible spread of a deadly disease, while Obama’s is that something out there is making him look indecisive. So we would naturally see a solution to the problem being in the general area of stopping its spread, but to Obama the solution is to merely look like he is doing something.
From our side of this divide, we look at things like early detection of the disease, isolating it so people are not exposed, working on finding treatments, working on developing a vaccine, etc. From the Obama side the approach is so much easier—-look down a list of sycophants to find someone willing to be the public face of the problem, make an announcement, and set up a tee time.
Racist.