Pushback: Court rules against East Lansing’s attempt to blacklist Christian for following his beliefs
The Tennes are a normal family! We must blacklist them!
They’re coming for you next: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up on a August 2021 post, and is a victory, of a sort. As I reported then, after farmer Steve Tennes (shown to the right with his family) made the egregious error of stating his strongly held Christian belief that marriage is for a man and a woman only, and he would only rent his farm for such marriages, and not same-sex marriages, the city government of East Lansing decided to specifically write rules that would ban his farm from participating in its local farmer’s market.
The ban against their business, Country Mill Farms, was begun in 2016. Though a court quickly ruled that it was unconstitutional, the city renewed the ban in 2018 and has maintained it since, claiming the court’s ruling only applied to the 2017 season.
The logic of the East Lansing government is actually quite blatent: It believes it has the right to dictate what others can or cannot say in public, the first amendment be damned.
The city’s new rules quite clearly stated it was illegal for anyone to “make a statement which indicates that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome or unacceptable because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.” You essentially had to agree to its queer agenda policies in all things, even if you were not in East Lansing or were doing business in a farm many miles away. And you better not express any dissent to those policies either!
» Read more
The Tennes are a normal family! We must blacklist them!
They’re coming for you next: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up on a August 2021 post, and is a victory, of a sort. As I reported then, after farmer Steve Tennes (shown to the right with his family) made the egregious error of stating his strongly held Christian belief that marriage is for a man and a woman only, and he would only rent his farm for such marriages, and not same-sex marriages, the city government of East Lansing decided to specifically write rules that would ban his farm from participating in its local farmer’s market.
The ban against their business, Country Mill Farms, was begun in 2016. Though a court quickly ruled that it was unconstitutional, the city renewed the ban in 2018 and has maintained it since, claiming the court’s ruling only applied to the 2017 season.
The logic of the East Lansing government is actually quite blatent: It believes it has the right to dictate what others can or cannot say in public, the first amendment be damned.
The city’s new rules quite clearly stated it was illegal for anyone to “make a statement which indicates that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome or unacceptable because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.” You essentially had to agree to its queer agenda policies in all things, even if you were not in East Lansing or were doing business in a farm many miles away. And you better not express any dissent to those policies either!
» Read more