Tag: first amendment

A Canadian man faces jail time for merely disagreeing with two feminists on Twitter.

10:16 am

Fascism: A Canadian man is now threatened with six months in jail because he dared to post on Twitter his disagreement with two feminist activists.

Read the article. These feminists fit the description of fascists so closely we could put their pictures in the dictionary next to the word.

Note also that this is in Canada, which does not have a first amendment comparable to what we have here in the U.S. Then again, the first amendment here in the U.S. is increasingly being ignored by those in power, so I’m not sure what advantage it gives us at the moment.

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Court rules Obamacare requires nuns to buy contraceptives

11:54 am

You must comply! A federal appeals court has ruled that Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic chartable organization run entirely by celibate nuns, must provide contraceptives, under the Obamacare mandate, to their employees or face IRS fines.

The court’s ruling ends the temporary injunction that prevented the Little Sisters from being fined while awaiting a final court decision. They either must get that injunction reinstate by a higher court or abandon their work. As they stated today,

As Little Sisters of the Poor, we offer the neediest elderly of every race and religion a home where they will be welcomed as Christ, cared for as family and accompanied with dignity until God calls them to Himself.  We have done this for over 175 years because of our faith in God and our vocation as Little Sisters of the Poor.

But now the government demands we choose between our care for the elderly poor and our faith.  We cannot do that and we should not have to.  It is a choice that violates our nation’s historic commitment to ensure that people from diverse faiths can freely follow God’s calling in their lives. But the government forces us to either violate our conscience or take millions of dollars that we raise by begging for the care of the elderly poor and instead pay fines to the IRS.

We are not seeking special privileges.  The government exempts huge corporations, small businesses, and other religious ministries from what they are imposing on us–we are simply asking to carry on our mission to serve the elderly poor as we have always done for 175 years.

Once again, the Obama administration, through its use of Obamacare, demonstrates its totalitarian nature. You must do as they demand, regardless of your religious beliefs.

Rather than abandon their work, the Little Sisters should continue doing it while also defying the law and the courts. Let the Obama administration and the IRS put some nuns in prison while bankrupting their organization. Only by doing that will there be any chance of continuing their work by getting this monstrous law changed, or repealed.

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The future roadmap of religious persecution in America

10:13 am

The article describes the inevitable legal consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage. Some key quotes:

The first attacks will be on small churches that don’t have the wherewithal to mount a legal defense against the IRS and against civil lawsuits. They will be confronted with a loss of their tax exempt status and the personal bankruptcy of their corporate officers if they do not allow homosexual weddings. The effect this will have on small congregations will be profound. Some will become “house churches”, much like what you see in Communist China. Many, however, will fall in line. The larger Protestant denominations will toe the line. Some, like the Episcopalians, are only nominally Christian as is. The Lutherans (ELCA variety) have had actively homosexual clergy for some time as have the Methodists. The two big targets for the government will be the Southern Baptist Convention — which is a voluntary association of independent churches — and the Roman Catholic Church. The pressure will ratchet up on them until they are confronted with confiscation of property or “discovering” hidden meanings in Scripture that reveal homosexual marriage has always been allowed.

Churches won’t disappear but the churches that you will see on Main Street will be peddling a warmed over and watered down version of Christianity that is a combination soup kitchen and twelve step program sans belief in a higher power. Real Christian churches will go underground but it will be a rearguard action. Christianity that chooses to ignore the very Word of God is not a religion, it is a cultural artifact.

The real price will be paid by those of us who are not actually employed by our churches. Organizing to resist homosexual marriage will bring down the FBI upon you as surely as if you were organizing a KKK chapter and with more alacrity than if you were an al Qaeda cell or blocking a polling station in Philadelphia. If you work for a large corporation or are in the military you can look forward to having your affirmatively support of homosexual marriage becoming an item on your performance appraisal. [emphasis mine]

And then there’s this:

Rather consistently local judges and others have said that religious liberty does not prevail for individuals who own businesses or engage in commerce. In effect, you can have religious liberty, so long as you don’t own a business. Here too there are legal nuances, but the fundamental trajectory is clear: Anyone who opposes the celebration of same-sex unions and lifestyle are going to be increasingly entangled in the courts and face more and more charges. [emphasis mine]

Read it all. If you don’t believe it will happen you are living in a fool’s paradise. Either Americans stand up now and defy the tyrannical strain that is beginning to dominate our society, or we will find all of our remaining but shrinking freedoms gone.

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Supreme Court voids local sign ordiance

1:59 pm

Some good news: In a 9-0 ruling the Supreme Court struck down a local Arizona town’s ordiance that restricted a church’s right to post signs about its upcoming events.

What is most encouraging about this ruling is that all nine justices agreed to it. This suggests that there is a strong majority on the court that supports freedom of speech, and will not look kindly at the Obama administration’s effort to impose its will on the speech and activity of religious and conservative organizations.

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Judge rules the arrest of a citizen during a local meeting illegal

10:26 am

The first amendment is such an inconvenient thing: A judge has dismissed criminal charges filed against a man who was arrested 40 seconds into his five minute allotted speaking period during a local council meeting when he asked the selectmen to resign.

“The arrest of (Clay) is found by the court to be a violation of (Clay’s) First Amendment right of free speech,” [the judge] Carroll wrote. The arrest amounted to “content-based censorship as the defendant was acting within the very rules promulgated by the (selectmen) as well within his constitutional rights under the U.S. and N.H. Constitutions,” Carroll wrote. Clay “complied with the board’s own protocol, established by the board for public input.”

I have embedded the video of the incident below the fold. Watch it. Essentially, the council didn’t like what Clay was saying and decided to shut him up. Granted, he was being very harsh, but tough, that is what free speech is all about. Note also that though they tell him they have ended the public input session, after he is arrested they then resume public input.

Everyone of these elected officials should be out of office. They have no understanding that their role as elected officials is to be the servant of the people, not their overlords. When a citizen is unhappy, you listen to them, and address their concerns as quickly as possible. As the least, you let the citizen air his or her complaints fully, and loudly, and then if you find they do not have merit, move on.

These thugs clearly do not understand these basic aspects of American culture.
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State Department proposes fines for writing about guns without permission

11:31 am

New regulations being proposed by the Obama administration would require anyone writing on the web about guns to get approval first from the State Department or face serious fines.

In their current form, the ITAR do not (as a rule) regulate technical data that are in what the regulations call the ‘public domain.’ Essentially, this means data ‘which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public’ through a variety of specified means. These include ‘at libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents.’ Many have read this provision to include material that is posted on publicly available websites, since most public libraries these days make Internet access available to their patrons.

The ITAR, however, were originally promulgated in the days before the Internet. Some State Department officials now insist that anything published online in a generally-accessible location has essentially been ‘exported,’ as it would be accessible to foreign nationals both in the U.S. and overseas.

With the new proposal published on June 3, the State Department claims to be ‘clarifying’ the rules concerning ‘technical data’ posted online or otherwise ‘released’ into the ‘public domain.’ To the contrary, however, the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech. This is because all such releases would require the ‘authorization’ of the government before they occurred. The cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining such authorizations, moreover, would make online communication about certain technical aspects of firearms and ammunition essentially impossible. [emphasis mine]

In your wildest dreams did you ever think we’d come to a time in the U.S. where the federal government thought it acceptable to require citizens to get their permission before they could publish something?

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A teacher’s Title IX inquisition

10:30 am

Link here. She was attacked and subjected to significant legal harassment, merely because she wrote an op-ed on sexual politics on campus, and some people didn’t like her opinion. They then used the badly written Title IX law, passed in 1972 by Congress to “deal with gender discrimination in public education”, to get her, and her supporters, charged and interrogated repeatedly by lawyers.

Her accusers were allowed to remain anonymous. She was denied the right to use a lawyer. The specific charges against her were never provided in writing. And they were apparently based merely on the fact that her op-ed offended her accusers.

Read it all. Since the attacks against her were instigated by the students, who represent our future, this story will give you a good sense of where our society is heading. And it ain’t paradise.

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“These are the brownshirts of our time.”

7:45 pm

Link here.

Read it. Though the author describes an event that happened in 2003, it shows us ugly circumstances that have now become quite common, because as she says, “the ‘good’ people did nothing to disperse the hostility.” And unless we do something about it now — stand up to these fascist thugs who hide behind nice-sounding ideologies — what is happening today in the worst places in the Middle East is only showing us what things will be like here in another dozen years.

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Speak free or die

3:29 pm

The rage builds:

Oh, you came so close. For so long, we wrongly imagined that your lies about racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and all the rest were just part of some big misunderstanding. Sure, we knew you were wrong, that we were being falsely accused, but we thought you were at least sincere, if misguided. Except now the mask is off.

Racism? You don’t care. Ask Clarence Thomas about your love of minorities who don’t toe your line.

Sexism? You don’t care. Ask any of Bill Clinton’s victims, who you eagerly sacrificed to save your progressive knight.

Homophobia? Poverty? Corporate abuses? Civil rights? You care nothing about any of them. You leftists just want control. You trash gays who get between you and power, and ignore the gays being murdered in the Middle East because that oppression isn’t useful to you. You keep the poor poor and addicted to your paltry handouts so you can maintain a docile voting bloc. Corporate abuses are terrible right up until the big companies start paying off your candidates. And civil rights? Gimme a break. The First Amendment stopped being useful back in January 2009, so now you’re eager to drown it like Mary Jo Kopechne.

We’re done. You fascists, whether Islamo- or liberal, want to shut us up? Then you better be ready to rumble, because submission isn’t one of the options. We will speak free or die.

Read it all. It illustrates how alike the Islamic fanatics and the liberal fascists have become. There really is no difference, and if freedom-loving Americans bow to either or both they will then turn on themselves in a new war of hate.

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Students vote to ban Chick-fil-A from Johns Hopkins campus

10:24 am

Fascists: In an 18-8 vote, the Student Government Association at Johns Hopkins has voted to ban Chick-fil-A from opening a franchise on campus because of the conservative opinion of its CEO towards same-sex marriage.

Most of the news reports on this story have focused on the reasons the students voted for the ban. Having such a restaurant on campus will cause students to experience “microaggressions” that will make them feel uncomfortable. We can’t have that!

I want to focus on the vote itself. That such a large majority of the student government body supports the idea that it is okay to squelch someone’s business merely because of a political disagreement speaks volumes about our future, and it is not good. These are the people that will be running society in a few years, and it is clear that they believe oppression and the use of force against their opponents is appropriate. The cultural norm for them is not to debate their opponents but to smash a boot into their face.

Based on this, if you think modern American culture is getting oppressive now, just wait. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Another global warming advocate demands the arrest of skeptics

10:32 am

Fascist: Continuing in what is becoming a pattern for the left, another global warming advocate has called for the arrest of anyone who dares question the existence of human-caused global warming.

You can read his entire rant here. This quote is especially telling:

Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.

Let’s make a clear distinction here: I’m not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.

You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.

This is why, at this time especially, I refuse to cede any further power to government and its allies. A significant percentage of our population is in favor of using that power to oppress their opponents. Give them any more power and they will do it.

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Americans rally to support persecuted Christians

10:27 pm

In less than two days, an independent fund was set up and raised almost $850,000 for the owners of the Christian pizza parlor in Indiana that was forced to close because of death threats from the left wing community.

Friends of the Washington state florist whose entire life savings might be confiscated by the state for refusing to participate in a homosexual wedding have also now created another site to raise money to help her. They have already raised over $50,000.

Both funds are important for many reasons, the most important of which is each fund makes it clear that Christians of good conscience are not alone, that they can stand for their beliefs and not be abandoned and destroyed. There are thousands of people who will rally to help you.

Let me add, as a Jew, this thought on this first night of Passover. Each year on Passover, Jews gather for their Passover Seder to retell the story of their enslavement in Egypt and their escape to freedom. In doing so, you are supposed to imagine yourself as a slave who is freed. As the Haggadah, the book that outlines the Seder ceremony, states, “In every single generation, each individual is obligated to think of himself as one of those who came out of Egypt.”

The Jewish faith also emphasizes that we must thank God each time for bringing us to freedom. I say that God only helps those who help themselves. It appears that in America today, in the 21st century, we are obliged to do the same again.

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The establishment of a state religion called progressive liberalism

4:51 pm

The battle over forcing businesses to participate in same-sex marriages is actually an attempt by the left to establish a state religion called progressive liberalism.

It is important to note that Madison was making this case [in arguing for the first amendment in the Bill of Rights] not in the context of arguing for permitting the free exercise of religion but rather in the context of arguing against the establishment of any religion by law. His point was that no one ought to be compelled to affirm as true a religious tenet he took to be false and that no one should be compelled to participate in a religious rite that violated his own understanding of his religious obligations. [emphasis mine]

The author goes on to point out how the effort by the left to require businesses to participate in same-sex weddings is exactly the same as what Madison feared, the creation and imposition of a state religion, except in this case the state religion calls itself secular and has few if any links with God.

Read it all. When I read it my mind went “Bingo! He has hit the nail right on the head.”

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Liberals are the New McCarthyites—and they’re proud of it

11:16 am

Link here.

Some of the hallmarks of the original McCarthyism are popping up in today’s variant. Media companies were pressured in the 1950s not to hire people suspected of Communist ties. Today, pressure is being applied to isolate or sideline scholars who disagree with climate-change policies. In the 1950s, people accused of heretical views were sometimes unfairly attacked or threatened. Today, people who oppose gay marriage sometimes see their jobs or businesses put at risk. Ask Brendan Eich, who was forced to step down last year as CEO of Mozilla for making a six-year-old donation to a measure opposing same-sex marriage. Or the owners of the Indiana pizza parlor who had to close their doors after threats mounted when they said they would serve any customers in their restaurant but wouldn’t cater a gay wedding.

Read it all. It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that the left is no longer interested in civil debate. Disagree with them, and their answer is to try to destroy you.

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It’s National Hate Week!

4:31 pm

Link here.

Today, we’re all hating on Indiana. Who will be the left’s Emmanuel Goldstein next week?

Evidently, the sole function of the media these days is to subject the public to a steady stream of manufactured events: “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”; nuclear power kills; Lena Dunham’s rape by a college conservative at Oberlin; the “mattress girl” raped at Columbia University; Jon Stewart is funny; a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia; and a law protecting religious freedom will lead to separate water fountains for gays in Indiana.

The whole country has to keep being dragged through these liberal hate campaigns, but as soon as the precipitating event turns out to be a gigantic hoax, the truth is revealed like a bedtime story being read to a child: The ending is whispered and the narrator tiptoes out of the room.

Read it all. It will help you distinguish between real news and modern leftwing propaganda, based on lies, being promoted by our modern mainstream press.

Meanwhile, that pizzeria whose owner said they wouldn’t cater a same-sex wedding, though they’d be glad to sell pizzas to homosexuals, has been forced to close because of death threats, including one threat on twitter from a high school coach who thought it a good idea to get together and burn the place down. She has since been suspended from her job.

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College punishes students for sexist chanting at party, even those not there

1:40 pm

Fascists: The University of Mary Washington has punished its entire rugby team of 46 because 8 attended a party where some had participated in “sexist chanting.”

The microaggression unfolded last November at a house party near the Fredericksburg, Virginia, campus, according to Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan. Some students, likely drunk, sang a demeaning song about raping corpses and “wiggling it” inside whores—inappropriate stuff, to be sure, though not really targeted at a specific entity in a threatening way. The chant apparently has its origins in rowdy “pub” songs. It’s a curious tradition, though not one intended to inspire actual malice, it seems.

But someone at the party recorded the chant; eventually, UMW’s Feminists United on Campus found out about it and made sure university administrators were informed. This led to an investigation, and eventually, the end of the rugby team. The location of the party was said to be a “rugby house”—even though only two members of the team actually lived there—and so the entire team had to pay the price.

First of all, the chanting, as ugly as it might have been, is perfectly legal under the first amendment. Not only was it merely speech, it took place off campus in a private residence, where the college has limited jurisdiction.

Second, what kind of justice is it for the college to punish all the members of the rugby team when only a few even attended the party? Even if it had to right to do so (which I question), punishing innocent third parties is beyond Stalinistic.

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Muslim university students campaign to shut down free speech

9:21 am

Fascists: Muslim students at the University of Missouri want to prevent the screening of the film American Sniper because they don’t agree with it.

At the heart of the controversy is a Muslim student activist who declared showing the film on campus would make her feel “unsafe” and demanded an “apology and explanation” as to how and why the movie was even selected for Mizzou audiences.

The uproar was taken quite seriously, and prompted the student government to conduct a meeting to determine whether the flick should be shown. “This film is blatant racist, colonialist propaganda that should not be shown under any circumstances and especially not endorsed by a branch of student government that purports to represent me and have my best interests in mind,” student Farah El-Jayyousi had stated. [emphasis mine]

I haven’t seen the movie, and I am sure neither has Farah El-Jayyousi above. I however wouldn’t dream of censoring it. El-Jayyousi would love to, along with any other person who dares to criticize Islam and the culture of violence and hate that now dominates it.

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Family flees home due to death threats

8:57 am

Modern American freedom: The parents of one of the Oklahoma fraternity students caught on video making a racist chant have fled their home due to death threats.

As vile as the racist chanting was, it was not threatening anyone with death. Moreover, we have something called the first amendment, which protects all speech, even the vile kind. Threatening the parents of someone who says something you don’t like is hardly standing up for righteous principles.

In related news, Christians at George Washington University in the District of Columbia face punishment because they refuse to participate in gay sensitivity training sessions.

A conservative student group at The George Washington University faces punishment, including the loss of its funding, for refusing to engage in LGBT sensitivity training on campus. The students are now being condemned and attacked on campus by those who claim they’re committing an “act of violence” for standing up for their members’ individual rights and Judeo-Christian values. The Young America’s Foundation chapter at the Washington, D.C.-based academic institute has refused to participate in LGBT sensitivity training recently made as a requirement.

Amanda Robbins, vice president of GW YAF, told The Christian Post that their objection to the training “stems not only from many of our members’ Judeo-Christian values, but also from our organization’s commitment to defending the individual rights of every student on campus. We firmly believe that there should be no such preconditions for any student organization to be able to operate freely on campus,” said Robbins.

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California bans Christian clubs at its colleges

10:27 pm

Modern fascism: Christian clubs at California colleges have been banned because the clubs insist that their elected leaders must be Christians.

Leaders of Cru, formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, as well as the two other Christian clubs at San Luis Obispo that were derecognized – InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Chinese Christian Fellowship – have insisted that they couldn’t allow any non-Christians to be leaders.

“We have no issue with anybody of any kind of race, religion coming to our weekly meetings and being a part of who we are,” San Luis Obispo Missionary Leader Jamey Pappas said. “It’s a question of who’s going to be leading our students in a Bible Study, mentoring them individually, or deciding what kind of content goes into our weekly meeting, and we want people who agree with what we’re about.”

More evidence that the concept of freedom of association is dead in America, and with it freedom itself. The result here is that it is impossible to have a religious organization on these campuses. (Note that the Islamic clubs have joined with the Christian clubs to fight the policy.)

Since I have no doubt that atheist and gay clubs accepted this policy knowing that college administrators will look the other way if they discriminate because they are considered “politically correct,” I think these religious clubs should test the policy for real. Pick an atheist club and swamp it with religious members so that a religious person gets elected as leader. We will quickly find out that the real intent of these policies has nothing to do with preventing discrimination but to squelch the freedoms of traditional American values in favor of new ideologies.

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Fired for using the wrong word

9:03 am

Fascists: A student government representative was removed from his position at George Mason University because he used the word “illegal” in writing about his opposition to giving illegal immigrants state tuition aid.

GMU’s student body president, Philip Abbruscato, released [an] official message on Sunday boasting of the school’s “thousands of unique voices” and the student government’s “variety of backgrounds, cultures, ideologies, academic interests, and more.” Abbruscato also said that “demeaning” remarks from members of GMU’s student government would “not be tolerated at any level regardless of belief,” and removed Paglia from his position on Feb., 20. “While we all live in a society that permits us to express our opinions, we must also recognize that we live with the consequences of their impact on those we represent. [emphasis mine]

In other words, according to this fascist, you have freedom of speech as long as you don’t say anything that he disagrees with.

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Christian florist tells her side of the story

10:51 pm

Watch the video of her television interview below the fold. As she says,

It’s not about the money. It’s about freedom. It’s about my eight kids and our 23 grandchildren and the future. There’s not a price on freedom. You can’t buy my freedom. It’s me now, but tomorrow it’s going to be you. You gotta wake up. [emphasis mine]

She added,

They are talking about bullying me into doing something that is against my faith. They can’t do that.

She also makes it very clear that she and the gay couple are friends, and that she has provided flowers for them many times in the past. And when she declined to do arrangements for their marriage, she provided them alternative recommendations so they wouldn’t be deprived of service, though not from her. And it appears that this gay couple never sued her. It was the ACLU and the Washington attorney general that sued.
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“It is ironic a sign warning of the liberal thought police was potentially stolen by the liberal thought police.”

1:45 am

Leftwing facists: A sign advertising a talk being given by Jonah Goldberg about his book Liberal Fascism at the University of Michigan was apparently stolen by liberal fascists who don’t like freedom of speech.

The sign was bright red and declared: “Warning: Liberal thought police. Jonah Goldberg on his best-selling book Liberal Fascism.” It included a picture of a smiley face with a piece of tape over its mouth and the word “censorship.” “The biggest irony is on the front of the poster it says ‘thought police,’” Audia said in an interview with The College Fix. “So a warning on thought police was censored. It’s pretty ridiculous.”

Now of course, we really don’t know exactly who stole the sign, but somehow I don’t believe it was tea party protesters offended by Goldberg’s subject matter. Moreover, such actions have become the typical behavior leftwing students and administrators on college campus.

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Houston mayor withdrews sermon subpoenas

10:22 am

A partial victory for free speech: The lesbian mayor of Houston has withdrawn the subpoenas her administration had issued demanding that conservative pastors turn over to the government any sermons or communications which had discussed politics.

I call this a partial victory because the mayor, Annise Parker, is still in office, and was still unapologetic about the subpoenas.

“The goal of the subpoenas is to defend against the lawsuit and not to provoke a public debate,” Parker said. She is ordering the subpoenas removed for the sake of Houston, not because the request were in any way illegal or intended to intrude on religious liberties, Parker said. “I didn’t do this to satisfy them,” Parker said of critics. “I did it because it was not serving Houston.”

She still thinks it was perfectly okay to make this demand against her opponents. Such a person should never be allowed the power of any political office, including dog-catcher.

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Democrats demand the right to regulate internet speech

5:26 pm

Fascists: The Democrats on the Federal Election Commission on Friday called for the heavy regulation of speech on the internet.

In a surprise move late Friday, a key Democrat on the Federal Election Commission called for burdensome new rules on Internet-based campaigning, prompting the Republican chairman to warn that the Left wants to regulate conservative political sites and even news outlets like the Drudge Report.

Democratic FEC Vice Chair Ann M. Ravel announced plans to begin the process to win regulations on Internet-based campaigns and videos, currently free from most of the FEC’s rules. “A reexamination of the commission’s approach to the internet and other emerging technologies is long over due,” she said.

And if you vote for these thugs, you identify yourself as someone supporting fascism.

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California orders churches to fund abortions

8:34 am

Fascists: In a sudden change to its health insurance regulations, leftwing California is now requiring churches to fund abortions.

California’s Department of Managed Health Care has ordered all insurance plans in the state to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not Plan B. Not contraceptives. Elective surgical dismemberment abortion. At the insistence of the American Civil Liberties Union, the DMHC concluded that a 40-year-old state law requiring health plans to cover “basic health services” had been misinterpreted all these decades. Every plan in the state was immediately ordered, effective August 22, to cover elective abortion. California had not even applied this test to its own state employee health plans (which covered only “medically necessary” abortions). But this novel reading was nevertheless quietly imposed on every plan in the state by fiat.

… Several other California churches have received similar notices from their insurers, and others will follow. While California (like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS) exempts churches from its contraceptive mandate, there is no exception to this bureaucratic abortion mandate. This leaves California churches in the illogical and impossible position of being free to exclude contraceptives from their health plan for reasons of religious conscience but required to provide their employees with abortion coverage.

This is clear proof that the left’s long claim that it is the champion of freedom and religious liberty is quite hollow, and if any speech or religion happens to believe something different than the left, the left is going to aggressively move to deny it its freedom.

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Send your sermons to Houston

9:05 am

This is good: Mike Huckabee on Saturday suggested that every pastor in America send their sermons to the mayor of Houston.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said pastors from across the United States should send “thousands and thousands” of Bibles and sermons to the Houston mayor who demanded pastors turn over their sermons to the government due to their objection to an LGBT discrimination city ordinance.”I hope she gets thousands and thousands of sermons and Bibles,” Huckabee said on his Fox News show Saturday, referring to Mayor Annise D. Parker.”It ought to make you mad that the mayor thinks she can turn in her pastors. And so I got an idea,” Huckabee explained. “If she wants a sermon, here is my suggestion. I would like to ask every pastor in America, not only the ones in Houston, to send her your sermons and go ahead. Obviously she could use a few. And everybody watching the show ought to send her a Bible.”

As always, the best answer to bad speech is more speech!

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Houston mayor says she will reduce scoop of pastor subpoenas

8:18 pm

How nice of her: The lesbian Democratic mayor of Houston has backtracked and promised to narrow the scope of the subpoenas her government issued to several pastors, demanding access to their sermons, speeches, and communications with church members.

She is still a fascist, as she is still going to go forward. She also has not yet specified exactly how she plans to narrow the scope of her demands, since as far as I can tell, none of her demands are constitutional or even reasonable.

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Forest Service clamps down on free speech

9:47 pm

The Bill of Rights is such an inconvenient thing: The U.S. Forest Service has instituted rules requiring journalists to get a permit before they can take pictures or videos on federal land.

Under rules being finalized in November, a reporter who met a biologist, wildlife advocate or whistleblower alleging neglect in any of the nation’s 100 million acres of wilderness would first need special approval to shoot photos or videos even on an iPhone. Permits cost up to $1,500, says Forest Service spokesman Larry Chambers, and reporters who don’t get a permit could face fines up to $1,000.

First Amendment advocates say the rules ignore press freedoms and are so vague they’d allow the Forest Service to grant permits only to favored reporters shooting videos for positive stories.

The fascist nature of these new rules is revealed by this quote near the end of the article:

[T]he Forest Service is giving its supervisors discretion to decide whether a news outlet’s planned video or photo shoots would meet the Wilderness Act’s goals. “If you were engaged on reporting that was in support of wilderness characteristics, that would be permitted,” [said Liz Close, the Forest Service’s acting wilderness director].

But if you are reporting on something the Forest Service disagrees with they obviously believe they have the right to deny you a permit to film or videotape.

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Senate Republicans block Democrat attempt to repeal First Amendment

7:04 pm

In a party line vote, Senate Republicans today blocked a Democratic amendment to the Constitution that would have partly repealed the first amendment to the Bill of Rights.

This paragraph summarizes well the goals of the modern fascist Democratic Party:

Holding the vote, even in defeat, was a major political goal for Democrats during the two-week session of Congress. They hope the fight will help them rally their base ahead of November’s elections, arguing that changing the Constitution is needed to prevent wealthy conservatives from improperly influencing elections. [emphasis mine]

The Democrats aren’t mincing words about this. To put it another way, they believe that conservatives shouldn’t have the right to express themselves, and thus they want to repeal the free speech rights of every American so they can squelch the freedom of their conservative opponents.

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The fascist Senate Democrats who voted to repeal the first amendment

3:16 pm

George Will, in an op-ed condemning the Democratic Party’s effort to partially repeal the first amendment of the Bill of Rights in order to limit free speech, also provides us a convenient list of the Democrats who voted for this amendment, also highlighting those senators who are up for reelection in November.

As Will notes,

The 48 senators proposing to give legislators speech-regulating powers describe their amendment in anodyne language, as “relating to contributions and expenditures intended to affect elections.” But what affects elections is speech, and the vast majority of contributions and expenditures are made to disseminate speech. The Democrats’ amendment says: “Congress and the states may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections,” and may “prohibit” corporations — including nonprofit issue-advocacy corporations (such as the Sierra Club, NARAL Pro-Choice America and thousands of others across the political spectrum) from spending any money “to influence elections,” which is what most of them exist to do.

Because all limits will be set by incumbent legislators, the limits deemed “reasonable” will surely serve incumbents’ interests. The lower the limits, the more valuable will be the myriad (and unregulated) advantages of officeholders.

If you stand for freedom, you will stand to remove these fascists from office.

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