Jay Michaelson | Doublespeak } The Daily Beast | November 26, 2015
The first salvo of this new, cynical tactic has just been fired by Republicans in the Indiana State Senate. There, a new bill is being sold as a landmark compromise on LGBT equality; on the face of it; the bill protects LGBT people from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.
LIZ ROBBINS | New York Times | MSN News | November 20, 2015
NEW HAVEN — On Tuesday afternoon, the couple from Syria arrived at Kennedy International Airport only to face one more shock in a four-year journey of loss, anxiety and upheaval. They had no idea they had landed in a political maelstrom.
The governor of Indiana, the state that was scheduled to be their new home, had said he would not accept any more Syrian refugees for fear that they might be terrorists. Over the next two days, more than two dozen governors, a majority of the House of Representatives and all the Republican presidential candidates said they would shut the door to people like them, because American security could not be guaranteed.
“Why did they bring us if they didn’t want us?” said the 33 year-old husband and father, recalling his initial reaction through an Arabic interpreter. “We are coming to an open country.”
“A country with freedoms,” his wife, 23, said.
![Same-sex wedding ceremony [KKLN-TV]](https://i0.wp.com/www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Same-sex-wedding-ceremony-KKLN-TV-800x430.jpg)
Bethania Palma Markus | Raw Story | July 24, 2015
A former employee of an Indiana county clerk’s office is suing after being fired for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses because of her religious beliefs.
Linda Summers, former Harrison County clerk, filed her suit last week, accusing County Clerk Sally Whitis of wrongly firing her. Last October, Whitis sent an email to employees directing them to comply with state law and process the marriage applications regardless of religious beliefs, the Indianapolis Star reports.
Summers responded by hand-delivering a letter to Whitis, telling her that same-sex marriage is against her “sincerely-held” religious beliefs, requesting she not be required to do so. As a result, Summers was terminated for insubordination.
Opponents of Indiana Senate Bill 101, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, march to Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis on Saturday, April 4, 2015 to push for a state law that specifically bars discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Peter Montgomery | The American Prospect | April 16, 2015
Sometimes you hate to be proven right. In an article in The American Prospect’s recent winter issue, I wrote that while marriage equality enjoyed some significant victories in 2014, Republicans would likely use their electoral successes that November to push back hard. Under the guise of “religious liberty,” Republican lawmakers at the state level were poised to legalize and protect discrimination against LGBT people in countless ways.
And how. Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) may have grabbed the most attention, but it’s just scratching the surface. Republican lawmakers had, as of April 6, introduced more than 100 pieces of anti-LGBT legislation in 29 states, according to Human Rights Campaign, including more than 25 RFRA bills. The bills challenge LGBT rights in adoption and foster care, access to health services, and even in organizing student groups on campus. Trying to keep up with all the action at the state level is a bit like playing “whack-a-mole,” says Rebecca Isaacs, executive director of the Equality Federation.
In Texas alone, activists are looking at more than 20 pieces of anti-equality legislation, including measures to strip provisions from the state RFRA that prevent it from being used to support discrimination. In Louisiana, a state lawmaker has introduced a religious freedom bill that would bar the state from denying a job, contract, license, certification, or tax deduction to someone who takes action, “in accordance with a religious belief or moral conviction” about marriage. According to the Associated Press, Governor and likely presidential contender Bobby Jindal intends “to fight for passage of this legislation.”
David Edwards | Raw Story | April 6, 2015
Likely Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday quoted Westboro Church’s infamous “God Hates Fags” slogan in defense of an Indiana law that allowed Christian businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples.
After Indiana revised its law to allow so that it did not override anti-discrimination ordinances in local municipalities, Santorum told CBS host Norah O’Donnell that he had hoped for more religious protections.
“I think the language they had is better language, this is acceptable language,” he explained in an interview that aired on Sunday. “It doesn’t do a lot of the things — it doesn’t really open the debate up on some of the more current issues.”
Graham Gremore | Queerty | April 3, 2014
It’s been a looooong week for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and his fellow Republican lawmakers.
What started out as an effort to undo decades of advancements in the gay rights movement has, one week later, turned into the state enacting protections based on sexual orientation for the first time in its history, even though Gov. Pence said on Tuesday that protecting LGBT Indianans was “not on his agenda.”
What a different a few days makes, huh?
Mike Pence | Mike Pence for Governor | March 31, 2015
Indianapolis – Governor Mike Pence today penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal regarding Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Excerpts can be found below. The full version, which will appear in Tuesday’s edition, can be found here.
“I want to make clear to Hoosiers and every American that despite what critics and many in the national media have asserted, the law is not a “license to discriminate,” either in Indiana or elsewhere.”
“I abhor discrimination. I believe in the Golden Rule that you should “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If I saw a restaurant owner refuse to serve a gay couple, I wouldn’t eat there anymore”
Contact: Peter LaBarbera, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, 312-324-3787312-324-3787, americansfortruth@gmail.com; Twitter: @PeterLaBarbera
OPINION, April 1, 2015 /Christian Newswire/ — The following is submitted by Peter LaBarbera:
In the wake of a pro-LGBT, media-driven campaign against Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), Gov. Mike Pence and leaders of the Indiana legislature are backtracking to appease the liberal political mob that has cynically recast the law as the “License to Discriminate.”
Good people everywhere are now intimidated from speaking plain truths about the homosexual-bisexual-transgender agenda. Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) is not. The distortions and media hype attacking Indiana’s religious freedom law are obfuscating some key fundamentals in this debate. It is not the purpose here to dig into the “legaleze” about the law (for that, see this Reason.com piece) but rather to expose the core hypocrisy of pro-LGBT progressives on “discrimination.”
Homosexual activists and their sycophants in the media (e.g., CNN’s homosexual anchor/activist Don Lemon) are cunningly building upon their distortions of the RFRA to demand a pro-homosexual special-rights law in the Hoosier State.
It would be the cruelest of ironies if the media-driven backlash against Indiana’s religious freedom law were used to push through a statewide “gay rights” law in Indiana. Such pro-homosexual laws and corporate policies have been the engine driving PRO-LGBT DISCRIMINATION against people of faith for decades-all in the sweet-sounding name of “equality.” For example, the “gay” movement’s bullying of the Boy Scouts of America began with a lawsuit that relied upon New Jersey’s pro-homosexual “sexual orientation” law.
The pro-family movement has long referred to so-called nondiscrimination laws based on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as “special rights” because genuine civil rights are not based on disordered, immoral sexual behavior and gender confusion. These Orwellian laws and corporate policies actually foment discrimination in the name of “non-discrimination.” That’s liberalism for you.
Our cherished American freedoms come ultimately from God, as recognized by our national charter, the Declaration of Independence, which appeals to “Nature and Nature’s God.” Homosexual behavior–which cannot produce life–is against both. Witness the grossly disproportionate STD rates linked to “men who have sex with men.”
It is ludicrous to posit “civil rights” based on homosexuality and gender rebellion as “constitutional.” But it is downright un-American to argue-as many LGBT activists do-that in a nation founded by people fleeing religious oppression, “rights” based on sexual sin should trump Americans’ freedom to uphold biblical sexual morality and real marriage between man and woman.
The LGBT Lobby and the media have raised the issue of potential discrimination in Indiana. Let’s talk about discrimination.
With the rise of “gay power” in the West has come an abundance of victims of pro-homosexual Political Correctness. All over the world, Christians and moral-minded citizens have been victimized by a liberal, elitist pro-homosexual orthodoxy that increasingly brooks no dissent. The media have trivialized the zero-sum conflict between “gay rights” and freedom of conscience as being merely about wedding cake bakers–but the escalating “LGBTyranny” goes far beyond that:
If government can compel a Christian or Orthodox Jewish businessman to participate in a ceremony that attaches sinful homosexuality to “marriage,” then the State can compel ANY American citizen or institution to violate ANY of their cherished beliefs. That is the essence of tyranny.
Disagreeing morally with homosexuality is not “bigotry,” “hate” or “animus.” Since when did sodomy-which has been taboo for centuries; is condemned unequivocally in Scripture; and is defined by American wordsmith Noah Webster as “a crime against nature”-become sacrosanct?
Legalized homosexual “marriage” is a grave moral evil and an unprecedented sign of decadence in the West. It is the right and duty of every true Christian to oppose it. But no small business owner-whether religious or not–should be compelled to participate in a same-sex “wedding” that not only glorifies homosexual sin but often does it in God’s name.
Liberals and homosexual activists love to cry “Bigot!” but there is plenty of anti-Christian bigotry on their side: see this nasty Tweet by influential Indiana LGBT activist Bil Browning mocking “Jeebus” (Jesus Christ) and this article about the National LGBTQ Task Force celebrating a documentary about a play that portrays Christ as “gay” and the one-time homosexual lover of Judas.
Politically speaking, it seems bigotry is OK as long as it advances the “progressive” agenda to impose mandatory acceptance of homosexuality and gender confusion on everyone.
Paul Waldman | The American Prospect | March 31, 2015
If you’ve been watching Indiana Governor Mike Pence over the last few days as the “religious freedom” law he passed has been getting so much attention, you’ve noticed that there are many questions he really, really does not want to answer. He doesn’t want to get into specifics or hypotheticals, even when those specifics and hypotheticals—like what different type of discrimination might be allowed under this law—are absolutely vital to understanding it. But I was pleasantly surprised to see one Republican politician who was willing to get specific over this issue: Marco Rubio. Here he is appearing on Fox News’s “The Five”—the relevant portion begins at around 3:45:
I don’t happen to agree with Rubio on most of what he says, but at least he’s addressing it. Let’s break it down:
“No one here is saying that it should be legal to deny someone service at a restaurant or at a hotel because of their sexual orientation. I think that’s a consensus view in America.”
Actually, if you object to nondiscrimination laws that cover gay people, as most conservatives do, then you do think that it should be legal to deny someone service at a restaurant or a hotel because of their sexual orientation. That doesn’t mean you think it’s a good idea, but you do think it ought to be legal. But now we know that Rubio doesn’t feel that way, which is a good start. And it’s something that conservatives ought to be asked about, because they always fall back on “Well I don’t like discrimination, and I think it’s wrong.” But that’s not what we’re debating; we’re debating whether the law ought to prohibit it. Let’s move on:
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