Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Stand Up for Jesus. . .

All over the media is the buzz about the Houston pastors whose sermons were subpenaed.  What is a strange and foolish act on the part of the openly gay Houston mayor in support of her measures to help the cause of GLBT there has backfired.  It was an outrageous overstep.  Of all the responses, one of the most thoughtful is that penned by LCMS 4th Vice President and also Pastor of Memorial Lutheran Church in Houston.  Read it here.  It is good stuff.

Why I stand with the Houston five.


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you meant the Houston mayor, not major.

John Joseph Flanagan said...

Of course it is an overstep, an affront to the Constitution and freedom, but we have seen the progressives in academia and media, and the politically leftist Democratic Party, continually create a crony system of picking and choosing values and winning by intimidation. The gay lobby, in partucular, is every bit as Fascist as the brown shirts of Hitler and Mao's Red Guard. These are times to stand up and oppose radical liberalism and its attack on religious freedom in America, lest we wake up one day and find that our freedom is gone. Under totalitarian systems, gulags and prisons follow, and opposition must be silenced. We are not there yet, but even the most lethargic and passive citizen should realize we, as a nation, are moving in the direction of a Fascist state.

Carl Vehse said...

"The City of Houston plans to try to invalidate the petitions by showing that the pastors tried to influence city legislation and then, I suspect, will turn the communications obtained in a court proceeding over to the IRS hoping it will revoke participating churches’ tax-exempt status, which would also expose the churches to property taxes in Harris County. (IRS speech restrictions apply at both the federal and local level because Texas Tax Code requires federal exemption status for local exemption status.)

"This is the Left’s goal against religion: open them to tax attacks. Contrary to popular belief, those IRS guidelines that prohibit political speech have root in the law....

"Some might wonder why these issues are only coming to a head now, in 2014, when 501(c)(3) has been on the books since the New Deal. There are many, progressively dire reasons for that.

"To start, the political speech prohibition did not exist until 1954. To punish and prevent political opponents from speaking out against him, then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, who was in a contentious re-election campaign, pushed through an amendment to the tax code which prohibits “political activity” by 501(c)(3) entities. It is called the Johnson Amendment. Since the prohibition passed, it has only been lightly—and selectively—enforced.

"But never fear (she wrote ironically): the IRS has been working on clarifying its guidelines for 501(c)(3) enforcement so when it starts prosecuting exempt organizations again, it can go after religious organizations.

"The IRS has not complied with Freedom of Information Act requests to disclose those new guidelines. If the press release from FFRF is true, the IRS has new guidelines for enforcement, but just isn’t telling the public what they are.

"The Houston subpoena is a test of the new active strategy against religious organizations: revoke their exemption and control or destroy them through taxation."

Excerpted from "Houston Sermons Are, Legally Speaking, Fair Game" by Leslie Loftis.

Anonymous said...

Well, she is acting like a major, or general, rather than a decent mayor. Shameful, isn't it? Stand up for truth and God's Word. We were hoping an LCMS pastor might have been among the 5. Keep confessing in the face of apostasy and revolt against God.

Carl Vehse said...

Regarding the attempt by a lesbian mayor to look for discussions of controversial political issues by pastors in the pulpits of their Houston churches, here's a June 28, 2012, statement made at the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s 49th general conference, held in Nashville, TN:

"And to anyone who says that church is no place to talk about these [political] issues, you tell them there is no place better -- no place better. Because ultimately, these are not just political issues -- they are moral issues. They're issues that have to do with human dignity and human potential, and the future we want for our kids and our grandkids."

The person who said that was ... Michelle Obama.

Janis Williams said...

Good one, Mr. Vehse!