Wonder why I am blogging this for a North Dakota Minnesota Mercy site? Because North Dakota Pastors are being asked by their parishioners to help them understand Measure 1 having to do with language about life. Look it up yourself and you figure out what it means because by the time the politicians and judges get done with it no one will understand it. There is a big brouhaha in Texas over just this kind of thing. Preachers got involved in a petition drive to stop a measure dealing with gender and restrooms (you should look that up too), and now the mayor and the “city” want the instructions on the petition process. In other words what did the preachers instruct these poor stupid people to vote on? They are so stupid that the mayor believes that they will not believe that preachers would have had to surrender sermons if she had her way because she never wanted them in the first place. If you believe that there is a billion dollar fence in her state that I can sell you for next to nothing. In the meantime the Pastors in North Dakota who are asked to comment better get their homiletical ducks in a row with all their “artifices” because you never know if Lloyd Omdahl might be called to check you out. He is the resident theologian for a certain political group in North Dakota.
By my count the First Amendment to the Constitution is 45 words. If the Mayor of Houston can’t read and understand those what would she do with thousands of sermons she had wanted subpoenaed plus their artifices? Of course now she says that was not the intent and that pastors deliberately turned this into a media circus. There is a lot of that mistaken intent and media circus stuff going on out there. IRS, VA, Border Security, NIH, Benghazi, and about a half a dozen other things that make one wonder if politicians have lost their minds. But of course they are misunderstood because they won’t tell us poor fools who pay the bills what is going on and if you question their competence, honesty, or understanding of the Constitution it becomes a media circus. Or at least it should. Really though look at some of the pictures of her Honor in her official pictures and she is pretty good at making her own circus.
This by Mike Morris for the Houston Chronicle.
“Mayor Annise Parker on Friday followed through on her pledge to narrow the scope of subpoenas sent to local pastors who led opposition to the city’s equal rights ordinance earlier this year.
Though the subpoena’s new wording removes any mention of “sermons” — a reference that created a firestorm among Christian conservative groups and politicians, including Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who accused Parker of trying “to silence the church” — the mayor acknowledged the new subpoenas do not explicitly preclude sermons from being produced.
“We don’t need to intrude on matters of faith to have equal rights in Houston, and it was never the intention of the city of Houston to intrude on any matters of faith or to get between a pastor and their parishioners,” Parker said. “We don’t want their sermons, we want the instructions on the petition process. That’s always what we wanted and, again, they knew that’s what we wanted because that’s the subject of the lawsuit.”
Opponents took advantage of the broad original language, Parker said, to deliberately misinterpret the city’s intent and spur what City Attorney David Feldman called a “media circus.”
The lawsuit, set for trial in January, was filed by opponents of a nondiscrimination measure City Council passed in May. Known as HERO, for Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, the law bans discrimination among businesses that serve the public, private employers, in housing and in city employment and city contracting. Religious institutions are exempt. The city has suspended enforcement of the ordinance until the case is resolved.
Opponents had mounted a petition drive to force a vote to repeal the ordinance, but city officials ruled thousands of signatures ineligible and did not place the item on the ballot, triggering the suit.”
Here is all you need to know in one sentence – “Opponents took advantage of the broad original language, Parker said, to deliberately misinterpret the city’s intent”. Obviously the original language was broad. You were asking for announcements, bulletins, sermons and artifices. So that was deliberately misinterpreted! So you really didn’t mean it? It was a joke? The broad language specifically asking for sermons and artifices was not serious? So the intent was not for the sermons? How about the bulletins? How about the artifices? What exactly was your intent? Why should anyone take you seriously at all? Because you have the power to subpoena!
