Another Significant Threat To Constitutional Liberties (UPDATED)

Credit: Cody Duty

Credit: Cody Duty

In May of this year the Houston city council passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) that requires businesses and workplaces to make available restroom facilities not according to sex but according to gender identity. A group of Houston area pastors has been organizing and vigorously opposing this bill. In response the city has issued subpoenas for materials produced, including sermons, by several of the ministers. It seems reasonably clear that the Alliance Defending Freedom is correct, that this is an attempt by the City of Houston to intimidate ministers into shutting up about the HERO ordinance and about the attempt by radicals to redefine human sexuality (sex vs gender). Ordinarily the local coverage of these issues is better simply because the local media are closer and more aware of all the facts but in this case the national media seems to be doing a better job telling the whole story. The local pastors group generated 50,000 signatures to get a referendum on the ballot to overturn the HERO act. The city disqualified the petition because of alleged “irregularities” and now seems to be trying to silence vocal opponents.

More than 10 years ago pastors in Canada began to face sanctions for speaking up against homosexuality and homosexual marriage. They warned us that it could happen here. I was one of those who did not listen. I thought that the constitutional differences between the USA and Canada were enough that, whatever happened in Canada, we would be safe here. I also thought that, after the Hillarycare debacle, nothing like it would ever pass. Wrong again. I didn’t think that Americans would elect an inexperienced former community organizer with a set of dubious associations with radical anarchist bombers (the Weather Underground), a weak record in state politics, and virtually no record in national politics, to become President of the United States of America. Three strikes and I’m out. So I want a do over. It really is time to pay attention. The assumption that “it can’t happen here because of the Bill of Rights” is obviously wrong. A constitution only protects liberties if we elect people who are committed to the constitution, who, in turn, appoint people to the bench who are also committed to constitutional liberties. Clearly it is no longer safe to assume that, whatever our economic and social differences, we’re all committed to basic constitutional protections. We live in a time when:

  • The IRS wants to know the content of your prayers.
  • When an administration has impenitently set the Department of Justice upon a reporter and his family.
  • When Cal Sate University has forced Inter-Varsity Fellowship off campus for believing and practicing the Christian religion.
  • When bakers and florists are fined and put out of business because of religious objections to catering homosexual weddings.
  • When it became necessary not only for Congress to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) but to call the Department of Defense to heel because of its unconstitutional behavior restricting religious liberty.
  • When a police captain is being punished by his superiors for failing to attend a meeting in a local mosque, which the Mosque advertises as an indoctrination session.
  • When middle school teachers, in middle America, are told not to classify children as boys and girls but rather as “purple penguins.”
  • When the City of Houston thinks that it is constitutional to subpoena sermons by ministers for daring to oppose the idea that human beings belong to one of two sexes, male or female, that gender is a grammatical category.

We may disagree about whether or how Houston pastors should have spoken up about this ordinance but the history and constitution of this country say that they are well within their rights to do so. Yes, there are some limits on what ministers can say about partisan politics, unless a leading Democrat politician is in the pulpit, on “the Lord’s Day,”  just before election. In that case all limits are off.

It’s time to give serious thought about the wisdom of living under the 501 (c) 3 limits. Are congregations trading the liberty to speak as they will for a tax exemption? It’s also time for Americans to re-think the entire tax code to maximize civil liberties and minimize governmental intrusion, of all sorts, into our lives.

I agree with my friend Brian Lee that the pastors should not be ashamed of their sermons, unless they are not preaching the gospel. If they are not, shame on them! Sermons are public. We should proclaim the whole counsel of God openly, for the whole world to hear and now, thanks to the internet, the whole world can hear. In that sense, sending their sermons to the city of Houston is a good thing but ministers are citizens in a twofold kingdom and as citizens in this Republic they have certain inalienable rights among which are the freedom of speech, freedom of religious practice, and the freedom of association.

Judging by repeated purple-penguin-in-the-street interviews, many Americans have not the foggiest idea what civil liberties are, what the Bill of Rights is, why this nation was founded, or that there are express, constitutional limits on what government may and may not do. Nevertheless, too many of these same folk do find a way to mail in a ballot.

There are glimmers of cultural hope. A popular writer in the UK has recently said that the educational establishment in the UK has become so corrupted by political correctness and the subjectivism of modernist educational theories that only educational hope there is homeschooling. Millions of Americans, of course, have already dropped out of the intellectually bankrupt public education system in this country. When enough folk finally leave they will begin to wonder why they are funding a system that they can no longer, in good conscience, use. More on this in another post.

This act by the City of Houston is yet  another warning shot across the bow of all who have an interest in constitutional liberties. We should not limit our speech for fear of political or cultural repression but it’s past time for all Americans to pay attention to the erosion of their civil liberties. If the City of Houston is allowed to use its offices to silence preachers, why should it stop there? Why shouldn’t they seek to silence rabbis? Somehow one thinks that they won’t be trying to silence any imams. As to why that might be I shall leave the reader to draw his own conclusions.

UPDATE 10/16/14

The city seems to have reversed field.

UPDATE 10/18/14

It appears that the City of Houston is still asking pastors to turn over “speeches and presentations.”

UPDATE 10/21/14

The ACLU of Texas expresses concern about the subpoenas.

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25 comments

  1. As I understand it, churches have to option of filing for 501c3 but do not need to. Donations to churches are tax deductible even without such a filing. It seems 501c3 is just a noose we put our heads into voluntarily. Once in it, the state says we can talk about anything but politics, they just have a very broad understanding of what defines politics.

    Are there any lawyers or accountants out there that could offer some sources for ways to avoid being silenced by political pressure?

    • R.K.,

      You’re right, churches are automatically tax-exempt if they can meet the definition of “church,” which is based not on beliefs but on various operational characteristics. If you do choose to file for exempt status then you are required to file the annual 990 tax form, which can be an involved, intrusive, complicated pain in the neck. I don’t know why a church would file for exempt status unless they had so much activity that looked “unchurchly” that the IRS might question whether they were in fact a bona fide exempt organization. (The upshot to this is that if past donations to a non-exempt organization suddenly are not deductible a lot people would have to amend personal tax returns for disallowed contributions. Not pretty. Unless you’re the CPA making money by preparing amended returns!)

      By the way, no OPC, URC, or PCA should ever file for exempt status, since that would imply they are doing a lot of stuff that a church has no business doing.

      To Scott’s concern of “congregations trading the liberty to speak as they will for a tax exemption,” churches have been exempt from taxation since the nation’s founding. It would be sea-change for this arrangement to change. Then again, things unimaginable just a couple of decades ago are happening now. But at least for now, a church has to involve itself in electoral politics before it gets its exempt status challenged, and for all it’s other disreputable activities, the IRS has not chosen to pursue many cases of churches getting too deeply involved in electoral politics.

      Where this could be more of a problem is for non-church religious organizations, such as seminaries, etc., that will need to apply for exempt status if they want to have contributions to their organizations deductible for income tax. And we’ve already seen how the IRS handles exempt applications for certain political organizations.

  2. Fueling the normalization of lawlessness in its myriad manifestations including sodomy, lesbianism, and all other sexual perversions is a dehumanizing evolutionary cosmology, an inverted exegesis positing an evolutionary ascent from matter that aborts man’s inner person and reduces him to the level of fish, apes and trees. In the Soviet Union, the Triune God-and-human hating nihilist of violence, Vladimir Lenin, exulted that,

    “Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another (and) that they were created by God, and hence immutable.” (Fatal Fruit, Tom DeRosa, p. 9)

    In other words, the conceptual ‘death’ of the God of Revelation allows unfettered violence against millions of people because they are no longer the immutable image-bearers of the Triune God but rather expendable products of evolution on a par with slime, weeds, slugs and rocks. Empowered by evolutionary scientism, Lenin exercised godlike power over life and death. He saw himself as, “the master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species.”

    It was Lenin who “decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history.” From the moment Lenin made the “scientific” decision that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that evolution had surpassed, “its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified.” (The Black Book of Communism, p. 752)

    In Nazi Germany evolutionary scientism resulted in gas chambers, ovens, and the liquidation of eleven million “useless eaters” and other undesirables.

    Alain Brossat draws the following conclusions about the two regimes of nihilism, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the ties that bind them:

    “The ‘liquidation’ of the Muscovite executioners, a close relative of the ‘treatment’ carried out by Nazi assassins, is a linguistic microcosm of an irreparable mental and cultural catastrophe that was in full view on the Soviet Stage. The value of human life collapsed, and thinking in categories replaced ethical thought…In the discourse and practice of the Nazi exterminators, the animalization of Other…was closely linked to the ideology of race. It was conceived in the implacably hierarchical racial terms of “subhumans” and “supermen”…but in Moscow in 1937, what mattered…was the total animalization of the Other, so that a policy under which absolutely anything was possible could come into practice.” (Black Book of Communism, p. 751)

    As in England, here in America evolutionary scientism has replaced the God of Revelation, thus human beings are no longer the immutable image-bearers of the Triune God but dehumanized products of evolution, thus our unalienable rights from God are null and void and all things are now possible.

  3. All this has become moot to me given Roe v Wade in 1973. So much for the Moral Majority (that was not)!

  4. Aside from the church/government interaction in Houston, I’m not persuaded that sermons should be public at all times and places; I think this thinking comes from too much accustomed comfort in places like the US. I don’t think Christian ministers preaching to hidden congregations in certain places want their sermons to always be public, and I’m OK with that.

    These conversations are good because they have made me realize something; don’t expect Christians, even in your denomination or congregation, to be defenders of your freedom. You may find the unbeliever to be a better friend of your liberties. I get the impression some Christians (even NAPARC types) are sort of cheering on the city of Houston; maybe cheering is too strong (I don’t really think so), but it seems they like the idea of having the state go after pastors like those in Houston in order that their 2K ideas (at least their versions of it) get implemented even more.

  5. On this matter of restroom facilities and the related issue of dormitory accommodation (in the military, etc.): The basic principle behind the traditional separation of male and female was that no one should be made to share such things with someone that is sexually orientated towards them, e.g., women mustn’t have someone in their dormitories or restrooms who’s going to be ogling them or worse every time they need to expose themselves. Now people are allowed to “come out” as “gay”, etc. with impunity, no “straight” person should be made to share with someone of the same sex who is openly gay or bisexual. Using this principle, “straights” can be protected, but the logistics of protecting SGBTs are far too complicated. The only practicable solution is one place for straight males, one for straight females and a third for everybody else.

  6. My favorite Hillary quote was in reference to how her healthcare plan (in the 1990’s) would decimate small business owners. Her response, “I can’t be responsible for undercapitalized businesses.”

  7. Ultimately the Constitution cannot be a final authority. Times have moved on and freedom for one person is not the same freedom for another. The common assumptions are no longer agreed upon. As the pluralists say, we need a new “common grammar” http://www.cardus.ca/blog/2014/10/finding-a-global-common-grammar. I agree the Constitution is not a mystery, but to expect it to be a basis for truth in its orginal understanding, a “common grammar”, is no longer realistic. It can no longer carry the weight of well nourished pluralism. So my question is rather not what the majority want or what the minority want, but what will bring true civil liberty?

  8. @Mark: In your remarkable regurgitation of typical leftwing nonsensical liberal platitudes wherein one bold assertion follows another — all of them void of logical sequence and coherence — you omitted the only axiom, or “final authority,” that drives every totalitarian regime from the beginning of politics — namely, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” This is, of course, Chairman Mao’s pithy rule though I admit it lacks the flair of Stalin’s rule, which is the same exact point though less direct — “You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.”

    So since you have unilaterally decreed the USA’s charter documents obsolete, please tell us how you like your breakfast cooked.

    • Chunk I think you were too quick to respond. Perhaps it will help if I make my point clearer. The liberals have altered the constitutions intent by means of the constitutional court. That’s a fact. That is why androgyny is lawful and no longer unlawful and so abortion etc. My point is that we need to argue for explicitly biblical politics (as Andew Melville and other Reformers). Separation of the two kingdoms based on a common epistemology. Excluding all religious ‘truth’ as the modern 2k or including all religious ‘truth’ as the pp do requires the need for new grammar (which I would be against or people would rightly call me a Chump).

    • Mark,

      Thanks for the clarification. Now here’s an unsolicited tip on writing: You might want to make your point by stating outright instead of stating another point that is not related to the point you think you’re making (please reread your comment and its follow-up comment to see what I mean).

      Regarding “explicitly biblical politics,” you have made a lateral move. Your previous question was, “The question is civil liberties according to what standard?” And if you shift the standard from “liberties” to “biblical politics,” you have to ask, “Biblical politics according to whose (not what) standard?” Theonomists believe that “biblical politics” means a return to Moses all the way down to stoning — and most of them are just self-righteous enough to believe they are qualified to cast the first stone. Evangelicals have a handy-dandy 5-point checklist (plus or minus) of how they define “biblical politics”; you know the litmus test — abortion, homosexuality, prayer and Bible reading in public school, nativity scenes, and maybe something about the Pledge of Allegiance or the ACLU. And some Bible-beating Baptists believe that mankind has reached the zenith of “biblical politics” where ever alcohol, tobacco, and dancing are outlawed (especially dancing at Disneyland). Try quoting the Reformers to any of these groups, let alone Roman Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Charismatics, etc., and see what they say.

      So the question to you is, “Biblical politics according to whose (not what) standard?”

  9. After the Patriot Act and the NDAA were both passed, the Constitution is a dead letter. Habeas Corpus has been suspended and yes this whole discussion is moot. We are a nation run by Executive fiat and the Congress (or at least the Senate) rubber stamps everything.

    • Richard, you forgot to mention the NSA and the CIA, but yes, in principle, the Rubicon has been crossed. Now the battle is to see whether or not those principles get implemented.

      Which is why the whole abortion/homosexual thing IMO is basically a tool by the state to destroy any opposition to it from the family primarily, but also the church.

  10. Mark said, “My point is that we need to argue for explicitly biblical politics (as Andrew Melville and other Reformers)”.

    Indeed. By allowing evolutionary atheists and their theological counterparts to define the personal Triune God out of existence and usurp the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo with evolution the uniquely Biblical definition of man on which our Constitutional rights are grounded has been lost. According to evolutionary cosmology man is not created but rather a dehumanized aspect of the evolving universe of matter and energy.

    If man is not God’s spiritual image-bearer then he is less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before Jesus Christ God Incarnate walked this earth:

    “Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either…Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one’s psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one’s being.” Thus your sense of self becomes illusion, “Reality is nonself…You don’t exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence.” (The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 6)

    Jesus Christ to Buddha,

    “…you took God away (and) your espousal of an absence of self is the most unique and fearsome claim you made.” (The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha, Ravi Zacharias, pp. 59, 67)

    Life is only with the living God of Revelation (John 1), the creator and upholder of the life and being (soul/spirit) of men. But if He does not exist, it logically follows that there is no ultimate source for life, conscious being (self), meaning and purpose; or for the sanctity of human life, worth, dignity, individual liberty and personal property. Without the God of Revelation unalienable (God given) human rights are as meaningless as the two sexes He created and America’s founding documents.

    Welcome to America’s Brave New World, an unreality of non-self and madness.

    • Linda,

      I agree entirely that dehumanization is major problem. In some ways I think it is the problem or perhaps the great consequence of the problem of the age. Modernity turned us into machines and late/liquid modernity has deconstructed the machine. I’m with you entirely on that.

      I agree that human dignity and rights are meaningless without God but I think your account omits the category of natural revelation. Our civil life need not be based on special revelation, i.e., it need not be a theocracy/Constantinian state where the magistrate enforces religious orthodoxy. We tried that in the West and it didn’t work out well. The American experiment, largely formed by people who didn’t much believe the Bible (I understand that the founders were mixed in their theology but we should resist the temptation to baptize the dead, as it were) has been a great benefit.

  11. Dr Clark the NT interacts in a world of politics. Pagan Rome was full of deviant relationships, Nero included. The apostle Paul gives a very clear exposition of the position on homosexuality Rom1. It is not merely a pastoral concern. In the kingdom of the Magistrate it is wickedness that should be punished. There is a reason why martyrdom followed in due time. In Rom 13 the Magistrate is to use the sword to punish wickedness. How do we define wickedness except by God’s Law? That is why we are told that we are to obey even the wicked Magistrate except where he commands us to disobey God. Natural Law is only properly understood in terms of God’s Law Rom 2. To think that you will arrive at a constitution by sitting around the table with a bunch of pluralists is really the height of incoherence.

    Regarding Constantine I would agree that he is not my favourite Christian, but his public position did carry huge benefits. It ended severe persecution for the Christians. It created a “common grammar”. The pluralist (postmodern) search for a common grammar sounds ominously like a search by Nietsche’s Super Human for a new god. “Protestant” countries have shown exceptional growth because of their biblical political zeal. To separate natural law from biblical law and expect an equal result is Roman Catholic not Reformed.

    The early reformers and men like Knox, Melville, Althusias, the Covenanters, DeBres etc. held to the original view of 2K. To hang all that on Constantine and not Scripture is unfair to say the least. Kuyper was a voluntarist and he changed the Confession (I’ll grant him that integrity). But I don’t believe he (or Bavinck) quite understood the principled pluralist and modern 2k legacy they would leave. His overrealised idea of common grace and his sphere sovereignty ideas left too much to the imagination of the principled pluralist. Recently I came across the William Young article that predicted the socialism (cultural marxism) and antinomianism inherent in Kuyperian thought. Surprise surprise!

    Of course I do not argue for theonomy or “chrisitan nation” views although theonomy has pointed out many weaknesses in current “reformed” thought and “christian nation” has demonstrated zeal often lacking among the godly. I argue for christian theism of the old confessions. The christian pluralists argue for “fair play”. Now that’s what I call incoherent.

    Now it is true not all are Christians in a “Christian State” but that is true for any “something state”. For sure not all are pluralist in a Principled Pluralist state, at least not the Christians. We live in a fallen world after all, as the “Christian” pluralists like to remind us.

    Have a blessed Lord’s Day. greetings Mark

    • “To think that you will arrive at a constitution by sitting around the table with a bunch of pluralists is really the height of incoherence.”

      This is not that bad a summary of how the US Constitution came to be.

  12. “I think your account omits the category of natural revelation. Our civil life need not be based on special revelation…”

    Scott, it is true that my focus is on special revelation. This is because the main thrust of the modern Gnostic pagan and mystical pantheist attack is against special creation, hence special revelation.

    For example, in “The attack on biblical creation in UK schools continues,” Phil Robinson reports that in the dechristianized U.K. unrelenting attacks against special creation (Genesis account) display a level of aggressive intolerance that is hard to stomach, coming as they do from self-proclaimed scientifically-enlightened ‘voices of reason.’ Some schools have already banned the teaching of special creation in favor of evolutionary science. (creation.com, Mar. 9, 2014)

    Other shrill ‘voices of reason’ go so far as to connect special creation to mental illness and child abuse. During a radio interview in Australia famous physicist and atheist propagandist Lawrence Krauss said that while in the United States recently, he stated that “teaching creationism is child abuse and I think it is.” (Prayer News, a publication of Creation Ministries, Apr. 2014)

    Throughout the West and here in America a slash-and-burn operation conducted against the Genesis account, particularly its’ literal and historical elements, is justified by the false idea that evolution is science, thus intolerance of special creation is often presented as a ‘science versus religion’ or ‘faith versus reason’ issue.

    At the root of the rejection of special creation is the rebellious assertion that man has not been created by the Triune God of Revelation. Instead, man is a free spirit neither dependent upon the God of Revelation for his life nor created in His spiritual image but rather a conscious product of evolution. He is a man-god, the master of science, evolution, matter, energy, time, and being who through his own knowledge and powers will save himself.

    In this way of thinking, natural revelation is the unfolding (evolving) story of man discerned through scientism (the instrument of the will of sovereign man). According to Prof. S.J. Gould, this unfolding story tells us where we came from,

    “….how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science’s version of Roots, except it is the story of us all.” (The Religious Nature of Evolution Theory and its Attack on Christianity, John G. Leslie and Charles K. Pallaghy, Ph.D, creation.com)

    With Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) , a prominent evolutionary biologist and “Christian” progressive creationist the evolving story (natural revelation) is a light that illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow, for if man,

    “…has arrived at his present state as a result of natural processes rather than a supernatural will, he can learn to control these processes…The concept of evolution, which is now basic to the life sciences, has provided new and in some ways revolutionary answers to questions men have been asking for centuries. The two most important of these are, ‘Why am I here, what is the purpose of human existence, and what is the nature of the world of life that surrounds us?” (Dobzhansky, T., Ayala, F.J., Stebbins, G.L. and Valentine, J.W., Evolution, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1977)

    For New Age mystical pantheists, natural revelation is a psychic energy radiating out of spiritual hotspots known as vortexes. Sedona, Ariz. is one such vortex where seekers can have their chakras aligned and their auras photographed. Damanhur is another vortex:

    “Every year thousands of people visit Damanhur to try out the social model, study the philosophy and to meditate in the Temples of Humankind, that great underground construction excavated by hand by the citizens of Damanhur and which many have called the ‘Eighth wonder of the world’. (The Temples of Humankind, damanhur.org)

    Under construction since 1978, the Temple of Humankind is 100 feet below ground inside a mountain near the northern Italian city of Vidracco. The incredibly beautiful cathedral is dedicated to the divine nature of humanity. It is not therefore a place of prayer to the personal Triune God but rather a place for inward contemplation of and meditation to the divine god-force or energy within self. Its’ builders describe the Temple as a great three dimensional book which recounts the unfolding story of Humankind through all the art forms, a path of re-awakening to the Divine inside and outside of ourselves.

    I hope this explains my focus on special revelation/special creation. To defenders on the front line of attack, modern Gnostic pagans and mystical pantheists will not accept a theologically correct understanding of natural revelation until and/or unless they accept the God of Revelation and special creation first.

  13. Dr Clark,

    In response to Mark DuPres, you make the following statement:

    “Where’s the NT evidence for a “biblical politics”? Constantine is dead and it’s a good thing. It was one thing to draw a straight line from King David to the Maccabees to Constantine to whomever (as I was just reading in Wollebius this AM) in 1626 but it’s quite another thing to do it now. It’s just not coherent.”

    Might we ask – what is your position on the Belgic Confession, Article 36?

    For the information of the other readers on this forum, Article 36 reads as follows. It is not theonomic, by the way, but it fully upholds the Establishment Principle, as indeed all the Reformers and Puritans universally did.

    The Belgic Confession: Article 36: The Civil Government
    We believe that
    because of the depravity of the human race,
    our good God has ordained kings, princes, and civil officers.
    God wants the world to be governed by laws and policies
    so that human lawlessness may be restrained
    and that everything may be conducted in good order
    among human beings.

    For that purpose God has placed the sword
    in the hands of the government,
    to punish evil people
    and protect the good.
    And the government’s task is not limited
    to caring for and watching over the public domain
    but extends also to upholding the sacred ministry,
    with a view to removing and destroying
    all idolatry and false worship of the Antichrist;
    to promoting the kingdom of Jesus Christ;
    and to furthering the preaching of the gospel everywhere;
    to the end that God may be honored and served by everyone,
    as he requires in his Word.

    Moreover everyone,
    regardless of status, condition, or rank,
    must be subject to the government,
    and pay taxes,
    and hold its representatives in honor and respect,
    and obey them in all things that are not in conflict
    with God’s Word,
    praying for them
    that the Lord may be willing to lead them
    in all their ways
    and that we may live a peaceful and quiet life
    in all piety and decency.

    And on this matter we reject the Anabaptists, anarchists,
    and in general all those who want
    to reject the authorities and civil officers
    and to subvert justice
    by introducing common ownership of goods
    and corrupting the moral order
    that God has established among human beings.
     
    ————-

    The above affirms that the civil magistrate has a duty before God to uphold both tables of the Moral Law. He is to repress the false worship of the Roman Antichrist. He is to promote the kingdom of Christ.

    Quite obviously, the City of Houston is not doing that. That said, what has happened to subscription in toto to the historic confessions?

    Al Hembd

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