The high sounding word “tolerance” has become a ruse for coercion of liberal agendas.  The “wall of separation,” so often distorted from Thomas Jefferson’s intent to point out the need to prevent government from meddling in religion, is crumbling. 
      Despite pediatricians
identifying youth
transgenderism as “child abuse”
), the left is demanding
that everyone, even churches comply with transgender acceptance. 
Last month, Massachusetts
enacted a law forcing everyone, including churches, to use the gender identity of a
person’s choice
. It is the most oppressive LGBT non-discrimination laws in the
U.S. Churches are specifically mentioned as needing to comply. 

      The restrictions
are many, including restroom and locker room accommodations and the demand that
people be addressed by the pronoun of their choosing.  This is not acceptable for many Christian churches
and schools who follow Scripture: “God made them male and female.”
Pope Francis
      Under this Massachusetts law, refusal to marry same-sex couples can be a
crime. And how will this play out considering Catholic’s have an all-male clergy and
sex-specific religious orders for monks and nuns?

      Pope Francis recently called transgender teaching against nature in August before bishops
in Poland, and again in October
on a return flight to Rome following a trip
to the countries of Georgia and Azerbaijan.
      Referring
to meeting with a French father whose young son wanted to be a girl after reading
about it in a textbook, Pope Francis said: “This is against nature. It is
one thing when someone has this tendency … and it is another matter to teach
this in school.”
     The pope
expressed that he spends time with transgender people, leading them closer to
God but for schools to teach and encourage this, he called, “ideological
colonization.”


Government Employee fired over
Church Sermons
      In the
state of Georgia, a public health official who is also a lay minister at his
Seventh Day Adventist church, was
fired over his church sermons.  He has been ordered by the state’s
attorney general to relinquish his sermons to the government, according to
federal court documents.
      Dr. Eric Walsh, a public health
expert with several advanced degrees, served as the director of the City of
Pasadena’s Public Health Department.  He
had earlier been appointed to President Obama’s Presidential Advisory Council on
HIV/AIDs. Since his hiring in May 2014, Dr. Walsh’s list of on-the-job accomplishments were many, but he was fired after state officials asked him to submit
recordings of his sermons. 
       First Liberty Institute filed a religious
discrimination lawsuit in September against the State of Georgia on his behalf,
contending that no one should be fired for something he said in a sermon.
The DPH
Director of Human Resources sent an email to other department employees,
stating: “OK…I have an assignment for several of us. We have to listen to his
sermons on YouTube tonight. If we take a couple of hours each, then we should
cover our bases.” (View the email)
.
      The next day, Dr. Walsh was
fired via voicemail.  Then, not realizing the call had not ended, comments and
laughing can be heard at the end.  
(Listen to the voicemail). He has been unable to get a
job in public health since then.
      Freedom of religion is ebbing away because conservatives are being pegged as holding back society.  In Hillary Clinton’s April 23 speech at the Women in
the World Summit, she pledged to change religious beliefs regarding abortions.
”  Laws have to be backed up
with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious
beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.”   She does not understand how faith works and sadly, she is not alone.
     
Archbishop
Fulton Sheen
      Ven. Archbishop Fulton Sheen put
politics and religion in perspective in his book
Characters of the Passion written in 1947.  He
considered the characters that played a role in the Passion of Jesus Christ and
related them to our modern world. 
      Sheen wrote: The Church does
not interfere in politics.  If by interference in politics is meant
judging or condemning a philosophy of life that makes the party or state, or
the class, or the race, the source of all rights, and that usurps the soul and
enthrones party over conscience and denies those basic rights for which the war
was fought, then the answer is emphatically Yes! 
       “The Church does judge such a philosophy.  But when it does this, it
is not interfering with politics, for such politics is no longer politics but
theology. When a state sets itself up as absolute as God, when it claims
sovereignty over the soul, when it destroys freedom of conscience and freedom
of religion, then the state has ceased to be political and has begun to be a
counter-Church.”
 
    Sheen explained that the Church
teaches that the state is supreme in temporal matters.  But when politics
make religious proclamations such as women have the right to end the life of
their unborn babies – politics enters religion and claims supremacy over the
human soul.  He reminded his reader: “It was Jesus Christ who suffered
under Pontius Pilate; it was not Pontius Pilate who suffered under Jesus Christ. 
The grave danger today is not religion in politics but politics in religion.”
     Sheen equated God’s truths with
true freedom: “Christ’s Church will be attacked, scorned, and ridiculed, but
it will never be destroyed…. The bold fact the enemies of God must face is that
modern civilization has conquered the world, but in doing so has lost its soul….
And as religion fades so will freedom, for only where the spirit of God is, is
there liberty.”
~~~~~

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