Wednesday, August 12, 2015

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The Christian purge has begun: Chaplains banned from preaching that homosexuality is a sin


It wasn’t so much a choice as it was a demand.
Chaplain David Wells was told he could either sign a state-mandated document promising to never tell inmates that homosexuality is “sinful” or else the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice would revoke his credentials.
“We could not sign that paper,” Chaplain Wells told me in a telephone call from his home in Kentucky. “It broke my heart.”
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The Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice revoked his volunteer credentials as an ordained minister – ending 13 years of ministry to underage inmates at the Warren County Regional Juvenile Detention Center.
Chaplain David Wells was told he could either sign a state-mandated document promising to never tell inmates that homosexuality is “sinful” or else the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice would revoke his credentials.
“We sincerely appreciate your years of service and dedication to the youth served by this facility,” wrote Superintendent Gene Wade in a letter to Wells. “However, due to your decision, based on your religious convictions, that you cannot comply with the requirements outlined in DJJ Policy 912, Section IV, Paragraph H, regarding the treatment of LGBTQI youth, I must terminate your involvement as a religious volunteer.”
Wells said that every volunteer in their church received the letter – as did a Baptist church in a nearby community.
The Kentucky regulation clearly states that volunteers working with juveniles “shall not refer to juveniles by using derogatory language in a manner that conveys bias towards or hatred of the LGBTQI community. DJJ staff, volunteers, interns and contractors shall not imply or tell LGBTQI juveniles that they are abnormal, deviant, sinful or that they can or should change their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
For years, Wells and his team have conducted volunteer worship services and counseling to troubled young people – many of whom have been abused.
“I sat across the table from a 16-year-old boy who was weeping and broken over the life he was in,” Wells said. “He had been abused as a child and turned to alcohol and drugs to cope. He wanted to know if there was any hope for him.”
Wells said he had been abused as a young child – so he knew he could answer this young man’s question.
“I was able to look at him and tell him the saving power of Jesus Christ that delivered me – could deliver him,” he said.
But under the state’s 2014 anti-discrimination policy, Wells would not be allowed to have such a discussion should it delve into LGBT issues.

“They told us we could not preach that homosexuality is a sin – period,” Wells told me. “We would not have even been able to read Bible verses that dealt with LGBT issues.”
For the record, Wells said they’ve never used hateful or derogatory comments when dealing with the young inmates.
“They are defining hateful or derogatory as meaning what the Bible says about homosexuality,” he told me.
Mat Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, is representing Wells. He said the state’s ban on Biblical counseling is unconstitutional religious discrimination.
“There is no question there is a purging underway,” Staver told me. “The dissenters in the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage warned us this would happen.”
Staver is demanding the state immediately reinstate Wells as well as the other volunteer ministers.
“By restricting speech which volunteers are allowed to use while ministering to youth detainees, the State of Kentucky and the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice have violated the protections given to private speech through the First Amendment and the Kentucky Constitution,” Staver wrote in his letter to state officials.
He said the policy “requires affirmation of homosexuality as a precondition for ministers providing spiritual guidance to troubled youth, and singles out a particular theological viewpoint as expressly disfavored by the State of Kentucky.”
In other words – Kentucky has a religious litmus test when it comes to homosexuality – and according to the Lexington Herald-Leader – they aren’t going to back down.
The DJJ told the newspaper that the regulation “is neutral as to religion and requires respectful language toward youth by all staff, contractors and volunteers.”
State Sen. Gerald Neal, a Democrat, dared Christians to challenge the law in court.
“I’m just disappointed that the agendas by some are so narrow that they disregard the rights of others,” he told the newspaper. “Let them sue and let the courts settle it.”
Among those backing Wells is the American Pastors Network.
“Pastors and all Americans must wake up to the reality of expanding efforts to cleanse our nation of all moral truth,” APN President Sam Rohrer said in a statement. “When pastors and all Christians…are forced by government agents to renounce sharing the very reality of sin, they are in fact being prohibited from sharing the healing and life-changing potential of redemption.”
Folks, I warned you this would happen. The Christian purge has begun – and it’s only a matter of time before all of us will be forced to make the same decision Chaplain Wells had to make.
Will you follow God or the government?
Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is "God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values." Follow Todd on Twitter@ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.

Oath Keepers arrival at Ferguson protest ‘inflammatory,’ top cop says

Someone has to step up and do it.

Four white men armed with rifles who arrived early Tuesday at protests in Ferguson, Mo., said they were there to protect journalists, but they were not welcomed by police, who fear their presence could prove "inflammatory" amid demonstrations marking the one-year anniversary of the racially charged police shooting of a black man.
Members of the group "Oath Keepers," an association of current and former soldiers or law enforcement and self-professed guardians of the Constitution, told Reuters they were there to provide protection for journalists from the conservative website Infowars.com. But like the police, the mostly African-American protesters seemed to find their presence provocative.
"I hope some black "oath keepers" show up tonight," read one tweet. Another user tweeted, "If oath keepers were black, they would have been killed by the trigger happy white cops."
Meanwhile, authorities arrested nearly two dozen people during a protest that stretched into early Tuesday, marking the anniversary of the Aug. 9, 2014, fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, although there was no repeat of the violence that scarred weekend demonstrations. Police and community leaders are desperately hoping to avoid a replay of the rioting that occurred after Brown was shot and again in November, after a grand jury declined to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson.
"Their presence was both unnecessary and inflammatory"
- Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County police chief
On Tuesday, there were no shots fired and no burglaries, looting or property damage during the protest along West Florissant Avenue, St. Louis County police spokesman Shawn McGuire said. That thoroughfare was the focus of months of massive protests and sometimes violent unrest last summer after the killing of Brown by a Ferguson police officer. McGuire said approximately 23 arrests were made, though police were still confirming official totals.
Despite the calm, authorities fear any any interference from outside, whether from out-of-town protesters, or groups coming in and claiming to be keeping the peace, could set off new conflict. That prompted some authorities to level criticism at the gun-toting Oath Keepers.
"Their presence was both unnecessary and inflammatory," Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County police chief said, according to Reuters.
It was not the first time Oath Keepers went to Ferguson. In December, members were seen on rooftops and in the streets during protests. The Washington Post reported that members spoke of lending a sense of security to a small community in the national spotlight. Although in both instances, police have threatened arrest, no Oath Keepers were accused of breaking the law.
Founded by Yale Law graduate Stewart Rhodes, the group claims 35,000 members. In a 2008 manifesto, Rhodes warned that Americans will be left to protect themselves and their rights if a "police state comes to America."
"That is a harsh reality, but you had better come to terms with it now, and resolves to not let it happen on your watch," he wrote.

Clinton turns over private server to Justice Dept amid report it contained 'top secret' emails


Hillary Clinton relented Tuesday to months of demands she relinquish the personal email server she used while secretary of state, directing the device be given to the Justice Department.
The decision advances the investigation into the Democratic presidential front-runner's use of a private email account as the nation's top diplomat, and whether classified information was improperly sent via and stored on the home-brew email server she ran from her house in suburban New York City.
Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said she has "pledged to cooperate with the government's security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them."
It's not clear if the device will yield any information — Clinton's attorney said in March that no emails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state still "reside on the server or on back-up systems associated with the server."
Clinton had to this point refused demands from Republican critics to turn over the server to a third party, with attorney David Kendall telling the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that "there is no basis to support the proposed third-party review of the server."
Republicans jumped on Tuesday's decision to change course, as well as the additional disclosure that two emails that traversed Clinton's personal system were subsequently given one of the government's highest classification ratings.
"All this means is that Hillary Clinton, in the face of FBI scrutiny, has decided she has run out of options," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement. "She knows she did something wrong and has run out of ways to cover it up."
Federal investigators have begun looking into the security of Clintons' email setup amid concerns from the inspector general for the intelligence community that classified information may have passed through the system.
There is no evidence she used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes. Kendall has said previously that Clinton is "actively cooperating" with the FBI inquiry.
In March, Clinton said she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and were discarded. She turned over the other half to the State Department in last December.
The department is reviewing those emails and has begun the process of releasing them to the public.
"As she has said, it is her hope that State and the other agencies involved in the review process will sort out as quickly as possible which emails are appropriate to release to the public, and that the release will be as timely and transparent as possible," Merrill said Tuesday.
Also Tuesday, Kendall gave to the Justice Department three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server.
Kendall gave the thumb drives, containing copies of roughly 30,000 emails, to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.
Word that Clinton had relented on giving up possession of the server came as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said two emails that traversed Clinton's personal system were deemed "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information" — a rating that is among the government's highest classifications. Grassley said the inspector general of the nation's intelligence community had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.
"Secretary Clinton's previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue," House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. "Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated."
Those two emails were among four that had previously been determined by the inspector general of the intelligence community to have been classified at the time they were sent. The State Department disputes that the emails were classified at that time.
"Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton," said State Department spokesman John Kirby. "They were not marked as classified."
The inspector general for the intelligence community had told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.
Earlier this week, Clinton said in a sworn statement submitted to a federal judge that she has turned over to the State Department all emails from the server "that were or potentially were federal records." The statement, which carries her signature and was signed under penalty of perjury, echoed months of Clinton's past public statements about the matter.
Clinton has defended her use of the server, saying she used it as a matter of convenience to limit the number of electronic devices she had to carry.

Kerry doubles down on Iran deal, says Tehran has not pursued nuke since 2003


Secretary of State John Kerry doubled down on the controversial Iran nuclear deal Tuesday, telling lawmakers that there was not a better deal available to negotiators and that since 2003 Iran has not pursued a nuclear bomb to the best of America’s knowledge.
Speaking in a moderated discussion on the nuclear deal reached with Iran hosted by Thomson Reuters in New York, Kerry tried to counter Republican claims that a better deal can be reached.
Kerry told the forum that President George W. Bush tried in 2003 and 2008 to get a better deal, but there “is not a better deal to be gotten.”
He went on to say that the argument for a better deal would entail the U.S. maintaining or increasing pressure on Iran by threatening foreign governments and businesses with penalties for doing business with Iran, an idea that Kerry slammed as far-fetched.
"Are you kidding?" he said.
Kerry asserted that European countries wouldn't cooperate with U.S. sanctions, and would walk away from separate U.S.-led penalties against Russia if Congress kills the deal.
He also claimed that the dollar would lose its status as the world's reserve currency, and allies wouldn't support U.S. military action against Iran.
Kerry told participants that there was clearly a period in which Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon.
“We found them red-handed with facilities they should not have had, with materials they should not have had,” Kerry said.
However, he said that since 2003, Iran has not pursued a weapon to the best knowledge of the U.S. and others.
"They have not pursued a weapon to our best judgment and to the judgment of all our allies, they haven't pursue a weapon, per se, since that period of time," Kerry said.
In terms of the argument for a better deal, Kerry noted that while Iranian leaders issued a fatwah in 2003 that a nuclear weapon should not be pursued, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) still wants one and has fought against the deal.
“They are opposed to the agreement if that doesn't tell you something,” Kerry said.

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