Rather Expose Them Christian News Blog
A WordPress Blog-THE CHURCH MILITANT Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse. ALL CONTENT FROM HTTPS://RATHEREXPOSETHEM.BLOGSPOT.COM MOVED TO THIS NEW BLOG, MAY 2020
For nearly a year the mainstream media has promoted lies about treating the coronavirus with the medicine hydroxychloroquine. One America’s Pearson Sharp takes a look at the cost those lies have had on our nation. #OANN
BY RICK MORAN
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
California is in the midst of a self-induced homelessness crisis that shows no sign of abating anytime soon. The crisis is especially acute in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has erected three tent cities to house about 300 homeless people.
The cost? About $61,000 a year per tent. All told, the cost of the program is $16.1 million. I guess in San Francisco, even the tents are first class.
The city is running a $650 million deficit and the tent city isn’t eligible for reimbursement by the government, so that money comes out of city coffers. If the homeless were housed in a first-class hotel, the federal government would gladly reimburse the city for that, but not for a few measly tents?
In the six “Safe Sleeping Villages” set up by the city of San Francisco during the pandemic, the cost of maintaining a single tent-camping spot is $5,000 per month, or $61,000 per year — more than it would cost to put each of these people in a market-rate apartment.
The insane costs of running these sleeping “villages,” which only have space for a total of 262 tents spread across the six sites, makes one immediately think of the criticisms that are leveled against the Homeless Industrial Complex, as conservative commentators are eager to call it. The revelation of the pricetag for the tent program — $16.1 million for the year — came at a budget committee meeting on Wednesday, as the Chronicle reports, via Abigail Stewart-Kahn, the interim director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
In addition to the tents, the city supplies meals, sanitation services, and police protection.
The cost boils down to $190 per tent per night, which includes 24-hour security, bathrooms, maintenance, and three meals per day. This is cheaper than the per-day cost for the hotel program, but the hotel program is getting 100% federal reimbursement. (Thanks, Biden.)
Also, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has committed to rehousing everyone as the [sic] come out of the hotel rooms — an enormous task, given that there are upwards of 2,000 people currently in the program.
San Francisco counts about 6,400 people as homeless, although that doesn’t include people living out of their cars, or the thousands who flit from temporary shelters to relative’s residences to friends and neighbors — anywhere they can find a place to lay their body down. Many of these people have jobs that don’t pay them enough to live within 50 miles of San Francisco.
The city was basically forced to adopt the tent idea because most homeless shelters closed down due to COVID restrictions. But $5,000 a tent? Certainly, allowances should be made but that is a ludicrous amount of money to spend on any group, regardless of their hard-luck circumstances.
Even city council members are critical. “I understand the motivation to create sleeping space during this COVID-19 crisis,” says Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, speaking to the Chronicle. “But we really need to dive deep to see if this a sustainable model… without any federal reimbursement.”
Perhaps if they had “dove deep” before they wasted this money, they wouldn’t be regretting it now.
Texas governor blasts Biden's border crisis: 'End this scheme right now.'
BY TYLER O'NEIL
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Former President Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden’s lax immigration policy in a powerful statement on Friday. Trump warned that Biden’s deportation moratorium, his return to catch-and-release, his stopping the construction of the border wall, and his rejection of multilateral border agreements with Mexico and other countries has helped unleash a “tsunami” at the border that, among other things, is helping spread the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.
Trump claimed that interior enforcement has been “shut down,” so that criminals that the Trump administration would have removed “are now being released back onto the street to commit heinous and violent crimes. ICE officers are desperate to remove these convicted criminals, but Biden won’t let them.”
Help us STOP Joe Biden’s radical agenda by becoming a PJ Media VIP member. Use promo code AMERICAFIRST to receive 25% off your VIP membership.
Trump claimed that when he left office, “we had achieved the most secure border in our country’s history,” but he warned that “under Biden, it will soon be worse, more dangerous, and more out of control than ever before. He has violated his oath of office to uphold our Constitution and enforce our laws.”
“Now that Biden has implemented nationwide Catch-and-Release, illegal immigrants from every corner of the Earth will descend upon our border and never be returned. You can never have a secure border unless people who cross illegally are promptly removed,” Trump warned.
Perhaps most egregiously, Biden dropped investigations into human trafficking. Trump noted, “We put in place powerful rules and procedures to stop the smuggling and trafficking, but the Biden Administration has abandoned these proven strategies and instead given the smugglers and traffickers effective control of our border.”
Trump also lamented Biden’s halt to construction of the border wall, even though the former president left it “almost finished” so that it “can be quickly completed.”
“Doing so will save thousands of lives,” the former president urged. While it remains unclear how many lives the wall would save — by discouraging migrants from seeking to cross the U.S. border and therefore endangering themselves —Biden apparently prefers the symbolism of dropping Trump’s policy over whatever good a wall would do.
Trump Eviscerates Biden’s Record in Blistering CPAC Speech
“The spiraling tsunami at the border is overwhelming local communities, depleting budgets, crowding hospitals, and taking jobs from legal American workers,” Trump warned. He also noted that illegal immigrants might carry the coronavirus with them. Indeed, Border Patrol recently released more than 100 illegal immigrants who tested positive for COVID-19 in Texas.
The statement included the usual Trump bluster, but the former president’s warning raised serious concerns about Biden’s immigration policy. It seems Biden has directed federal officials not to enforce the law, signaling that crossing the U.S. border illegally — which is still a crime — will not be penalized.
Just before Biden took office, a senior Biden transition official warned migrants hoping to cross the southern border that “now is not the time” to make the journey — suggesting that the opportunity would come soon. “There’s help on the way, but now is not the time to make the journey,” the official said, according to NBC News.
Customs and Border Patrol has briefed the White House on the grim prospect that as many as 13,000 unaccompanied alien children will arrive by May as caravans head north.
Biden’s near-total reversal of Trump’s immigration policy — which largely involved enforcing existing federal law — has sparked a likely crisis on the southern border. Trump was right to call him out on it, and Biden would be wise to listen. Unfortunately, the president is likely to double down on his lax policies and encourage yet more illegal immigration.
BY TYLER O'NEIL
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Nine years ago, a gay couple went into Masterpiece Cakeshop and asked baker Jack Phillips to craft a cake to celebrate their same-sex wedding. Phillips refused, based on his Christian conviction that marriage is between one man and one woman, but he offered to sell the men anything else in the shop. They reported him to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, sparking a six-year legal battle up to the Supreme Court. Shortly after the Supreme Court found in favor of Phillips, a transgender lawyer targeted the Christian baker, beginning the battle all over again.
On Thursday, the Denver County district court granted Phillips a partial victory, striking down one of the legal claims the transgender lawyer, Autumn Scardina, brought against him. Yet the court refused to drop Scardina’s other claim in the lawsuit, leading to protracted litigation, once again.
“The decision by the court to dismiss one of the claims against Jack Phillips is the first step towards final justice,” Kristen Waggoner, general counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the firm representing Phillips, said in a statement on Thursday.
“Jack has been threatened with financial ruin simply because he makes decisions about which messages to create and celebrate—decisions that every other artist in Colorado is free to make. Tolerance for different opinions is essential. We look forward to defending Jack—and ultimately prevailing—on the remaining claim,” Waggoner added.
3 Disgusting Ways the Media Twisted the Truth in the Colorado Baker Transgender Cake Story
According to ADF, Scardina first approached Masterpiece Cakeshop on June 26, 2017, the very day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ case. Scardina, a biological male who identifies as a female, requested cake art celebrating his gender transition. The shop declined the request, since creating such a cake would violate Phillips’ religious beliefs about gender.
A few days later, another caller from a number associated with the name “Scardina” asked for a “birthday” cake for Satan, complete with a red and black theme and an image of Satan smoking marijuana. Phillips denied this cake as well.
On June 4, 2018, the day the Supreme Court issued its decision, someone emailed Phillips claiming to be a “member of the Church of Satan.” The email requested a “three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting. And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9” black Dildo [sic]. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.”
Scardina’s law practice states, “We take great pride in taking on employers who discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and serving them their just desserts.”
Scardina first went to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which found probable cause that Phillips had discriminated against the lawyer on the basis of sexual identity. Ultimately, the commission dropped the case, but Scardina himself filed a lawsuit against Phillips.
Scardina alleged that Masterpiece Cakeshop violated the Colorado Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) by engaging in deceptive advertising and that the bakery violated the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) by discriminating against him on the basis of his gender identity.
Scardina claimed that Phillips advertised his willingness to serve LGBT people in his shop, but he intended not to sell birthday cakes to them, in a bait-and-switch.
Yet Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones ruled that Scardina had failed to show that Phillips even advertised this message. The transgender lawyer pointed to numerous press reports about Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), along with photographs of birthday cakes on the Masterpiece Cakeshop website.
Jones noted, however, that “Phillips was speaking on a matter of public concern: his legal case. … These materials are not commercial speech, and thus cannot be classified as advertisements under the CCPA.”
Scardina claimed that “Phillips and his bakery attempted to exploit the news coverage by stating they would sell birthday cakes to LGBT customers.” Jones rightly dismissed this preposterous argument. “If Defendants were engaged in such a stealth advertising campaign, they successfully disguised it within their speech on a matter of public concern,” he wrote.
Christian Baker Again Under Fire Again—This Time for Refusing to Bake a Transgender Cake
As for the photographs, they qualify as advertisements but “are not deceptive standing alone.”
Jones ruled that “the Court sees no meaningful distinction between punishing Defendants for their noncommercial speech and punishing them for advertisements as contextualized by Plaintiff via reference to separate noncommercial speech. The First Amendment would not tolerate either circumstance.”
While the judge dismissed Scardina’s CCPA claim, he did not dismiss the CADA claim.
Phillips argued that Masterpiece Cakeshop would not make a cake celebrating a gender transition for anyone, yet Jones noted that the Colorado Court of Appeals dismissed a similar argument in Craig v. Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018).
“Making a pink cake with blue frosting, the design [Scardina] requested, would at most be symbolic speech. As such, the relevant inquiry is whether making Plaintiff’s cake would have been inherently expressive conduct,” Jones argued. “Whether making Plaintiff’s requested cake is inherently expressive, and thus protected speech, depends on whether Defendants would thereby convey their own particularized message, and whether the likelihood is great that a reasonable observer would both understand the message and attribute that message to Defendants.”
The judge ruled that making such a cake would not necessarily “convey a celebratory message about gender transitions likely to be understood by reasonable observers. Further, to the extent the public infers such a message, that message is far more likely to be attributed to Plaintiff, who requested the cake’s simple design.”
So Jack Phillips and his counsel at ADF face yet another court battle, in which they will work to prove that Masterpiece Cakeshop’s cakes are expressive speech and that being forced to bake a cake to celebrate transgender identity would violate Phillips’ free speech and religious freedom rights.
Even though the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Phillips, it did not rule on the central question at issue: whether or not the creation of cakes or other art celebrating same-sex weddings (or other events to which Christians like Phillips would object, such as a gender transition party) constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s horrific decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) — which redefined “discrimination on the basis of sex” to include discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” — this question is more important than ever.
Under Bostock and President Joe Biden’s related executive order, Christians and conscientious objectors across the country could face protracted legal battles like the one Jack Phillips currently faces. If Democrats manage to pass H.R. 5, the “Equality Act,” that would eviscerate religious freedom, carving out a specific exemption from religious freedom protections just for claims of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity have enabled LGBT activists to target dissenters like Phillips for prosecution in the service of ideological enforcement.
The same commission that hounded Phillips defended another baker’s right to refuse to create cakes that stated a message with which she disagreed. Worse, the commission compared Phillips’ actions to Nazi apologists, even though Phillips’ own father fought the Nazis and liberated a concentration camp in World War II.
Scardina’s lawsuit only underscores the fact that activists will seek to use Bostock and Biden’s order to hound Christian artists out of existence.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
“Even if we are removed from these platforms, we still have to be talked about on these platforms. That means the stories have to be strong enough where we force them to talk about it,” says James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, which was recently removed from Twitter. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), we sat down with O’Keefe as well as two whistleblowers from Facebook and Google to talk about big tech bias. Ryan Hartwig used to be a third-party content moderator for Facebook. Zach Vorhies is a former Google engineer who leaked nearly a thousand pages of internal Google documents last year.