Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller is condemning offensive comments from Texas state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, that equate allowing individuals and businesses to use religion to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Texans with protecting Jewish and gay shop owners from serving people who hate them. Here’s the press release we just sent out:
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller is condemning offensive comments from Texas state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, that equate allowing individuals and businesses to use religion to discriminate with protecting Jewish and gay shop owners from serving people who hate them. TFN is issuing the following statement from Miller:
“Making such bizarre and wildly offensive comparisons to justify passing a bill that allows people to use religion as a weapon to discriminate is beyond cynical. Even worse is that Rep. Krause callously ignores the real-life consequences of reopening the door to the kind of unfair and cruel discrimination our country rightly turned its back on decades ago. His bill could lead to individuals being denied jobs, housing and even public services we all take for granted simply because of who they are and whom they love. And it would suck Texas into the whirlwind of criticism from businesses and faith leaders that we’re seeing in Indiana.”
Speaking to the Austin American-Statesman for a story published today, Rep. Krause argued that proposed constitutional amendments from himself and state Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, (HJR 125 and SJR 10) would protect religious freedom:
“Should a Jewish bakery have to bake a cake for the neo-Nazi convention coming into town? Nobody would say that. Nor would anybody say a gay florist couple has to give flowers to a Westboro Baptist protest at funerals,” Krause told the American-Statesman. “All [his bill is] saying is that if you feel like it has been burdened, that gives you a chance to go to court to say the government is infringing on my religious freedom because they are forcing me to do this.”
Either constitutional amendment would essentially replace the current Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which was passed by a large bipartisan majority in the Legislature and signed by Gov. George W. Bush in 1999. The current Texas RFRA allows individuals to challenge laws that “substantially” burden their practice of religion. It also includes a provision to ensure that the law can’t be misused to disregard civil rights protections against discrimination.
Major companies and organizations have criticized the Indiana legislature for recently passing a RFRA that doesn’t include such a provision protecting against discrimination. The proposed Texas constitutional amendments also don’t include that provision. In addition, the Texas amendments allow challenges to laws that someone thinks burden his or her religious beliefs or practice in any way at all, substantially or otherwise.
The two amendments are among 20 proposed bills in the current legislative session that protect, promote or mandate discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Texas.
No surprise. Keep in mind that the Tx Republican Party Put Reparative Therapy on their Platform. Yout voted for them, so there should be no fucking surprise in this bullshit.
RFRA. What a disgusting thought. Our religious freedoms are enshrined in our Constitution. Y’all try to read it once in awhile.
The 1st amendment says prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting …
What more needs to be said? The repulsive RFRA laws is meant to DISCRIMINATE against people they don’t like.
Back in 1964 the civil rights laws were passed. Those RFRAs are designed by some Christian groups to overturn the civil rights laws.
Although I am not a Christian, I have read their books which they call the New Testament, and have never read that Jesus said to hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.
I’m not a member of the LGBT community, I would much rather associate with those people than many Xians.
Unfortunately, many Xians would love to hug the burning cross rather than accept the fact that not all brains gestate identically.
As a young girl, I saw that all boys had “cooties.” Then one day some of them were downright cute! How did that happen? Well, I can’t brag on myself for that happening. It is exactly the same way that LGBT people’s brains work. But to hate people because of the way their brains work? Absurd.
If a line has to be drawn, it could run between selling stuff off the shelf and selling something custom made. So, no shop keeper could selectively refuse to sell something in store but could not be forced to produce something according to a specific order. In this case this would mean that a Nazi could buy a generic cake but the Jewish baker could refuse to bake a swastika cake (and that would be covered by simple freedom to contract laws*). This would not be true, if it was an essential service (like e.g. a hospital, an emergency room in particular, or something to do with basic necessities like food, housing, water etc.).
In the also debated case of a photographer I’d say the distinction could be to force him to not refuse in-shop standard services but allow him to not take specific contracts for events outside.
I would not consider it ideal but it is at least a reasonable distinction.
*not going into the legal intricacies that formally any sale consists of no less than 2 contracts (or more) that are not usally written down.
Hitler WAS a Christian:
Despite how often Christian apologists try to argue that Adolf Hitler is an example of the evil caused by atheism and secularism, the truth is that Hitler often proclaimed his own Christianity, how much he valued Christianity, how important Christianity was to his life, and even how much he was personally inspired by Jesus – his “Lord and Savior.” Like many German Christians of the time, however, Hitler saw Jesus Christ in a very different light from what is normally the case.
In a speech from April 12, 1922 and published in his book My New Order, Adolf Hitler explains his perspective on Jesus Christ:
“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”
There are two features here which deviate from what many might expect to find in a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. The first, of course, is the anti-Semitism. While Christians in America today might find this bizarre, it really wasn’t out of place in early 20th century Germany among conservative, moderate, and even liberal Christians. Nazi Christians didn’t abandon basic Christian doctrines, like the divinity of Jesus. Their oddest religious belief was a denial of the Jewishness of Jesus, but even today there are Christians in Germany who object when Jesus’ Jewishness is focused upon.
Source: http://atheism.about.com/od/adolfhitlernazigermany/a/HitlerJesus.htm
Hitler’s Christianity is Not Completely Irrelevant: http://www.atheistrev.com/2011/04/hitler-christianity-is-not-completely.html
Hitler Was A Christian: http://www.squidoo.com/hitler-was-a-christian
List of books banned in Nazi Germany – Note that Hitler banned books on Darwinism and those which criticized the Christian religion: http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/documents.htm
List of Hitler quotes – He sure doesn’t sound like an atheist, does he?: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/09/list_of_hitler_quotes_in_honor.php
The religion of Hitler – History is being distorted to separate Hitler from Christianity: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/john_murphy/religionofhitler.html
Adolf Hitler on God: Quotes from Adolf Hitler Expressing Belief & Faith in God – Adolf Hitler had Faith in God that His Agenda was Divinely Ordained: http://atheism.about.com/od/adolfhitlernazigermany/tp/AdolfHitlerFaithGod.htm
(I have reseaeched this for many years. this is not “he said she said” or jusr claiming to be something to get elected. this is history and youy cannot argue with fact!!! I could provide more, but i am bored now, i learned a long time ago to not converse with uneducated people, in the USA they tend to be conservative Christians, as dangerous as Hitler and Muslim Terrorists. so goodbye for now.)
As long as we continue to elect narrow-minded authoritarians like Krause we will get the results we deserve.
Krause is undoubtedly unaware of the irony of his German heritage and invoking Godwin’s Law at the outset of his failed analogy. Krause, in other times, would have been perfectly comfortable in fascist Germany. As the son of a baptist preacher in socially conservative East Texas, educated in Christian schools, Christian college and with a “law” degree from Liberty University, Krause’s “world view” is paper-thin, authoritarian and based entirely on opinion. Having lived his entire life in the echo chamber it’s no surprise that he invokes Nazi’s, of which he knows nothing. It’s simply a sound bite.
Krause is a product of an authoritarian culture that has no goal other than to force people to be like them, or to pretend to.