The Brew: Christians Need Not Apply to Adopt Children in Oregon

By John Zmirak Published on April 6, 2023

Al Perrotta is taking a day off.

We warned people this is where legal recognition of same sex “marriage” would lead. Even squishy Chief Justice John Roberts saw that the Obergefell decision boded ill for religious liberty. And now here we are, an American state treating Christians as second class citizens, unfit to parent children. (H/T Gateway Pundit.) The Alliance Defending Freedom reports:

On behalf of a single mother of five wishing to adopt siblings from foster care, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Oregon state officials for denying her application because of her religious beliefs.

Jessica Bates began the process of applying to become certified to adopt a child from Oregon’s foster care system one year ago. The Oregon Department of Human Services, the agency responsible for the delivery and administration of the state’s child welfare programs, denied her application because individuals seeking to adopt must agree to “respect, accept, and support … the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of any child the department could place in an applicant’s home, and Bates could not agree to this because of her faith.

How long before parents in divorce cases use their ex-partners’ religious faith against them to gain custody? And how long after that before radicalized bureaucrats in blue states start treating parents’ efforts to pass along their faith as “child abuse”? There are no off-ramps on this Gadarene slope down to the sea.

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Woke “Trans” Lutheran Pastor Compares Trans Mass Shooter To … Jesus

When I warned you that the Woke cult preaches the “new gospel” of the antichrist, I wasn’t exaggerating for effect. Here’s precisely what I predicted, happening right on schedule. The Blaze reports:

A woke preacher in Fargo, North Dakota, compared the Nashville shooter who slaughtered six Christians to Jesus just before the Crucifixion in a recent sermon.

On Sunday, newly installed pastor Micah Louwagie, a woman who claims to be “trans” and who prefers they/them pronouns, made the shocking comparison during an Easter-themed service at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Louwagie began by blaming the shooting at the Covenant School on guns, asserting that gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and ignoring the fact that millions of babies die violently from abortion every year.

She insisted that society had fixated on the shooter’s trans “identity” rather than “focusing on ways this could’ve been prevented, such as gun control.” Louwagie then pivoted to make “marginalized folks,” including those who claim to be transgender, the victims of “powers and institutions that are literally killing them.”

“[T]hose of us with the least amount of privilege and power,” Louwagie stated, including herself among the supposedly powerless, even as she enjoyed the attention of an entire church congregation, “need those who have more privilege and power than they do to physically place their bodies between them” and those who supposedly wish them harm.

Louwagie then scorned “allies” who claim to support “trans” people but who ultimately “betray” trans people “with a kiss,” just as Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus.

 

Libel an Organization as a Hate Group, Get Sued for Defamation

The cogent culture critic Tyler O’Neil reports at The Daily Signal that the Southern Poverty Law Center might finally face some consequences for its reckless smears of conservatives and Christians:

The Southern Poverty Law Center routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, but most lawsuits aiming to hold the SPLC accountable for this alleged defamation have failed.

On Friday, however, a federal judge denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit, allowing the case to proceed.

The SPLC branded the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society an “anti-immigrant hate group” in February 2018 after the SPLC had previously stated in 2011 that it did not consider the society a “hate group.” The society, named after a 16-year-old Georgia boy killed in a 2000 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant, aims to combat illegal immigration.

“After telling the Associated Press in 2011 that we were not a ‘hate group,’ the SPLC changed their mind and made us an ‘anti-immigrant hate group’ within days of their registering as active lobbyists against pro-enforcement, immigration-related legislation here in the Georgia Capitol,” D.A. King, the society’s founder and president, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Tuesday.

King claimed that the SPLC’s “goal was clearly to paint us as the extremists and to marginalize us in the eyes of state lawmakers and the media. That effort was largely successful.”

Don’t miss O’Neil’s eye-opening book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

 

Wyoming Democrat Posts Violent Pro-Trans Tweet Less Than a Week After Church Shooting

Kudos to the Daily Caller for spotting this outrage, and to the Wyoming Freedom Caucus for condemning it:


The NRA is never one tenth this insensitive in the wake of mass shootings, but hey … “Trans” means never having to say you’re sorry, as The Family Guy once observed:

Ukraine to Evict Orthodox Church From 980-Year-Old Monastery

We’re pouring billions of dollars into Ukraine to fight for something. But it isn’t freedom—at least not religious freedom. The Jerusalem Post reports:

Ukraine’s punitive actions against a branch of the Orthodox church linked to Russia are part of a drive to achieve “spiritual independence,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday.

Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders have accused the long-established Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), itself under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, of undermining Ukrainian unity and collaborating with Moscow.

Authorities ordered the church last Friday to leave its base in the 980-year-old Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, prompting Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to ask Pope Francis and other religious leaders to help stop the crackdown.

The Security Service of Ukraine has since October carried out searches at UOC churches, imposed sanctions on its bishops and financial backers, and opened criminal cases against dozens of clergymen.

Church officials say it and its millions of worshippers are victims of a witch-hunt.

Orthodoxy is the primary faith in Ukraine and the Moscow-linked church has been in competition for worshippers with an independent Orthodox Church, founded after the Soviet collapse in 1991 but only recognized by church hierarchy in 2018.

Pfizer Knew the Dead Baby Vax Didn’t Work, But Didn’t Tell Us

Children’s Health Defense reports:

In late 2020, the airways became saturated with triumphant reporting of Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” COVID-19 vaccines. Millions rolled up their sleeves with the belief that reaching herd immunity would end the pandemic.

But by June 2021, the pandemic endgame story had gone off script. Highly vaccinated countries like Israel were experiencing a new wave of COVID-19 infections, vaccination rates were starting to slow, and public skepticism was snowballing.

Regulatory filings date-stamped from April 2021 show Pfizer had strong evidence that its vaccine’s efficacy waned — results the company did not publicly release until the end of July.

Peter Doshi, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, accessed these documents from the Canadian drug regulator, Health Canada.

“It’s clear from the documents that these analyses were almost four months old by the time they became public,” said Doshi.

“It’s disappointing that neither Pfizer, nor regulators, disclosed these data until it was too obvious to ignore new outbreaks in Israel and Massachusetts, which made it clear that vaccine performance was not holding up.”

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”

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