Thank you all for your warm welcome.
It's my pleasure and privilege to be with you here tonight to talk about
topic that's vitally important to all of us. In fact, it may be the most important
thing that's going to be happening in our lives in the next few years to the
extent that we value and appreciate our religious freedom. Our first freedom in
the Constitution of the United States, the First Amendment, is free exercise of
religion and it's being increasingly encroached upon in ways that many of you
will be
surprised to learn. And we'll be talking about that tonight, particularly focusing on, although
there's various issues of religious freedom in the Mount Soledad Crosses, one deals with displays of
religious symbols on public property that many of us have grown up with, like nativity scenes
at Christmas. That's going to be a big issue within the next month or so before Christmas.
Or tank commandment displays.
And in the case of San Diego, the Mount Soledad Cross,
whether you can have a symbol like that to honor veterans
who gave their lives in service of the country.
But tonight, the area of religious liberty
we're going to be talking about
is the one that most threatens our religious freedom.
as Christians. Now, it doesn't just threaten Christians, but we tend to be more the focus,
and it deals with the issue of same-sex marriage. Now, to put it in perspective,
religious liberty in general throughout the globe has become a major issue. For example,
in the years 2000-2010,
100,000 Christians per year in other countries, not the United States,
lost their lives for their faith. That's a million
martyrs to the Christian faith over the past decade. Now thank God we're not
Anywhere near that point in this country, but I have to tell you as we go through these slides
The trajectory and the trends are not good. There is increasing
hostility towards what we believe as
Christians now this is going to seem a little legalistic, so I'm going to try
to make it less so because last time I gave this presentation was to a group of lawyers a webinar around the country
But I want to kind of briefly outline for you those areas of primary concern,
because we now have same sex marriage in California.
I've been dealing with this issue
since 2003. I've been speaking on this issue that long. And when we started in 2003, we
were predicting the kinds of things that we thought might happen. Unfortunately, we were
not only right, we're more right than we knew because they're not only happening, they're
happening in a faster and more severe way than we had anticipated. And I'll be giving
you some examples. There are dozens of examples, really hundreds at this point, but I can only
give you obviously
sampling in the time that we have allowed. But in terms of civil liability,
meaning people being sued for their beliefs, particularly employers, and one
of the things going on right now the Senate just passed the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act in Washington yesterday.
We believe the Republican majority in the House will not pass it.
But basically what that law would say is that, for example, if a man wants to come to work dressed as a woman,
use a woman's restrooms and such, you have to allow it.
And if that work means...
You know, a man applies for a job at a preschool or daycare center dressed as a woman.
You can't discriminate on that basis, but not too many parents would feel very comfortable
having a man dressed as a woman taking care of their little kid.
So watch this Employment Non-Discrimination Act and
be a good citizen, you know, write your senators and congressmen, it's already passed the Senate,
so your House of Representative members would be the focus, to oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
I mention that because that's in play right now.
And it basically ties with the first point, employees entering same-sex marriage.
I'll give you an example, and this is happening, obviously, not just in the U.S.,
but it's even worse in Europe and in Canada.
But what happens in those countries frequently...
does happen as, in fact, is happening here. But one example, an Anglican bishop, Church
of England, more liberal than most evangelical or Catholic type.
Churches would not hire an openly gay youth minister.
He was sued, had to pay a $100,000 fine,
or actually it was in pounds, so it's more than $100,000,
and had to take some type of sensitivity training and apologize.
Okay, now that's because he didn't want to hire for his church
someone who was openly gay, not living by the church's values.
Now, in the United States, we still have some protections for churches.
Obviously, you know, ministers don't have to marry same-sex couples if it's not part of our faith beliefs.
But I'm telling you, they're going to keep trying to push the envelope so that things like employees in key positions,
including youth ministers, that you can't discriminate.
and the second item, cohabitation lawsuits,
for example, at various Christian universities,
Catholic universities, in this case,
a Jewish Orthodox university in New York,
Yeshiva was sued for not allowing two lesbians
in their graduate housing and they lost
and had to allow that even though as Orthodox Jews,
they follow the Torah, which is our first five books
of the Bible, including Genesis, same beliefs we have.
regarding marriage, and they lost that suit.
And that was here in the United States, in New York.
Services of their facility suits under public accommodation laws.
That's going to be a major area of concern.
Already in Canada, churches have been sued saying, okay,
you don't have to marry same-sex couples in your churches,
but if you have a church hall that you...
let couples use for celebrating their weddings and having a reception there you have to allow it
even if it's a religious place so somebody you know same-sex couple might sue and say we want
to use your hall even though we won't make your pastor marry us.
In Hawaii, they actually passed a law that the churches have to open their doors and
allow same-sex couples to be married in their churches, so they bring in their own minister.
And you know, for those of us who have a biblical view of marriage as set forth in Genesis that
God made us male and female so that we have the sexual complementarity and the psychological
and spiritual complementarity so that we could be good helpmates.
And even more fundamental than that, so we understand gender,
that there's a difference between men and women,
so that we understand what it means to relate to God as a loving Father.
And I'm quoting good evangelical pastors I've heard talk about this.
It's not coming from me, and although I'm not going to get into theology
because I'm a lawyer, not a theologian.
I want you to understand why I view this as so important, and the people that I work with view it as so important.
So if you don't get the idea of gender, you don't understand God as a loving Father, how do you relate to and know God?
And if you don't know God, how do you love God?
And if you don't love God, you know, how do you merit heaven?
there's eternal consequences to these issues. So for us, as believing Bible, believing Christians,
these are vitally important issues. You know, it affects people's not just their religious
freedom in this life, but potentially, you know, it's all major issues.
that involve decisions of morality, you can have eternal consequences.
So that's why it's so vitally important.
I also like to say as a disclaimer kind of up front,
none of my remarks are meant to cast judgment on anyone.
Certainly that's not my job, that's God's business.
How people choose to live their lives is their personal choice, particularly if it's, you know,
private matters. However, when they start enacting laws based on public policy that
affect all of us, people like me, lawyers of conscience who love and want to serve the
Lord as you do, we have a duty to speak up and defend the religious liberty that our
founding fathers fought and died and all the people that died in wars since then defending
our liberty that they sacrificed so much for. It's the least that we can do. That's why
I'm sharing this information and giving you
perspective. So let's move on. In terms of the services and facilities they call on public
accommodation laws, it affects
all the way across the board.
Anybody out there in the workplace
who provides some type of product or service,
for example, an evangelical woman doctor,
OB-GYN physician in North County, San Diego,
would not artificially inseminate a lesbian woman
because she believed that it only should be married couples,
and at that time only men and women could be married,
and she believes that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.
But she told this lesbian woman that, you know, you could go down the hall,
the doctor...
Down the hall, we'll do the service for you, and if it costs more than I charge, I'll pay the difference.
That wasn't good enough. She got sued.
And the California Supreme Court held that if she wants to practice this area of medicine,
she has to artificially inseminate this lesbian or give up that field of practice.
So that's the law in California, in these public accommodation laws that you have to check your religious liberty at the door.
More recently, Elaine Photography in New Mexico, a woman who was a good Christian evangelical woman, was asked to photograph a lesbian wedding.
Now, you know how these wedding photographers were.
He got to pose people, romantic poses, hugging and kissing.
And she said, I'm not comfortable with that.
I'm a Christian. I believe marriage is between a man...
And a woman. Now, the lesbian couple went out and got another photographer with no problem.
There's plenty that, you know, don't have...
any difficulty providing that type of service to a same-sex couple but
nonetheless Elaine photography got sued
and the New Jersey, excuse me,
New Mexico Supreme Court held recently
that she had to pay a big fine and if she wants to photograph weddings she has
to photograph
same-sex weddings or give up that business.
And that's now going to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of the judges in that case actually said the price of good citizenship
is not to let your religious beliefs interfere with other people's rights.
Well, what about our free exercise of religion,
particularly when this person was able to and did get the photography service
from someone else that was perfectly satisfied with it.
In the area of the wedding industry,
This has been a dramatic problem.
I gave you the example of the photographer,
but you may have heard of the baker up in Oregon
who would not bake a cake for a lesbian couple.
Again, the lesbians, for whatever reason,
want to make more of a point with these lawsuits than the men.
Don't ask me why.
And so the bakery up there would not...
baked the cake, and the lesbian couple made a complaint.
Now the bakery was being sued by the Attorney General,
and the militant gay activist started boycotting him
and got their suppliers to boycott,
and actually drove him out of business.
Okay, so these things are happening now.
This was very recent.
And there's, you know, cases where, again, people who have, for example, bed and breakfast
in their home, older people, religious people, let people, including the newly married couples,
stay in a guest room in their house or something, in a beautiful, usually, you know, setting
in the woods or something.
Those people have increasingly been sued and unvariably lose those cases.
The same-sex couple wants to come and...
stay and undo the same roof and use their home or cottage or whatever.
If they don't let them do that as they would a newly married heterosexual couple,
the courts are saying that they have to stop doing business that way.
They can no longer rent those rooms.
significant supplemental form of their income.
So again, across the board in the wedding industry,
even people that print wedding invitations,
we've had it with public accommodation laws.
You have, if you print t-shirts,
you have to print.
print, pro, homosexual messages on the shirts, or you're going to be fined.
So this is happening again, and all across the country.
Now it was happening in Canada five years ago, and now it's happening in the U.S.
The big area of concern is this last item, point four, hate speech or hate crime laws.
It's gotten, as you know,
to be the case in this country that everything is so politically correct, people are almost afraid to say anything.
You know, businesses won't say Merry Christmas anymore, they don't want to offend anybody, they can't sing Christmas carols in some public schools.
You have to be walking on eggshells all the time. Okay, that's bad enough.
But the hate speech laws that they passed in some places, for example, Sweden,
A minister there, a Lutheran minister, was reading from the Bible in his church, okay, like this,
pull out a Bible, read from certain passages where our Lord has spoken to us through Scripture and
talked about a marriage has to be between a man and a woman, and homosexuality is considered
sinful. He was convicted of a hate speech and sentenced to six months for reading from the
Bible in his church. Prosecutors said, try to get yourself a different Bible.
Now that was appealed, and now they're rewriting the Bibles.
You can get Bibles with rainbow covers now
where they've taken out of it all the passages.
You know, there's many in the Old Testament,
New Testament, you know, Sodom and Gomorrah, Romans 1.27.
I probably believe in Ephesians where, you know,
our Lord talks about marriage and how it's so fundamental
to our faith that it is analogous to the relationship
of Christ and his church.
So as Christians, there's nothing more important to us
as a relationship of Christ and the church.
That's how God equates on a human level.
The closest thing is marriage.
But nonetheless, all those biblical passages
are considered hate speech in some countries
and some places right now.
And church members, for example,
Belgium, an elderly 80-year-old cardinal was hauled before one of these human rights tribunals for saying homosexuality was sinful.
In Scotland, an evangelical street preacher was not even talking about homosexuality.
talking about other biblical passages, but two men came up to him, came in,
and said, well, what does the Bible say about homosexuality?
And he said, well, it's a sin, but like any other sin, God's mercy and forgiveness
is available, and will heal all of us. We're all sinners.
They went and complained, and he was arrested and fined.
And all he did was answer their question.
But if you call it a sin, this hate speech,
an evangelical minister in Canada was held by a Supreme Court of one of their provinces to be found
guilty of saying, love the sinner, hate the sin, with regard to homosexuality,
because they said, what you call the sin, we call behavior that can't be divorced from who the
homosexual is, and therefore you're really saying, you know, hate the sin and hate the sinner,
and we won't allow that. So he was told to pay the other side's attorney's fees, which are $200,000,
for saying.
love the center hate to sin with regard to homosexuality.
Catholic schools in Canada have been told they can't teach Catholic moral theology
regarding human sexuality and marriage that they have to teach a state-sponsored moral
theology.
Now that's a religious school and the Mennonites were told that they wouldn't put their kids
in public school so they could learn the state-sponsored moral theology because they were homeschooling
that they'd take their kids away from them.
Okay, now that's to our North, okay, that's Canada, so I don't want to be shocking you,
but Joe said I had to tell you the straight truth, which is what I would do anyhow.
I try to be sensitive to the fact that, you know, people don't come here, I want to go
home doom and gloomy, and I will try to end on a positive note because after all, we know
who wins the war in the end, right?
Price 400 on the cross.
That's all that really matters.
And there's no accident that He put us at this time and place in history.
God doesn't make those kinds of mistakes.
And if He didn't feel up to the task, He wouldn't have put us here.
But we do have a role to play.
And your presence proves that you're up to the task and you're ready to fulfill that role,
whatever your Lord and Master asks of you.
And this information I'm giving you is to forearm you.
so that you can go out and ask for the angelic protection,
our Lord will give you so that you can be a courageous witness.
In a loving and compassionate one, because we as Christians, again,
we're not condemning and we're not judging
judging Scott's business, but we have to proclaim the truth.
And it's his truth, and we can't change it.
It is what it is, it is a message of love and forgiveness and mercy, but He's also a
God of justice.
So we have to be willing.
to do what he tells us in the obedient servants.
The other big area that is gonna be in play here
with regard to how it's gonna impact our religious freedom
deals with denial of government benefits and privileges.
For example, there's a Methodist camp
in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.
And they would not rent out their marriage
pavilion again to lesbians.
I don't know why.
The gay men are not the ones bringing these cases.
First of all, they're not as interested in getting married
for the most part.
The rate of gay marriages is relatively small.
The liberal media wants to promote it,
like there's so many of them.
But the Center for Disease Control,
which has to track AIDS, which is still
the epidemic proportions among gay men,
and is rapidly increasing among teenage boys
in many of their 20s to be at epidemic proportions.
And that's not part of my talk.
but get off in these tangents. The point I wanted to make is the CDC in the Census Bureau says it's less than 2%, about 2% of the population is exclusively gay.
You keep hearing these numbers as if, you know, every other person is gay, and that's what they would have you believe on all the prime time television shows.
But it's 2%. And now you're hearing about the transgenders and the bathroom bill in California as if, my God, all these people are out there.
Probably less than one-quarter of 1% of the people have that particular type of disorder.
That's not to say that we should not make reasonable accommodations in terms of bullying
and discrimination and all that.
It doesn't mean you open up the girls locker rooms and showers to boys who have this problem
so they can walk in on your daughters and granddaughters.
You know, I've got a 14-year-old daughter in high school.
And I'm not going to tolerate some guy walking in the shower with her.
And that's, we're at, that's a lot in California that they passed.
Now as of today, it was the last day for the petitions.
I'm hoping and praying when they count them that we got to the mark, they needed I think 550,000, they think they did, but we don't know.
And then if we have the half a million petitions, they'll put it in the ballot.
The people of California, although we're kind of supposedly a blue, liberal, progressive state, overwhelmingly are against this.
The people that passed it are the militant gay activists in Sacramento and they live for this.
They pass one bill after another, totally out of touch with the mainstream, but they can
get away with it because they have the votes.
There's been eight bills passed in the, uh,
Legislature regarding these issues, so you can't say anything that supposedly promotes a discriminatory bias against homosexuality in the public schools.
That probably includes all this information I was starting to say about HIV being an epidemic report.
To my view, even setting aside religion and morality, people are going to get upset about
secondhand smoke.
They should get upset about the fact that you've got epidemic proportion of teenage
boys and young men contracting a fatal disease.
And don't be misled, AIDS will still kill you and reduce people's life expectancy by
10 to 20 years, which is very significant because it means half of these young men in
their teens and 20s are going to get AIDS, according to the statistics.
And there's a good chance they won't live to my age, which is 58.
Because the illness, although the retrovirus type drugs,
they give people a prolonging life, they cannot cure it.
So people have a right to know this and you can't teach this
in the public schools because it promotes the discriminatory bias.
And the textbooks now have to have homosexual role models.
This is a far cry from preventing bullying or unjust discrimination.
None of us want to see anybody bully, but there's laws to protect against that and nobody wants to be someone to be
unjustly discriminated against. People have the right for housing and jobs and health care and education and
employment, but that doesn't mean that other people who don't share certain views or values have to give up their rights and right now
the Christians are the ones being discriminated against or the public schools. Already we have situations
In other states like Colorado where they've allowed this transgender rights where boys
will walk into the girls' bathrooms and if girls complain they're told they're the ones
are going to get in trouble because they're the ones who are discriminated against this
man or young man who is using the girls' bathroom.
You want to hear a really egregious example up in Oregon.
There's a state university.
I'm trying to remember the name of something like Greenville, but in any event, a 45-year-old
man who was married and has kids and fully anatomical male who now thinks he's a woman
is using the locker room at that college, but the college has a big community pool.
So teenage girls and even grade school girls use a locker room, and this 45-year-old man
is lounging around completely naked in front of these six-year-old girls.
And the college said really nothing we can do and they called the police to go the law is kind of ambiguous. He thinks he's a woman
That's going on
right now
okay, and so
People have asked me when I given this the last time I gave this talk the rotary club
In Orange County last week. How is that rational? It's not rational in my view. It's evil
You know it's evil it goes against God's word that they're we are made male and female in his image and likeness
You don't get to have you know a sex
Just assigned at birth being male or female and then say unilaterally
Well, I think today I'm gonna be a woman and the way these laws are written you can switch back and forth
And in one state, the boy who's going to use a girl's bathroom will use a boy's bathroom one day and the girl's bathroom the next.
So that's okay, too. He gets to decide. You can't tell the parents and you don't need to know from the doctor. The kid just decides.
Okay, so that's how crazy.
this is. Now, you need to know about it and be responsible with your vote, get out to vote,
tell your neighbors if they care about these issues to get out and vote, and let your representatives
in the legislature and the State House and in Congress know how you feel. Now, when I got involved
in the Melcellate Cross case nine years ago, the city had decided to take that cross down,
which had been there since 1954, and I was born in 55, so my whole life.
And I heard they were going to take it down, and I got involved and got community support,
went down, raised heck of the city council meetings, and they put it on a ballot, people
saying Diego voted 76% to keep the cross, okay?
But that's what it took.
And at that point, because there was a federal judge order to remove it, we went and got
an act to Congress.
signed by President Bush, transferred it to federal government so they couldn't remove it because it was ruled on on the state constitution.
Again, I don't want to divert it as a fascinating story. I love to tell it, but I got to cover this other topic, but I wanted to give you an example.
citizens who exercise their rights and that means praying together because
these are spiritual battles and if you act as God's eyes and ears and hands and
feet he'll work through you okay.
I've been involved in Minnesota Cross for six years.
I've put in over $2 million of my time and lots of my own money on that case.
And I was told many times I was wasting my time we couldn't win, but yet the Cross is
still there.
We've won by the grace of God.
That all after battle.
I represented the four Christian firefighters that sued the city of San Diego for ordering them to participate in the
Gay Pride Parade and the Liberal City Attorney had his whole office over a hundred attorneys fighting us and everybody in the city government
Was arrayed against us even the police chief testified at trial. I didn't see anything that was offensive
So, you know, I brought in the retired detective who was marching right behind him when how could he not see it?
I saw these guys taking their clothes off and doing all these disgusting and vulgar things
So the jury got the picture and we won that case. It was upheld on appeal, but again
I had to have four courageous firefighters, good Christian men, you know the captain put
his career on the line. He'll probably never get promoted to battalion chief but he did
it because it was the right thing to do and as a result of it no other government
employee in San Diego will have her San Diego in California.
We'll have to go through that again.
Okay, I'm gonna move through this list
because there's more information that you need to know.
In terms of exclusion, oh, the Methodist camp, by the way,
They wouldn't let the lesbian couple use their little pavilion on the coast.
Even though there's marriage pavilions up and down the coast in New Jersey there,
that the couple could have used.
They sued this Methodist camp and the state of New Jersey removed their state tax exam status
because they were discriminating against the same-sex couple.
This is a big issue.
All of these religious organizations, Catholic, evangelical, any Protestant, Jewish, whatever,
you name it, even the Islamic ones, they have taxes instead and they need them.
And many of the smaller ones are barely operating.
So if they have to pay taxes, they're automatically out of business, all right?
This is a multi-trillion dollar item for the churches.
And already in California.
They have a law pending that any organization for youth that discriminates against openly
gay young men and women will lose their taxes and status.
Now it was aimed at the boy scouts, which capitulated somewhat because of now they'll
allow openly gay scouts, but they won't allow openly gay scout masters.
And again, the militants in the state legislature said, not good enough.
We're still going to go after your tax exempt status, unless you allow openly homosexual men to mentor these young boys.
Now, but it's not limited to the scouts, it's any youth organization.
So Little League, Pop Warner.
any church youth organization, if they don't allow openly gay participants and leaders,
they're going to lose their tax exempt status in California for state taxes and status without
law passes.
That is a very huge weapon because most of these nonprofits can't exist without that.
Exclusion for government service contracts, for example, the opposition will always say
with regard to the same sex marriage, it's not going to affect you.
You see this guy Barney Frank, you know, talking all the time.
How does my marriage, to my lover, affect you?
Well, as soon as it passed in Massachusetts and same thing in Illinois,
in the city of LA, they made a municipal ordinance in San Francisco
that any organization religious or otherwise is that places kids
for adoption have to place them with same sex couples.
Catholic Charities and Lutheran Adoption Services would not do that so they
pulled their licensing. Now, realizing there are many other adoption agencies
that would place kids with same-sex couples. In the case of Catholic Charities
and Massachusetts, it was the largest and oldest and had the best reputation for
placing difficult kids, you know, troubled teenagers in good homes, wouldn't save
them. They pulled their licensing so they can't put kids out for adoption.
Same thing in Washington, D.C.
Okay, so they'll go after your license now that could go and it did for the evangelical
Doctor I told you about North County San Diego go for lawyers. Let's say okay
You don't want to provide that service. We'll take away your license. You take away your license. You take away the person's livelihood
Okay, so we have economic martyrdom
already going on in this country to force people to go against their sincerely held religious
police or lose their ability to support their families. That's a very heavy club and a very
painful choice for people to make. There was a Fox commentator for sports who, when he
ran for a state office,
He was asked a question on a panel whether he supported same-sex marriage.
He goes, no, I'm a Christian, I believe in traditional marriage.
No, he lost that election, but he later got the job as a commentator for Fox.
They found out after he got the job as a sports commentator for Fox someone
reported that he had given that answer to that question and that debate, they fired him.
That was Fox. They're supposed to be the most conservative.
Okay? One guy worked for Allstate as an executive,
and he'd been a prize fighter at one time, worked for Allstate.
Just wrote an editorial at home on the weekend from his home computer
in support of traditional marriage, came into office on Monday,
Allstate fired him on the spot.
I didn't even say anything at work.
Okay, so this is a type of thing that's going on.
The exclusion from government facilities and property boy scouts have been kicked out of all kinds of military
Installations where they would meet they were kicked out of Balboa Park, but they eventually actually won that case surprisingly by the Ninth Circuit, which is the most liberal
Court in the history of the United States, but
See that's why you have to fight
Because you don't know which battles God's gonna allow you to win in which ones you can't you can go in there and be very prepared
You still have some judges got their mind made up because they've got an agenda, but
you don't know.
God can give you a good judge.
Right now in San Diego, the Mount Solide Cross case, the federal judge at the case is
pending in front of a good evangelical Christian, went to Point Loman Nazarene College.
he's going to render a fair result on the law.
Not some biased result because he's anti-Christian.
When I had to argue in front of a different judge
in state court, the attorney for the atheist
He said, and he pointed at me, this man's a Christian.
He's got no business representing the city of San Diego
on a case involving religious liberty.
That is an unconstitutional entanglement
of church and state.
She goes, yeah, that sounds right.
So we appealed it, and the appellate court
said that's ridiculous.
You're not supposed to question anyone's religious belief
if they're representing a client in court.
But.
that liberal judge bought that argument saying a Christian can't represent a
government entity in a religious liberty case. So that's what we're dealing with.
And then exclusion from licensees of marriages like in France and Mexico, you
have to go to a justice of the peace of your marriage won't be recognized. You
can still have your marriage with your pastor but the government won't recognize
that.
That's going to probably happen.
They'll just say, fine.
We won't make you ministers, pastors, priests, whatever,
marry gay couples, but we're not going to recognize
anybody's marriage that you marry.
They're going to have to go to some justice of the peace
or something, someone that will marry gay couples as well.
the schools. I've already kind of mentioned how bad.
Things are, in Massachusetts, shortly after they passed,
gay marriage there, this guy went into the school
when he found out that they were gonna be teaching
his kindergartener student about same-sex couples.
They read a book called King in King.
It starts out where the queen mother wants to marry a son
off to the beautiful princess and brings all the pretty girls
from the kingdom in.
and he's not interested in any of them.
One of them happens to show up with her brother
and he falls in love with her brother.
And they get married at the end of the book,
the two of them.
you, princes are kissing, and now it's King plus King, and that's a book they're giving
these kindergartners. He said, look, if you're going to be doing this, just let me know so
I could take my kid out of class that day. They said, no, at the school board meeting
and said, we won't do that. He said, I'm not leaving until you promised me that. They
arrested him, put him in jail. He appealed his case and lost. And they said, you have
no rights as a parent. The state recognizes same-sex marriage.
You don't have any right to teach that kid about marriage once they're in school.
You can teach them at home, but once they get to school,
we're going to tell them that you're a bigot.
And that everything that your parents are telling you, your pastor is telling you, is based upon racism, and they're a bigot.
Okay, that's not the policy of this state, right?
Now, what we're really seeing this is in the military.
And this is why I'm so concerned because
The schools are children, and are grandchildren, and they're the weakest and most vulnerable,
most easily influenced, and we have a duty to protect them, and God puts them in our custody
and control.
That's our job.
As parents, our military, what are they supposed to do?
They're supposed to be protecting us, right?
They're supposed to be the strongest, the best,
and the brightest.
But ever since the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell,
there's been an out-and-out effort.
By the government and they're replacing top generals and top military commanders with people that accept the current government philosophy
That Christianity has no place in the military now traditionally
Christians have been disproportionately represented in the military. You know why
is that? Well that's because our Christian principles, it's like when the
Tocqueville came in the 1800s and said these Americans are amazing people, they
don't separate their liberty from their Christianity and we never have. It's our
Christianity that makes us good citizens, you know, love your neighbor as yourself,
those types of ideas, but they have no longer have a place.
In our modern military, according to the current administration, and the group that I'm fighting
in a key case right now, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is even more radical than
the A.C.L.U., is an advisor to the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and the Pentagon.
And for example, the Army Reserve has been shown a slide recently that lists groups that
are called extremists.
That's the word they use that have to be particularly watched by our military and that includes get this Catholics evangelicals
Mormons and on the same slide
Hamas al-Qaeda in the Ku Klux Klan
I know, it's laughable, isn't it?
But it's true.
Now, when that came out...
Pentagon said, no, that's, you know, was a mistake.
That was one commander.
But yet, the slide keeps repeating.
And then most recently, one came out with a group,
a hate group list, and it had on it the American Family
Association, which is a traditional values Christian-based
organization.
An Air Force sergeant recently was fired
because his lesbian commander, and I don't know what it
gets, let's be with the bed, he went
Fire for firefighters, it was a lesbian fire chief and a lesbian battalion chief who got
really upset when they complained about being in the gay pride parade.
But with this Air Force sergeant, yeah, I know, I agree with you.
He was asked by his lesbian commander,
do you support same-sex marriage?
And knowing where she's coming from,
he said, I'm respectfully, I'm uncomfortable
answering that question, and I declined to answer the question.
And she said, I order you to answer.
He said, as a Christian, no, I don't support same-sex marriage.
She relieved them of the duties on the spot, okay?
Now, this is someone who was ordered
by a commanding officer to express his views,
and as a Christian,
He shared those views and was fired for it and the policy by these people who are exercising
this type of misuse of their authority is that Christians don't share proper army values
when it comes to views regarding sexual morality and marriage and therefore they have to be
eliminated.
I'll give you an example, this is pretty amazing stuff.
This guy, Mickey Weinstein, who's an advisor to the Pentagon,
who supposedly heads up this religious freedom foundation
for the military, but is a rapidly anti-Christian.
This is a direct quote.
from him. He goes, if these fundamental Christian monsters of human degradation and tyranny
can at broker or barter your acceptance of their putrid theology then they crave for your universal
silence of the face of their repitious reign of
Theocratic terror. I mean the verbiage is ridiculous to begin with but this is a guy who's an official advisor to the Pentagon
Indeed, they ceaselessly lust, ache, and pine-view to absolutely do nothing to thwart
their oppression.
So basically what he says is without going on and on is, anybody who dares evangelize
in the military, which is share their faith, he calls it a form of spiritual rape, just
as bad as sexual rape, and that these people who would dare try to share their faith with
other soldiers should be summarily court-martial for treason.
Okay?
I don't know if you're clapping because you agree with this or you're agreeing with me for calling it your attention
I hope you don't agree with it because you know the penalty for treason can still be execution
Just like in the days of St. Thomas, you know more the patron saint of lawyers who I
admire. Whether you're for gay rights or not for gay rights, I can't imagine
anybody in their right mind is against somebody peacefully sharing their faith
with someone else because we're called to do that as Christians. We're called
evangelize.
I want to give you an idea of how bad this hostility is.
For example, for Transgendered Queer Month in June 2009,
the president welcomed 300 gay activists to the White House
in celebration of homosexuality.
One of the persons they invited was Frank Kamani,
a Harvard PhD in astronomy,
and this was what Frank Kamani had said.
It goes, this is a quote, and I'm sorry because this is blasphemous, but I want you to understand
what we're dealing with.
He goes, your God of Leviticus and of the whole Bible is clearly a sinful homophobic
bigot.
He should repent of his sinful homophobia.
He should atone for that sin and he should seek forgiveness for the pain and suffering,
which is sinful homophobia is needlessly afflicted upon gay people for the past 4,000
years.
Our God is our Father and I wouldn't allow anyone to talk about my earthly
Father that way and he's talking about our Father and he was honored in the
White House and the President actually told them we're proud of you and your
work and your leadership.
Again, I didn't want to shock you, but I didn't want to wake you up if you didn't know how pervasive
this level of
hostility is. In fact, you know, it used to be the atheist who
According to the latest statistics, I have read represent 2%
of the population are getting increasingly, openly hostile.
For example, these new atheists, as they're called,
at the 2012 Reason Rally, where 10,000 atheists
gathered on the National Mall in Washington DC,
Dawkins, who's a very famous atheist,
might be aware of, I think it's Charles,
I'm not sure, Dawkins, Richard, thank you.
See, you guys are good.
That's why I love talking to Christian audiences,
because, and you're the reason why I do this.
You know, I'm always under fire here.
We're fighting principalities and dominions, and I need you to hold me up as I'm trying
to hold you up because of spiritual warfare, and we know we'll be saved, okay, but this
is not easy.
Our Lord didn't say it would be, by the way.
He said we'd be persecuted in His name, and it's happening like we never could have imagined.
I'm 58 years old, I never could have imagined.
And when I started predicting this in 2003, I never could have imagined in 2013 the predictions
that come so true.
But anyhow, Dawkins told this crowd of 10,000 as to Christians, mock them, ridicule them
in public, don't fall for the convention, we're all too polite to talk about religion.
They've dropped all pretenses of civility.
Now we're Christians and we're still going to do our thing and we're still going to
respond with love and compassion, but we have to be innocent as doves and wise of serpents
and know where the enemy is coming.
from. And he wants to destroy us. You know, I'll take the one question, but I was told
not to take questions because I'm supposed to get through this. I will be available afterwards
if you want to ask me questions. Or I don't know, maybe you're just affirming me. Thank
you. God bless you. I appreciate that.
I have to confess something. I'm a Cradle Catholic, and I don't typically pray that way, so I never quite know.
The one good thing, and it is a very good thing, brother.
The very good thing is that these issues have brought our faith communities together like
never before.
I don't want to get emotional, but I've had evangelical brothers pray over me like they did before the firefighter case
Where I went to point Loma Nazarene College and a group of pastors prayed over me and again
I was a little awkward and uncomfortable because I'm not used to people laying hands on me, but I
Can't tell you the power that swept through me. It practically lifted me up today
So, the Holy Spirit is with us and will guide us on these issues.
And there are formidable challenges, but we're up to the task and because I have people
like you praying for me and others who do the kind of work I'm doing, I know that we
can and will ultimately prevail and we're certainly going to win the battles God wants
us to and we're winning some big ones.
This mail told at a cross case, we have the votes on the current U.S. Supreme Court.
Even Justice Kennedy, who has been a very unpredictable vote and did not help us on proposition eight or the Doma case a couple of months ago,
he has signaled he's with us on the mail told at a cross case and certain statements that he's made.
So between him and the other four reliably conservative justices,
And even then I say that hesinally because Justice Roberts was supposed to reliably conservative
and did not go with this on Obamacare.
But on this issue, he's with us in Scalia and Thomas and Alito.
Those are five votes.
So pray for the health of the President Court and that the current President doesn't get
any more appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And the Melzloé cross should be safe and it's important because it's become now a symbol
for this.
struggle of worldviews. That's what we're talking about.
We share a Judeo-Christian worldview that our founding fathers shared.
The founding fathers, many of you probably know,
were devoutly religious men.
And they're wise, they're devoutly religious women.
The first four presidents, Washington, Adams,
Jefferson, Madison all talked about how religion
and morality were absolutely essential to our faith.
Now Jefferson had kind of a weird Christianity
where he took things out of the Bible and stuff,
but even he,
said it's very important that I could not only go to church every Sunday, but be seen doing it.
So he would walk from the White House to the U.S. Capitol, which was the biggest building at the time,
and the only one capable of being able to provide for the number of people who want to go to church services on Sunday.
Can you imagine? They had church services in the Capitol, but now the atheists are suing because you can't pray.
at football games or at city council meetings,
but the founding fathers had no concept to that.
And right after they wrote the Bill of Rights,
they voted to fund a chaplain to pray
before each session of Congress before it opens.
Half of them had the equivalent of seminary degrees.
And Washington said in his farewell address
to the nation, religion and morality
are the pillars for our democracy.
If we stop being a religious and a moral people,
this nation cannot stand.
Now, this is a first generation where they pulled people who were sadly people are saying
we don't think the next generation will have it as well as we do.
You know, do you think all of this degradation and morality and slide towards secularism might
be affecting our prosperity economically and our military strength?
Of course it does.
And I'm not here to give a political talk so much,
but I want you to know why these issues are important.
I would explain theologically as Christians,
but even for the non-Christians,
we all share in good citizenship
and one in a healthy and strong United States.
what's happening, we become very polarized, more so than any time since probably the Civil War
between those of us who share a Judeo-Christian worldview and those who are becoming increasingly
secular and are hostile towards that worldview. And it's going to be decided in our lifetimes,
whether the, I think it'll be decided in the next 10 years, whether we can preserve this union
But at least in the way we've known it to be in our lifetimes and for the last few decades
and generations.
So these are vitally important issues and who wins?
on these cultural war issues, in my view,
and I have a very strong conviction.
You know, Holy Spirit doesn't speak to me verbally.
I don't hear the voices or anything,
but I get these real strong convictions
like I have had on these issues since 2003,
when it was on no one else's radar hardly,
and it's all coming true.
I had a very strong conviction. I had to get involved in the mail so that I
crossed case and against all the odds that Cross is still there is a symbol of
what God can do when he works through his people. And even though Prop 8 was
stolen from us by the governor and attorney general by ordering
The county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, even though it was not struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not take that case. Under the law, Prop H should still be on the books.
We had one gay San Francisco trial court judge say it was unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court's throughout the appellate court decision.
And under California law, you can't change.
The state law in California is certainly not a constitutional amendment passed by a majority of the people because of one gay federal judge or any judge, regardless of sexual orientation or resilience to the police.
One judge can't change that law, but the governor and attorney general ordered those marriage licenses to be issued the same sex couple.
So we have a sense of lawlessness and anarchy.
And that's what happens when God starts being part of our thinking and our rationality and
the orderliness that comes from God and His creation.
But to pass Prop 8, all the churches had to come together, and they did, marvelously.
And I've heard great religious leaders say, God bless that effort because we all worked
and nobody tried to take the credit for it.
We did it for God's glory and we beat Hollywood, we beat the mainstream media.
We beat the liberal universities, we beat all the power brokers in the halls of Congress
and in the corporate executives who are funding all of these efforts because God worked through
the religious communities and the religious communities can come together and preserve
what our parents and their parents and their parents before them gave us
when we inherited this country with all of our precious religious liberties. But it's going to
have to come from the churches and from the good pastors who you're blessed with
to have a program like this so you can hear the truth because a lot of pastors are running scared.
They don't want to preach the truth on this.
They think it's too politically controversial,
but the truth is there's nothing that's politically important
that's not also a moral issue.
And these issues of life and marriage,
which are so fundamentally important to us as citizens,
are more important to us as Christians.
Okay, so thank God you have a good pastor to lead you,
to stress that.
I'm ready at a time, so I'm going to kind of run through these kind of quickly.
This was really was more for lawyers, but basically some of the tactics I've seen from
the other side, they'll take these pro-family values groups, you know, since they can't
get it them, they'll go to their website providers and say, these people are hate speech
which they put on their website, so I've represented these various groups.
that have had their websites pulled down and gone to their website providers and said,
you're violating your contracts and it's not for you to decide what's free speech and what isn't here,
and got their websites put back up.
And then these other types of potential remedies are all legal tools we've used to defend people,
including people like any of you if they come after you.
There's a lot of good,
public interest Christian lawyers and I work with big groups like the Alliance
Defending Freedom based in Phoenix. I've got 2,000 Christian lawyers all over the
country and I'm one of their key allied attorneys. So you come to us, you come to
me, if I can't help you, I'll get you to a Christian pro bono lawyer that will not
charge you if your religious freedom is being violated. So you need to know that.
You don't stand alone.
Okay?
You need to know that so that you can be courageous and speak the truth.
For example, I represented both these guys.
Mark Ragnarus came out with a study in July of last year, a new family structure study.
which showed that in two-thirds of the categories
when you measure how children do,
now that they've had same-sex couples around long enough,
they had enough of a sampling, a large sampling,
of 18-year-old who grew up with one parent being gay
and was living usually with a same-sex partner.
And in the study that Mark Reggnaerus came out with,
he's a professor at the University of Austin,
he approved that kids in the majority of categories,
academic performance, discipline. They all do significantly better when raised
with a father and a mother as opposed to two women or two men. Completely
opposite with the mainstream media. We'll tell you. Now he was salvagedly attacked.
They tried to bring academic discipline charges against him.
He was successfully defending my work with the alliance defending freedom
Lawyers, and he was fully exonerated then a guy Robert Lopez at Cal State Northridge came out supportive and goes
You know he's being attacked
But I know that Reggnaer says right because my mother was a lesbian and I grew up in that environment and I became a gay man
You know I didn't have a father
Eventually, I married a good Christian woman. I turned my life around and now I'm happily married and we have
our own daughter. But he's a very respected author. Well, again, two lesbian
administrators at his college campus went nuts. They brought academic charges
against him and I went up and represented him and all those charges were
dismissed and he got his tenure. So again,
That all happened within the past few months.
But if you speak up, you expect to be attacked.
even by your own family members.
Even by your own kids, if they're in public school,
because they're being indoctrinated against our beliefs.
One of the saddest things I ever saw
was a YouTube video show someone sent to me
where they interviewed little kids up through like 12, 13,
about their view of same-sex marriage,
and then they showed same-sex couples
proposing to each other and kissing and all that.
even though the initial reaction was that's kind of where particularly for the
really young kids like you know four or five years old when they see the two
men or two women kissing because I'm not used to seeing that but when they
started asking do you see a problem of two people like each other oh no no
that's just wonderful I'm happy for them of course you start getting up 11 12
you're the very defensive yeah these people who cannot accept this they're
just hateful they're bigoted people
Okay, I took on my own alma mater, University of San Diego, when they had drag queen contest.
And I had been president of student body when I was a student, I was president of the Alumni Association,
and my son was there, and I found out they're having a drag queen contest.
And, you know, the university wouldn't stop it, so I went to the alumni,
and I had been president of the association, like I said.
And 90% of those who had graduated before 2000 felt very strongly against it.
This is wrong.
But the recent alums, oh no, what's wrong with this?
Why are you getting all upset?
There's nothing wrong with the drag queen contest.
And this is very pervasive, even among supposedly religious schools.
So be aware of this, that they're turning our kids against us.
And again, what's at stake, ultimately, you're talking about immortal souls if people don't
understand why gender is important, and how do you relate to God again?
I'll just skip to this Jonah case.
Choose offering new alternatives for healing.
This is an Orthodox Jewish group, and I'm out of time, so I'm just
going to mention is this is taking about 80-90 percent of my time.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, this radical anti-Christian group that I said acts as an
advisor to Homeland Security and the military, has sued this little group
because they will help men and women
who struggle with same-sex attraction
try to overcome those attractions.
In the Southern Poverty Law Center,
headed by, in this case, two gay men
on their 10 lawyer team, in this case,
that are fighting us, have said it's a fraud
to tell anybody that you can help them
overcome same-sex attraction.
That people are born that way and they cannot change.
The very important case,
because it goes to the core issue.
You know, how did God make us?
Can we, in fact,
change from if it's a sin. Now they say that is a fact of fraud because it's not
disordered and it's not sinful. But that's a religious concept so I don't know
if the court will even address it. But it's their position that nobody can change
and anybody who says they can if they're in business to help people and that goes
with the evangelical groups, the Catholic groups, in this case a small
Orthodox Jewish group, that will actually refer them into Christian counselors.
They're being sued to be put out of business.
And the Southern Poverty Law Center has targeted 70 groups around the country,
and they're asking gay men to come forward and to sue each of them,
put them out of business, because they want the courts to rule,
you're born that way, and it can't be changed.
And if they get that, then they're going to say it's just like race,
and therefore anybody who tries to say that people can or should change by the grace of God,
Because God tells us he can help any of us overcome sin with his help if we come to him
And in penance and and we ask him for his help. He'll if we're repentant. He'll give us that help
They will not accept that so it's directly threatening a key theological religious belief. So it's a very important
Case, I'll just leave you. I'm gonna go right ahead to the last
quote
which I like. From Daniel Webster, who obviously Noah was the one, I guess, who did the dictionary.
It was Daniel. I get him confused. 1782. Daniel Webster, famous American order and politician
who practiced OK. So he didn't do the dictionary. I know what he did. But here's what he said.
If we in our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice,
trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together,
no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory and profound obscurity.
It's up to us, the last quote, it is necessary to live Christianity with fortitude and militant
spirit.
That's what we're being called to do.
hold each other up in prayer, different faith-based groups coming together,
serving our common good, in true brotherhood, and preserving our nation.
And again, the fact that you're here, you're arming yourself with this knowledge,
and ready to do the spiritual warfare gives me every confidence that we can and will prevail.
I thank you so much for allowing me to be with you this evening. God bless you.