Here is a story from The Daily Signal about the Christian bakers who are being sued for $135,000 for refusing to bake a gay couple a wedding cake.
Excerpt:
The Daily Signal has exclusively learned that the government agency responsible for enforcing Oregon’s anti-discrimination law appears to be working closely with a powerful gay rights advocacy group in its case against Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa.
Communications between the agency, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, and the LGBT organization, Basic Rights Oregon, raise questions about potential bias in the state’s decision to charge the Kleins with discrimination for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.
In April, a judge for the agency recommended the Kleins be fined $135,000.
Communications obtained through a public records request show employees of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries—which pursued the case against the Kleins—participating in phone calls, texting, and attending meetings with Basic Rights Oregon, the largest LGBT advocacy group in the state.
[…][T]he Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries commissioner, who is in charge of determining the Kleins’ final punishment, met with Basic Rights Oregon on multiple occasions and purchased tickets costing hundreds of dollars benefiting the advocacy group.
[…]Communications between Bureau of Labor and Industries Commissioner Brad Avakian and Basic Rights Oregon, which has actively spoken out against the Kleins, raise questions about whether the commissioner and other agency employees were using the case to benefit a political agenda, and in the process, stripping the Kleins of their right to a fair trial.
According to emails, Avakian met with Basic Rights Oregon on multiple occasions.
One of those meetings was planned for May 1, 2014, shortly before a federal court struck down Oregon’s Defense of Marriage Act.
Another meeting between the commissioner and Basic Rights Oregon occurred on or around August 5, 2014. This fell between the time a judge denied the Kleins’ first attempt to disqualify the commissioner for bias and shortly before a hearing for the case was scheduled to begin.
So the government, which is supposed to be fair to everyone, is actually collaborating with advocacy groups to punish those who disagree with the advocacy groups. It reminds me of the targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS. Big government, which is funded by the taxpayers, using their power to coerce and punish taxpayers.
Related to this story, I found another story in The Public Discourse, about how the Obama administration appointed gay rights activists to push the gay agenda in the public schools.
Excerpt:
Through his executive appointments, President Obama has helped expose American schoolchildren to activism that places them at risk.
On May 19, 2009, a few short months after his inauguration, Obama gave the green light to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to appoint Kevin Jennings to a top position to influence school policy: the post of Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, also known as the “safe schools czar.” Jennings, a powerful LGBT rights activist who is himself a gay man, was the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN is one of the largest LGBT activist organizations in the nation and is devoted to promoting homosexuality in K-12 schools. Jennings served as “safe schools czar” from 2009-2011.
Given his connection with the organization, we should not be shocked to discover that GLSEN received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control in 2011 for $1.425 million over five years to promote the LGBT agenda in public schools at taxpayers’ expense. Through these publicly funded in-school programs, kids are being bombarded with the message that same-sex attraction and gender-identity confusion are innate and therefore not changeable.
[…]GLSEN knows that the elementary years are a prime opportunity to encourage kids to reject the values of their parents. The handbook outlines a variety of activities that gradually introduce and reinforce the messages that gender is a social construct, that moms and dads are interchangeable, and that anyone who says otherwise is hateful and prejudiced.
Along with lessons designed to help kindergarten through fifth-graders to “explore the definition of a family and to understand that there are a variety of family structures” and to “challenge their own and other’s [sic] assumptions about gender and gender roles,” the guide recommends a variety of books and videos to help cement the lessons.
Just think about how people on the secular left were so loud and passionate about pushing for separation of church and state, blocking even the slightest hint of free expression of religion. They didn’t want even a hint of government support for Christianity, and not a speck of Christianity in the public schools. But when the shoe is on the other foot, and the left is in power, they are only too happy to push their agenda in the schools and from the government-run censorship panels.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Well how does one define gender?
Gender from what I goggled is define as is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity.
So then what determines masculinity and femininity? Cause some aspects of life that seems masculine or feminine has changed over years and cultures.
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I’m tempted here to say “this is what inevitably happens when you insist on living in and owning a business regulated and taxed by a prog-dominated People’s Socialist Democratic regime hellhole like Oregon” (or anywhere else on the Left Coast).
But alas, this is happening everywhere now, which only lends further credence to the obvious, that the old political labels are meaningless. All we have now, everywhere, is raw totalitarianism that simply cloaks itself in whatever ideological mantle is most appropriate for the time and place.
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WK,
After comment hiatus due to health and the death of my sweet sister, I just HAD to push one of your conclusions on over the cliff…grin.
‘
You wrote: “”So the government, which is supposed to be fair to everyone, is actually collaborating with advocacy groups to punish those who disagree with the advocacy groups.”
That statement is FULL of wisdom and understanding.
If we the people truly understood that we are actually paying for our own cultural destruction….to the tune of selling not only our children…but even to the third generation into the slavery of national debt..while also endangering the financial security of anyone with a God-shaped work ethic — this stuff would stop.
It’s ALL SELF-inflicted…because Christians have accepted the Secularist lie that secularism is morally neutral. Therefore, we think nothing of contributing….at the point of a gun…to the giant State Church collection plate in order to prevent moral decline. Nor do we question the fallacy that man’s nature can be redeemed through legal and regulatory means due to that same government aimed gun.
But guess what, in God’s Economic Rules – you get what you reward. And BINGO! total cultural destruction of life enjoying those certain Creator endowed rights and hello anarchnotyranny. The Secularized State is the antithesis of Christian Liberty ….this is what rebellion to God looks like. Even Nineveh had better sense when they heard the Word of God.
But, isn’t that what God told us if we abandon Him and His Commands??
…..poverty, oppression, threats from within and from other nations, and the selling of our children into slavery?
Your understanding that the government is supposed to be fair to everyone is so Biblical….so Reformed Theology…so Declaration of Independence….that states that the purpose of government is to hold ALL men accountable to the law regardless of who they are…and then to secure EVERYONE’s Certain Creator endowed rights….NOT use the law to “save” people or for god/savior men to provide us with “new” rights, privileges or providence.
The number of elected officials or even pastors that recognize this reality are a mere remnant.
You swerved into a real deep topic there, WK…keep pulling that that string and teach on brother!
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This is a great comment. I really wish that more Christians connected the practicalities of living out a Christian life with public policies, taxes, and so on. But it’s hard to do that if the focus is all me, me, me and my feelings.
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I regard this as a high compliment coming from you dear brother. I wonder sometimes at the huge blind spot among self-professing believers that say God’s Word has nothing to do with government and the legal system as we read terms like “the Throne Room of God”, Sovereignty, or envision a day when the nations (governments) bring their gifts to the Holy City ruled by God. God gave us determining factors that we are to use to identify “good men” suitable to be elected as our representatives as well as disqualifying factors for those unsuitable for handling the legal representation i.e. protection of those CERTAIN Creator endowed rights of others.
Just the other day I was struck by the legal term: trespass or debt – in regards to Jesus teaching us how to pray. “Forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me…” Now that’s a legal term that denotes treading into an area that does not belong to me…crossing a boundary to involve myself in an area owned/governed by the individual and God.
In other words, Christianity ain’t about not hurting the feelings of others, health and wealth….Christianity is about salvation that then makes one joyful to adhere to God’s Laws and to resist the temptation of meddling in the personal territory governed by God and the individual….and if Christians don’t recognize the trespassing of the tax-payer funded public school system through the flagrant boundary crossing into the private territory of Creator-endowed self-interest/ self- government of the individual as well as the sacred territory of marriage, and godly order that governs family…they are asleep at the wheel.
That we are PAYING for such destructive lawlessness is just icing on the ticking bombe’.
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