Posted on 08/09/2006 11:14:54 AM PDT by Abathar
NEW YORK -- A minister in New York said billboards he paid for displaying a Bible verse that condemned homosexual behavior were removed after the president of the Staten Island borough called the message intolerant, offensive and unwelcome.
The Rev. Kristopher Okwedy's lawsuit against the former official was heard Tuesday by a three-judge federal panel.
Okwedy's attorney, Stephen Crampton of the American Family Association, said the case highlights the conflict between gay rights and the right of Christians to publicly quote Bible passages that declare such behavior sinful.
Crampton predicts that the issue will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nice try. Those are the rights of the people, a subset of whom are Christian, another subset would be gay people. So your comment applies equally to both.
But Article VII dates the Constitution in "the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." Who do you think that's referring to?
Is the Constitution unconstitutional? Based on the logic of some of these judges lately, yes.
THIS is censorship.
This isn't just a civil rights case. This is quite clearly a violation of one's Constitutional rights to freely practice one's religion.
"America it is said is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance, tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so over run with the bigoted, as it is over run with the broadminded. Tolerance, is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil . . .a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons...never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error.... Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscraper as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratories."- Bishop Fulton Sheen 1931
so now governments are free to PROHIBIT the free exercise of religion?
Umm, your answer was neither, so even by your own attempts to argue semantics, you were wrong.
Yes the are the rights of all people. And the religious rights of all people are protected. The right to freedom of religion is expressly protected.
We have a constitutional right to be Christian if we so choose.
Are you now saying that someone also has a constitutional right to be gay? Feel free to make that argument, but please support it.
"Gay" people do have constitutional rights, and if you'd like to try and present an argument that the scriptures posted on a privately owned billboard somehow infringes upon those rights, go ahead and give it a try.
Not one shred of scientific evidence proves that God
"created them male,female(and gay),it is as it has been
written -homosexuality is a learned behavior and destructive at that.
Yes. Freedom of religion is one of your civil rights, and I used the term in that context.
"Civil rights" is a term that has been used so often to mean what might be more accurately called "minority rights" that it's easy to confuse the true meaning of the term.
ANY violation of your Constitutional rights is a violation of your civil rights. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are BOTH protected by the same First Amendment.
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