On Tuesday, six church members came together in a Zoom meeting to discuss the dis-Respect for Marriage Act (H.R. 8404). This Senate bill, if passed, threatens the religious liberty of Christians who uphold the biblical view of marriage and sexuality. It will probably be passed within the next two weeks by the Senate majority.

The participants in the discussion are:

Pastor Larry Kirkpatrick
Wayne Blakely
Pastor James Ash
Gerry Wagoner
Jonathan Zirkle
Ron Woolsey

This atrocious bill will encourage both government and individuals to sue institutions and people, including people of faith. Even if you win litigation in the end, months of being dragged through the court system will be enough of a punishment to preemptively silence many people. The process itself is punishment.

Lesson From Greece

Although America is not Greece, HR 8404 will establish a public policy that could silence you, more so as it leads to the Equality Act.

One of the greatest soccer players in Greek history, Vassilis Tsiartas, just received 10-month jail sentence and was ordered to pay 5,000 Euros for posting “God created Adam and Eve” on Facebook in 2017 in opposition to an LGBTQ “gender identity” bill. Coming soon to America? It certainly will if the cultural revolutionaries and political panderers have their way

The promised “religious accommodation” amendment (as narrowly proposed) was a sleight-of-hand trick to get senators to vote for this damaging bill … and the following 12 Republicans fell for it:

Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Thom Tillis (NC), Richard Burr (NC, retiring), Roy Blunt (MO, retiring), Shelley Capito (WV), Rob Portman (OH, retiring), Todd Young (IN), Joni Ernst (IA), Cynthia Lummis (WY), Mitt Romney (UT), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Dan Sullivan (AK).

Three of these senators (Collins, Portman, and Tillis) thanked the SDA church and a couple others as their inspiration for supporting this bill.

It is a window-dressing compromise amendment that simply restates that people of faith have existing religious liberty and conscience protections in the Constitution and federal law. This compromise could very well provide the 60 votes necessary for passage.

Simply asseverating that which already exists does not and will not stop the radical left from dragging good people through the court system and receiving a public tarring and feathering in the media for living their lives in fidelity to God’s Word.

It's bad enough that five members of the Supreme Court wrongly claimed that the U.S. Constitution requires a new definition of marriage, but if the Senate votes to codify this redefinition of marriage, all it will do is add fuel to the fire of those harassing and penalizing citizens and organizations that hold to the biblical truth about marriage.

The Senate bill pays lip service to religious liberty and conscience rights, but it does not offer any meaningful protections for those rights. Had the Senate sponsors wanted to, they could have explicitly stated that no individual or organization could be penalized by the government for operating according to the conviction that marriage unites husband and wife – particularly that the IRS may not strip any such organization of its nonprofit status.

But the bill offers no such protections. It is not even a bad compromise. It enshrines a false definition of marriage into our law and then tells people they can have their day in court if and when they get sued. That's not public policy for the common good, but rather a neo-pagan atrocity being forced upon all American citizens.

It would be far better to simply vote against the bill, and for SDA religious liberty to encourage just that. Vote it down.

****

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).