Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

Annise Parker, the openly gay mayor of Houston who caused a national outcry last week for subpoenaing the sermons of five Christian pastors, made several unsuccessful attempts to convince the public that she’s backing off of this outrageous breach of the U.S. Constitution even while continuing to bully Christians for expressing their views in church sanctuaries.

According to Fox News’ Todd Starnes, Parker’s office reacted to the initial outcry by claiming the mayor didn’t know about it.

“Mayor Parker agrees with those who are concerned about the city legal department’s subpoenas for pastors’ sermons,” said a statement by Darian Ward, the mayor’s press secretary shortly after the scandal broke.

“… Neither the mayor nor City Attorney David Feldman were aware the subpoenas had been issued until yesterday. Both agree the original documents were overly broad. The city will move to narrow the scope during an upcoming court hearing.”

However, no sooner was the ink dry on this statement when Parker took to Twitter and issued the following message: “If the 5 pastors used pulpits for politics, their sermons are fair game.”

In other words, she’s not backing down on the subpoenas, which were aimed at any sermons that had to do with a controversial transgender rights bill known as the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) or “bathroom bill”.

When the council passed the bill, opponents gathered enough signatures to have the issue brought to the public for a vote, but the mayor and the City Council threw out the signatures. This prompted a lawsuit demanding that the people’s voice be heard. The subpoenas were issued shortly thereafter in a rather obvious attempt to bully opponents, including the city’s pastors who were vocal opponents of the bill.

But the city was not prepared for the kind of backlash their heavy-handed tactics would generate and hastily tried to cover the mayor by saying she didn’t know about the subpoenas, something almost no one believes.

And for good reason. Once the lawyers looked at the revised subpoenas, they found the documents weren’t really changed at all. They merely replaced the word “sermons” with “speeches”.

“I don’t mean to point out the obvious here – but what do those attorneys think a sermon is? It’s a speech,” Starnes writes.

While the amended subpoenas did drop demands for sermons pertaining to Parker, homosexuality and gender identity, they’re still gunning for all sermons related to HERO from five Houston pastors.

“The city of Houston still doesn’t get it,” said Erik Stanley of the Alliance Defending Freedom religious liberty law firm who is representing the five pastors. “The subpoenas still ask for information that encompasses speeches made by the pastors and private communications with their church members.”

Stanley says the only resolution to the matter is to withdraw the subpoenas entirely.

“This tramples their First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion,” Stanley said. “Any inquiry into what these pastors did in standing against the ordinance passed by the city of Houston and encouraging members to sign the petition is a violation of the First Amendment.”

Parker made yet another attempt to placate the public on Friday when she told the press that “We don’t need to intrude on matters of faith to have equal rights in Houston, and it was never the intention of the city of Houston to intrude on any matters of faith or to get between a pastor and their parishioners.”

She insisted that all they want is any information from sermons in which pastors gave their congregations instructions on how to protest the HERO bill.

“That’s always what we wanted and, again, they knew that’s what we wanted because that’s the subject of the lawsuit,” she said,then implied that opponents of HERO deliberately  misconstrued the subpoenas to spur a “media circus.”

Starnes calls all of this disingenuous equivocating to be “a load of grade A fertilizer.”

And he’s not alone. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was outraged by the subpoenas, calling them “aggressive and invasive” and demanded that they be rescinded.

“Whether you intend it to be so or not, your action is a direct assault on the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Abbott wrote.

While the mayor and her staff continue to fumble their attempts to stifle religious liberty, Alliance Defending Freedom says the pastors will not be handing over their “speeches” any time soon and are moving forward with a request to rescind the subpoenas.

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