Commissioner Peter Kirsanow
Annise Parker, the openly gay mayor of Houston, got a tongue-lashing this week from a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for demanding copies of the sermons and e-mails of five Houston pastors who supported a citizen-led initiative to defeat a controversial transgender law.
The Blaze is reporting on the letter, penned by Commissioner Peter Kirsanow, who warned that the city’s subpoena of the pastors’ speeches and internal correspondence threatens to “have a chilling effect on religious and political speech that is protected by the First Amendment.”
Parker and her lawyers went after the five pastors who were known to oppose a 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.
Kirsanow scolded the Mayor’s office, saying that “No government entity should be in the business of requiring private citizens to turn over private communications about the issues of the day . . . . When he is out of the pulpit, a pastor has the same free speech rights as any other person.”
Houston Mayor Annise Parker
He went on to call the subpoenas overbroad, something even the embattled Mayor admitted to. She attempted to placate the public by pretending to narrow the scope of the filing, but only changed the word “sermons” to “speeches” and dropped demands for communication that had to do with her or homosexuality.
Apparently, the commissioner wasn’t fooled any more than the public and reminded the Mayor that because the recipients of these subpoenas are pastors, “it is almost inevitable that their views on homosexuality and gender identity are informed by their faith, if not almost entirely rooted in their faith. Indeed, the views of many people on homosexuality and gender identity are rooted in their ultimate commitments.”
He concludes by calling the subpoenas “a blatant attempt to punish these pastors for expressing their religiously-based political views. It punishes them by subjecting them to the stress of a subpoena (though they are not parties to the litigation), impairing their right to petition the government, forcing them to comply with a patently overbroad discovery request, and singling them out for opprobrium – thus chilling future religiously-informed speech. This is an abuse of government power . . . It is troubling that, given the number of lawyers involved, someone did not raise the First Amendment implications of this discovery request.”
Kirsanow’s recommendation is that the subpoenas be withdrawn.
Thus far, Parker’s office has not responded.
Click here to read the Commissioner’s letter.
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