On Sunday, Chicago’s first openly gay mayor, Lori Lightfoot, mounted a raid on a black South Side church for holding services in defiance of her coronavirus lockdown orders.
Lightfoot reportedly sent three marked squad cars and two unmarked cars full of officers to the Chicago Cornerstone Baptist Church in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Woodlawn is just south of Hyde Park, the area in which the Obamas lived for a short time before Barack became president.
The pastor of the mostly black congregation, Courtney Lewis, reportedly shut and locked the doors and refused to allow the officers to gain entry to the building, Todd Starnes reported.
Pastor Lewis told Starnes that he felt like he was confronting “the Soviet-style KGB” as the officers pounded on his doors and demanded entry to shut the church down.
“Thankfully, our doors were locked as a normal safety precaution we take each service to protect our members from the escalating gun violence in Chicago,” Lewis said.
A sentry that is usually posted outside the sanctuary to monitor the street during service also reported seeing occupants of a dark car with tinted windows filming the incident through one opened window.
“All we are seeking is the same consideration and trust that is being tendered toward the liquor stores, abortion clinics, and Walmart,” Lewis told Starnes.
Lewis is also seeking help from U.S. Attorney John Lausch. “We are trying to follow the laws of man as much as reasonably possible, but when the laws of man conflict with the laws of God, I, as a pastor, have a duty to follow the laws of God,” Lewis wrote in a recent letter to Lausch. “We will not be intimidated by this overhanded government bully, but we are requesting the assistance of our president and our Justice Department in correcting this grave miscarriage of the law.”
Lightfoot, Chicago’s Mayor since May of last year, has been targeting the city’s churches for several weeks as houses of worship have begun balking at her draconian lockdown orders.
Late last week, Lightfoot excoriated the city’s churches, saying that their desire to re-open is “dangerous and foolish.”
Also last week, the city began fining churches that Lightfoot thinks are violating her coronavirus lockdown orders. After some churches started holding services on the second weekend of May, fines were handed out to churches, including Philadelphia Romanian Church of God, Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church, Metro Praise International, and others.
Law service Liberty Counsel reported on May 23 that Elim Pentecostal Church and other Romanian churches in the city received letters from the Chicago Department of Public Health, invoking emergency orders and deeming churches a danger to society.
The letters also invoked “summary abatement,” which gives the city the power to forcibly enter properties without a judge’s orders and impose the mayor’s will on occupants.
On Friday, President Donald Trump updated federal guidelines for re-opening the economy and added that churches are essential institutions and should be allowed to re-open without government opposition.
“Today, I am identifying houses of worship, churches, synagogues, and mosques as essential places that provide essential services,” Trump said on Friday, announcing the release of new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.
A similar flurry of harsh orders has come from the state’s governor, as well. Illinois’s recently elected Gov. J.B. Pritzker, heir to the billion-dollar Hyatt Hotel chain, continues to maintain that Illinois must remain on near-total lockdown as a measure to stave off the coronavirus.
Pritzker, who has instituted the most draconian lockdown in the country, recently decreed that churches must not allow more than 50 worshippers inside at a time, “until there is a vaccine” for the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, Pritzker took criticism for demanding that everyone stay at home even as he allowed his wife to fly off to their Florida estate where lockdowns are not as strict. He was also caught ordering construction crews from Illinois to travel to Wisconsin to work on his property there despite those strict stay-at-home orders he was doling out to his constituents.
But Pritzker is facing mounting pressure to roll back his authoritarian coronavirus policies. Last Wednesday, the governor succumbed to pressure to cancel his order to criminally charge businesses that opened their doors in defiance of his coronavirus orders.
Illinoisans are becoming increasingly restive under Pritzker’s rule. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the state’s coronavirus decrees, and many county governments are shying away from the lockdowns. A growing number of county sheriffs and board members are refusing to enforce the governor’s orders.
The deep blue state of Illinois is beginning to revolt against the nation’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns even as those in charge seek to strengthen their power.
Some of the more outrageous examples of overreach are seen in the City of Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot has fenced in the city’s extensive lakeshore areas and even created newly designated no parking zones around churches to prevent worshipers from attending services.
Last Sunday, the city’s first gay mayor sent the Chicago Police Department (CPD) out to erect new signs around the neighborhood of Philadelphia Romanian Church to suddenly create long stretches of new “No parking/tow warning” zones around the building.
Lightfoot also sent the CPD to prowl around outside several of the city’s churches to hand out parking violations, Chicago’s CBS affiliate reported.
The mayor’s campaign against churches comes on the heels of statements by several church officials across the city saying they had no intention of submitting to the mayor’s orders to shut down their houses of worship.
A protester holds a sign during a rally calling for the state to reopen the economy outside the Thompson Center in downtown Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
The Windy City is not the only Illinois jurisdiction instituting the draconian lockdowns that are riling citizens. The state’s novice Governor, J.B. Pritzker, has also dabbled in harsh lockdowns that have stifled the state.
Indeed, a recent review of lockdown policies by the personal finance site WalletHub found Illinois has the harshest lockdown policies in the country.
As a result, the Windy City citizens are not the only Illinoisans who have revolted against the Democrat-enforced lockdowns.
A growing number of county and municipal officials are coming out in opposition to Gov. Pritzker’s seemingly arbitrary orders. Pritzker ruled businesses that violated his orders could be handed a prison sentence of up to a year for refusing to obey him. But many balked at the order.
Sheriff James Mendrick of DuPage County, Illinois, for instance, told his constituents he had no intention of enforcing Pritzker’s order to fine and arrest violators of the gov’s lockdown orders.
“I just can’t do this anymore. I stand with our citizens and businesses of DuPage County who have offered no trouble or no resistance to any rule we put upon them, no matter how strange.,” Sheriff Mendrick wrote in a Facebook post.
“I will not victimize lawful residents of DuPage County trying to put food on their children’s table. I’m so proud of our DuPage citizens who have done everything right from the beginning. All I can say is thank you,” he added.
Kendall County Sheriff Dwight Baird joined Mendrick and let his county know that he had no intention of sending police to break up gatherings, take out weddings, or shut down businesses because in his opinion, “the Governor’s Executive Order is not a law.”
Gibson City, a town in central Illinois, also announced they would not be enforcing Pritker’s orders.
“After careful consideration, the Gibson City Police Department will not be making any criminal misdemeanor arrests of individuals or business owners for violations of temporary rules of Executive Orders, the town said in a statement on Wednesday.
In reply to these officials, Gov. Pritzker warned he would send the state police in to enforce his rules.
“Counties that try to reopen in defiance, may not be reimbursed by FEMA for damages they cause because they ignored the law,” Pritzker said adding, “Local law enforcement and the Illinois State Police can and will take action.”
Individual business owners have also defied the governor’s threats.
A gym owner in Moline, a city on the border with Iowa, straight west of Chicago, reopened his business on Monday in direct defiance of Pritzker’s orders.
Madison County Board Chairman Kurt Prenzler helped usher through a resolution that “basically declared all businesses and churches essential.”
“I did the Zoom classes for a while. Rented out all my equipment and, you know, you reach a point where enough is enough, and somebody’s got to say something,” said Chris Ninotta, owner of Omni Strength. “I can’t do it any longer. I’m a single father, and that’s where my loyalty lies, and there’s no man or government on earth that’s gonna tell me I gotta, you know, do this.”
In another case, Kevin Promenschenkel, owner of Poopy’s biker bar in Savanna, Illinois, filed a lawsuit after his state liquor license was threatened because people used his picnic tables – spaced more than 10 feet apart – to eat their takeout orders.
The above actions by business owners and government officials noted above are only a handful of the examples of residents and officials revolting against the Illinois governor’s autocratic orders.
Exclusive: Jason & David Benham blast ultimate goal of leftist
April 7, 2019
Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
We’ve seen that to be true, which is why USA Today’s recent story grabbed our attention last week: “So Yale Law School endorses anti-religious bigotry now?”
Oh boy – what now?!
The story basically describes the digressive nature of the progressive movement’s goal to silence freedom of speech and slay freedom of religion. That’s why the ceiling consistently becomes the floor with these folks. First they want acceptance of their ideas, then appreciation, then celebration, then participation – and if you choose not to join the revolution, they’ll marginalize you, demonize you, and eventually criminalize you if they can (wow, that was a mouthful).
Because you can’t have free speech and free religion if you want to destroy American values, you need government coercion; and to get that, you need a crop of future leaders fully indoctrinated to hate freedom of speech and religion (well, at least freedom of speech and religion that’s different from theirs).
The article reported the Yale Federalist Society scheduled an event in February with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a premier legal organization with nine Supreme Court wins in the last seven years. But before the event took place, over 20 campus organizations condemned the group as “homophobic and hateful” because it has defended religious freedom – and won – on multiple occasions. Their most recent victory included the Colorado cake baker.
And, like a set of perfectly aligned dominoes, the dean of the school fell directly into line with the protestors. By late March, the school had adopted new policies that went even further than the protestor’s demands. Samuel Adkisson, himself a Yale grad, summed it up like this:
Under the guise of nondiscrimination, Yale Law School has announced it will blatantly discriminate. A student is barred from aid if she works at a synagogue that gives preference to Jewish applicants, but not if she works at an organization that peddles anti-Semitism yet hires all comers. A graduate is blocked from funding if she works for the Christian Legal Society, but not if she works for the Freedom from Religion Foundation. And a graduate is not eligible to receive loan assistance if she is a professor at Brigham Young University, but is eligible if she works for Berkeley.
Nice.
There are a couple key points I’d like to point out.
First, Lincoln’s quote was spot on – kids in college today do become leaders in government tomorrow. So it matters where we are sending our kids and what they are being taught.
Dr. Elton Trueblood, a former chaplain for Stanford and Harvard in the early 20th century, was asked what it would look like for Christians in America in the 21st century. His response was eerily prophetic: “By the year 2000, Christians in America will be a conscious minority surrounded by an arrogant, militant paganism.”
He saw the direction progressives were taking our colleges, and his discerning reply was our warning. Now it’s here.
Second, those saying all we need today is more “conversation and dialogue” should understand that it requires shared values and common goals with those to whom we converse to move forward as a society. But that’s not what the progressive left wants.
A traffic analogy works well here. Traffic flows in America, despite the cars we drive, what we listen to on the radio or think about other drivers, because we all have the shared value that red means stop and green means go – and we all have the common goal of making it to our destination safely.
But if people don’t share those values or goals traffic would quickly become unsafe – it would turn into chaos. And that’s the ultimate goal of the left.
Which brings me to my last point. God is not the author of chaos and confusion, the devil is. At the bottom of this struggle on college campuses (not to mention mainstream media and Hollywood) is a spiritual battle between good and evil, right and wrong.
It’s not a Republican/Democrat thing, conservative/liberal thing, black/white thing, citizen/immigrant thing, or any other thing the left decides to foment. It’s a spiritual battle that truly rages behind the scenes.
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,
‘Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.’ (Psalm 2:1-3)
Matthew Henry, the 18th-century Bible commentator, said of Psalm 2 that people throughout history constantly seek to cast off “the bands of conscience and the cords of God’s commandments.”
That’s why conscience and conviction are in the cross-airs of the radical Left. It’s spiritual, even if they don’t know it.
And Revelation 12:17 reveals that Satan is behind it all:
Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.
Those who choose to live by their conscience and conviction and honor God’s moral commands in today’s America find themselves directly in opposition to the dragon of Revelation – Satan himself.
Those on the radical left have no idea the spirit under which they are operating, so we are hitting our knees in pray more than ever for them to be set free.
Because the good news of the Gospel is still the good news – that Jesus defeated the devil at the Cross and is clothed with resurrection power.
Exclusive: Jesse Lee Peterson blasts left for attacking people for telling truth
April 7, 2019
America is a Christian nation, but that fact has been under attack by the children of the lie. The left has pushed immorality to the point we have so-called “same-sex marriage” and “transgender” nonsense trampling the rights of Christians. “People of color” and “women” join the attack on freedom of speech and our rights to self-defense. Good people are accused of “hate speech,” punished for telling the truth in public – or even in private!
Christians, men and especially white people are under attack. Christians are forced to bake “gay cakes” for homosexuals pretending to get “married.” Men are falsely accused of “sexual harassment,” “sexual assault” or of being “child molesters” – and they’re not allowed to say the women are lying! Children are abused by women, even killed in the womb, and the man can’t do anything to protect his children. White people are called “racist” just for loving their country, for telling the truth about “people of color,” or for standing up for white people.
A decade ago, the fallen messiah Barack Obama claimed America is “no longer a Christian nation.” He pushed homosexuality and transgender madness, and took up for Muslims at every opportunity. He was the first “feminist” president, and loved abortion.
Obama attacked whites and police, making blacks feel justified in their anger and false victimhood. He brought Black Lives Matter to the White House – a group worse than the KKK, founded by black lesbians, homosexuals and white “social justice warriors.” They killed the souls of black people by pushing anger, and their attacks on police resulted in an increase in murders around the country.
You cannot be a Christian and support the Democrat Party. After Obama, they’ve only grown more radical, electing far-left Muslims, homosexuals, and women – in order to attack a real men, President Trump. Donald Trump represents everything they hate – the goodness of America. The straight, white, conservative, Christian man of power built this country. But leftists don’t want America to be made great again, so they go after all males, white people, and Christians in order to take down Trump.
This week, they went after Democrat Joe Biden – Obama’s vice president. They accused him of sexual harassment with no proof. For years, Biden openly kissed and tried to flatter women and little girls in front of cameras – never trying to hide it. But now people impulsively judge him as “creepy,” watching suggestively edited videos that play on the imagination and people’s anti-male brainwashing. In the old days, men warned you to believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.
But Biden as a hated “white male” is not welcome in the Democrat Party. They want a woman or a “person of color” to run for president.
Men have been trained by women to show affection, to worship women, make them feel special – but only with “consent.” Meanwhile, women throw themselves on men, hug and kiss men without permission, sexually assault them, and even rape men and young boys. Even Christians join in on this double-standard, in which every man is a suspected “rapist” or “child molester.” At our recent Men’s Forum at my nonprofit BOND, a home contractor said he wears a camera on himself all day to prevent being accused!
The city of Chicago recently elected a black lesbian for mayor. She’s pretending she will end the corruption in the city. But she herself is morally corrupt – she has no values. She’ll go after the Christians, white people and men, and only further destroy the city.
There are homosexuals who are stuck in that lifestyle but know it’s wrong. But this new mayor-elect, Lori Lightfoot, is promoting wrong as right. Similarly, Pete Buttigieg, a homosexual Millennial mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is trying to run for president. The corrupt liberal media love him for being shamelessly homosexual. The mayor of Dallas, Annise Parker, is a lesbian with a pretend “wife.” Females on the Supreme Court and in Congress have conducted so-called same-sex “weddings.”
In Ireland, they have a homosexual prime minister who brought his gay “partner” to America for an official event with Vice President Mike Pence. This man, Leo Varadkar, gave a slap in the face to Christians, speaking against “discrimination.” The radical homosexuals are allowed to discriminate against Christians, but not the other way around. There is no freedom.
Christians have lost their countries because Christians are no longer any different from the world. They believe that they can be born again of God and continue to sin. The men are controlled by women – they kiss up to women in their personal lives and in politics. The whites are afraid to tell the truth to the people of color. The Christians have anger in their hearts, playing God – there’s no love in anger, but only fear, doubt, worry and insecurity. Christian parents are sacrificing their children to corrupt schools where kids come out liberal, turning away from God.
If you want your country to be right, you have to be right. As Christ said, you must become perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect.
NarrowPathMinistries 