Tag: religion

Canadian church exposed for hosting ‘Hot Potato’ night to promote government-assisted dying

A church in Canada has come under fire for hosting a hot potato night, in which congregants attending can enjoy a baked potato, that focuses on educating attendees about the country’s government-assisted suicide, know as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID).

St. Timothy’s Anglican Church in Nova Scotia is scheduled to host the event on October 5. An advertisement for the event states that MAID “is a legally available, end of life option for Canadians who are fully assessed, and found yo meet strict eligibility criteria. Making the choice to seek MAID is a deeply personal decision, and such a decision requires accurate, and timely information.”

The church said that staff from the province’s MAID program would deliver a presentation covering the criteria, process, “and the things people should consider” regarding MAID. The advertisement added, “the evening includes a baked potato with all the toppings and a beverage.” The event was first reported by independent journalist Kelsi Sheren. 

The event quickly received backlash from users on social media. 

“Let me be very clear, Nova Scotia and the Veterans Association RCMP did this to their veterans as well about a year and a half ago,” Sheren said. She later added, “this church should be ashamed of itself.” 

One user wrote, “People should be able to walk into a church at their lowest point and find a reason to keep living. Helping the government make assisted death more acceptable is a betrayal of that responsibility.”

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Grammy-winning pastor’s half-time side job that pays $540,000 is with taxpayer-funded nonprofit

A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.

That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.

His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.

Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.

“I don’t know whether there were better recipients for this cash, but it doesn’t look like it was supposed to go to pay for the salaries of an organization’s director,” said James Hohman, director of fiscal policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a prominent conservative think tank in Michigan.

Winans did not respond to repeated requests from The Center Square, including a visit to his church, to comment for this article. The Center Square also sent him an email that summarized the article’s findings.

The salary Winans receives from the church itself, separate from the nonprofit, is not publicly disclosed because churches are generally not required to report their spending to the federal government.

His salary increases also come amid his vigorous fundraising campaign to finish work on an enormous church that has been under construction for more than 20 years.

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Another Incredible Win Against the Covid Tyrants: New Jersey Jury Delivers Unanimous 8–0 Verdict for Christian Groundskeeper Fired Over a Religious Exemption — Awarded $671,000

A New Jersey jury just delivered a message that the Democrat machine in Essex County did not want to hear.

On Friday, an Essex County jury returned a unanimous 8–0 verdict for Theodore “Teddy” DeBlasio, a longtime groundskeeper at Essex County Hospital Center who was fired after the county denied his religious exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

The panel awarded him more than $670,000 for economic and emotional harm. Attorneys’ fees are still to come. Punitive damages are next.

Attorney John D. Coyle of Coyle Law Group called it New Jersey’s first jury verdict in a COVID-19 religious exemption case.

DeBlasio, raised Catholic and now a Christian, objected to taking a shot tested or developed using aborted fetal cell lines. That is a sincerely held religious belief millions of Americans share. Essex County treated it like a punchline.

According to trial evidence cited by Coyle Law Group, in February 2022 the county denied every religious exemption request submitted by Christian and Catholic employees, and approved every request submitted by Muslim employees.

Coyle put it bluntly on X:

“It was revealed at trial that Essex County denied each and every request from a Christian employee and granted every Muslim exemption. That isn’t an exaggeration.”

“Catholic groundskeeper could not safely test and mask but a Muslim NURSE could test and mask.”

“Essex County determined that Teddy DeBlasio—with the crown of thorns tattooed on his wrist to remind him to think of Jesus with his actions—did not have sincere beliefs but a Muslim employee who photocopied another Muslim’s exemption, did.”

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Pastor at James Talerico’s “Sanctuary Church” Admits to Harboring Illegal Alien for 8 Years, Says “We’re Not a Belief-Based Church”

The Reverend Carol Johnson from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, the home church of Democrat James Talerico, was caught on undercover video recently exposing the world to the community’s wackadoodle principles.

Brandon Waltens from Texas Scorecard released this video on Monday.

Rev. Johnson admits in this video that the church has been harboring an illegal alien from Guatemala for eight years. She also speaks proudly that the church is “not a belief-based church.”

This may explain a lot about the Democrat man-child, trans-kids-loving candidate from Texas.

Rev. Carol Johnson: We don’t have a lot of people who are religious here. Right. Yeah, it’s very interesting.

Don’t laugh at me. We’re not a belief-based church, we’re a values-based church. The beliefs are what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. Loving each other, taking care of each other. Anti-empire. After the church became part of the Holy Roman Empire, suddenly Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount just went out the window and it became all about beliefs and whether you believe the right thing. Right?

And so we don’t spend time on that later stuff. We don’t spend time on creeds. Right?

We focus on the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve stood up for LGBTQ+ rights forever. Right, right. And racial justice. And we have immigration stuff and we actually have a person. There’s a gentleman living in our church who is from Venezuela… No, Guatemala. And he has lived here for 8 years.

Questioner: A Sanctuary Church. I’ve been following the Talarico campaign. I understand he goes to this church and speaks about it in interviews.

Rev. Johnson: Yeah, he grew up in this church.

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Meloni Announces Plan to Ban Burqas in Schools, Limit Number of Migrants in Classrooms

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said her government will introduce legislation to limit the number of foreign students in classrooms and ban full-face coverings in schools.

Appearing on Sunday at the Fenix, the annual national youth festival organised by Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, told her student supporters that Italian children should not become a minority in their own classrooms.

“It’s unthinkable that in an Italian classroom, Italian children feel cornered because they’ve become the minority. It can’t be done,” she said, according to Corriere della Sera.
The Italian premier said her Council of Ministers would therefore “soon introduce a law on the maximum number of foreign students in classes.”

Meloni said that this would be paired with a “requirement” for parents of foreign students struggling to integrate to learn Italian. The legislation would additionally impose a ban on burqas and niqabs in schools, she declared, saying that it is a “question of civilisation”.

“We go to school with our faces uncovered, and in Italy, no one, in the name of a real or presumed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide. Gender equality is non-negotiable,” she added.

Meloni, who recently earned the distinction of having the longest-serving government in post-war Italy, appears intent on shoring up her position on immigration prior to next year’s elections.

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Doctor Punished with $28,000 Fine for Refusing to Hurt Teen

The Christian Institute is revealing the newest atrocity from the transgender agenda: Officials in Canada have fined a Christian physician $28,000 when he refused to harm a teenage boy by giving him the puberty blocker Lupron.

The doctor’s beliefs are that God made people male and female.

However, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal rejects the scientific fact that males cannot become female or vice versa, and claimed the puberty blockers are “not medication for gender reassignment” because the drug prevents puberty rather than inducing physical characteristics of the opposite sex.

The doctor, in his records, said, “I noticed that the injection is for gender re-assignment as patient is already in the waiting room with (her) mother. I called mother into the room and explained to her that I would not be able to give the injection. Based on my religious belief and cultural background.”

A complaint followed and the tribunal confessed it “corrected” the doctor’s notes to “properly reflect Child Q’s gender.”

The doctor was found, the institute reported, to have caused, “injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect” of the gender-confused 14-year-old boy.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a Canadian civil liberties group, stated: “Doctors should not be required to personally participate in medical treatment that genuinely violates their conscience or religious beliefs especially where reasonable alternatives are available to patients.”

And Canadian columnist Amy Hamm wrote in The National Post: “The message this sends to all health-care providers in B.C. is clear: provide trans health care to minors – or suffer the consequences.”

A report at Lifesitenews said, “Dr. Henry Ajaero, who has run a family practice in Delta since 2014, was ordered to pay the compensation in a Sept. 1 B.C. Human Rights decision.”

The teen at the center of the case began identifying as transgender in 2020, and Ajaero referred him to the B.C. Gender Clinic, where the teen was prescribed a puberty blocker to be injected every three to four weeks. Although the drug can be injected at home, the family requested that Ajaero do it, but he declined when he discovered what it was. He had been the teen’s doctor for about four years, the report explained.

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Letitia James Seized Nuns’ $19 Million and STILL Won’t Release It So They Can Care for Aging Members

For 123 years, the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence devoted their time and money to help young women in Manhattan through the Jeanne D’Arc Residence.

Jeanne d’Arc Residence is dedicated to creating a welcoming and caring environment for women seeking safe, affordable and temporary housing in New York City. Through the ministry provided at Jeanne d’Arc Residence, the Sisters of Divine Providence are committed to ensuring a Christian environment which serves women of all nationalities, cultures and religions. In this setting, the good news of Jesus Christ is lived and proclaimed in the spirit of Providence.”

The nuns, whose order is based in Kentucky, have seen their number shrink and their population age.  The cost of continuing to run the residence has become too much to bear as they face caring for their own elderly sisters.

The sisters sold the property to John Catsimidis for $22.5 million. Because the property is part of a registered charitable organization, Letitia James’ office must, and did, approve the sale.

But devoting over a century to vulnerable women in the city is not enough for James.  Her office seized the proceeds of the sale and, for two years, has refused to release it to them.

James’ reason? She doesn’t like what the nuns will do with their money.

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Amid Crime, Homelessness, and Budget Issues, San Diego Confronts the REAL Problem

At last, San Diego is tackling one of the most serious problems of our age.

San Diego is a jewel of a city. If it weren’t in California, it could present a strong case for being a near-perfect place to live. But it is in the Newsom SSR, and that is its downfall. The last time I was there, a couple of friends and I had dinner downtown a few blocks away from Petco Park, where the San Diego Padres play baseball, and then dodged homeless drug addicts all the way over to the stadium. 

Although San Diego has a relatively low crime rate for a large city, there’s a shortage of police officers that has led police departments to give short shrift to crimes that are considered as serious as others, so that San Diegans who are victims of petty crimes won’t get justice, but they can at least console themselves that they aren’t getting murdered. The city can’t or won’t do much about this because it is busy dealing with a huge budget shortfall. That’s what happens, of course, when far-left city officials lavish money on woke priorities, such as free stuff for illegal migrants, rather than dealing with real problems.

But at last, the San Diego City Council is facing head-on one of the really big problems confronting its fair city. NBC San Diego reported Tuesday that the council “voted unanimously to officially define the term ‘Islamophobia.’” Once the term is clearly defined, you see, offenders can be duly prosecuted. This was necessary, the city council claims, because “anti-Muslim hate is growing and this is a way to fight it.”

And it’s true, there may indeed be a problem: Back on May 18, two teenagers whom NBC San Diego says were “motivated by white nationalism” murdered three men at the Islamic Center of San Diego, and then killed themselves. This was an unspeakable atrocity, and there is no minimizing that fact for the families and friends of the victims. Whether it means, however, that “Islamophobia” is as big, or bigger, a problem than jihad violence and the advance of Sharia in the U.S. remains an open question.

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Massachusetts Governor Defends State Taking Catholic Couple’s Daughter Away After They Refused to Call Her a Boy

Democrat Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is defending the Department of Children and Families after Catholic parents accused the state of seizing their teenage daughter because they would not refer to her as a boy.

Healey told reporters the removal had nothing to do with gender, but the family’s lawyer says that is not true.

Joseph and Arlene Kutzko of Southborough say they have not spoken to their daughter, Sophie, since late 2024.

The child was 15 when DCF took her, and she is now 17.

The couple claims that Algonquin Regional High School began using a male name and pronouns for their daughter without telling them.

They have said that a school counselor reported the family after they refused, on Catholic and scientific grounds, to treat the girl as a boy.

“They exposed our daughter to teachings on LGBTQ and topics that conflict with our Catholic beliefs about human dignity, creation as male and female in Catholic teaching,” Joseph Kutzko said on the Lighthouse Faith podcast.

Massachusetts law allows schools to use a student’s chosen name and pronouns without notifying parents, a practice that has survived federal court challenges in other cases.

The parents say DCF has housed Sophie in a boys’ dormitory, put her on birth control and psychiatric drugs, and kept her from Sunday Mass.

A permanent restraining order bars the parents and an older brother from contact.

Attorney Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign says the state is now seeking court permission to give the girl high-dose testosterone. A judge temporarily blocked that treatment. The next hearing is October 29.

Healey was asked about the case after an event in Boston this week.

“Let me be clear about the facts in that matter,” she said, according to a Boston Herald report. “First of all, DCF did not remove the child because of a health issue or a gender-affirming care issue. DCF removed the child after there were criminal charges filed against the parents, including the father. As you know, DCF is responsible for the care and well-being of kids, and that’s what happened in this instance.”

Healey added that the matter is “currently a subject of criminal prosecution right now against the parents,” then declined further comment while insisting the child “was not removed because of a gender-affirming care issue.”

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