Tag: religion

Northern Irish Pastor Prosecuted for Sermon on John 3:16

Clive Johnston, a retired pastor in Northern Ireland, is facing prosecution for allegedly violating “abortion buffer zones laws” by preaching an open-air sermon on John 3:16.

Johnston, 76, decided to preach a sermon on the famous verse last July outside of Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, according to a release from The Christian Institute, which is representing him.

The elderly minister “never mentioned” abortion specifically in his sermon, raising the question of whether “a law designed to stop abortion protests” should be “used to criminalise gospel preaching.”

The open-air Sunday sermon was delivered from the “fringes of a buffer zone on the other side of a dual carriageway” from the general hospital.

Johnston had a preliminary hearing on March 21 and expects a trial “in the next few months.”

“If convicted, the grandfather of seven, who has never been in trouble with the police, faces a criminal record and maximum fines totaling thousands of pounds,” according to The Christian Institute.

The organization noted that “it is now a criminal offence for people to be ‘impeded, recorded, influenced or to be caused harassment, alarm or distress’ within the areas” encompassed by the buffer zones.

Johnston, who previously served as president of the Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland, is accused of “influencing” rather than impeding or harassing.

The Christian Institute added that the prosecution comes after the Green Party passed legislation three years ago creating buffer zones ranging between 100 meters and 150 meters.

The buffer zones around abortion clinics are meant to dissuade Christians from speaking to men and women entering or from encouraging them to choose life.

Simon Calvert, the deputy director of The Christian Institute, said in a statement, “We have amazing gospel freedom in this country, and we encourage Christians to use those freedoms, so that more people will hear about the love of God.”

“That’s why we’ve taken on this case,” he added. “Prosecuting someone for preaching John 3:16 near a hospital on a quiet Sunday is an outrageous restriction on freedom of religion and freedom of speech.”

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Iceland’s Minister For Children Quits After Admitting Having Baby With 16 Year Old

Iceland’s minister for children has resigned after admitting she had a child over 30 years ago with a 16-year-old boy while she was a 22-year-old church group counselor, according to the New York Post.

Ásthildur Lóa Thórsdóttir, whose name has forced us to remember Word keystrokes we haven’t used in years, is now 58 and a member of the center-left People’s Party.

She confirmed the relationship after local outlet RUV received a tip. She revealed the teen father was present during the birth, and later paid child support.

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Air Force Academy Reverses Decision, Allows Muslim Cadets To Forgo Physical Training During Ramadan

The Air Force Academy recently held a new more rigorous “cumulative exercise” which is “an essential training event designed to enhance cadets’ warfighter readiness and leadership skills.”  You can read more about this here.

The Academy said,

“This multi-day field training event evaluated all cadets’ proficiency in newly developed Ready Airman Training (RAT) skills, reinforcing their preparedness for Agile Combat Employment.

The Spring 2025 CULEX tested cadets’ adaptability, leadership, and mission execution capabilities in physically and mentally demanding scenarios.

These challenges included day and night operations spread across four rotations, simulating the complexity of real-world military engagements.”

However, it now appears that Muslim cadets were allowed to opt-out of the physical part of the exercise due to their religious holiday Ramadan.

Hope there are no wars during religious holidays or that the enemy will be nice enough to accommodate holidays. However, the Israelis found that out the hard way in 1973. American soldiers under Gen. George Washington in a Christmas surprise attack ensured we’re not a British colony.

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Canada Plans to Lift Some Sanctions on Syria Jihadis Following Massacres

The Canadian Foreign ministry said on Thursday that it plans to ease some financial sanctions on Syria and send a non-resident ambassador to Damascus, despite the horrific massacres of Alawites and Christians perpetrated by the new Syrian government and its allies last weekend.

“Canada can play a meaningful role in enabling Syrians to build an inclusive country that respects all of its citizens. We also can help prevent Syria from falling into chaos and instability,” said Canada’s special envoy for Syria, Omar Alghabra.

Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said sanctions would be relaxed for six months to “support democratization, stabilization, and the delivery of aid” during a “period of transition” for Syria.

“These sanctions had been used as a tool against the Assad regime and easing them will help to enable the stable and sustainable delivery of aid, support local redevelopment efforts, and contribute to a swift recovery for Syria,” said a statement from Joly and Minister of International Development Ahmed Hussen.

The sanctions-easing plan involves issuing six-month permits for Canadians to conduct business transactions in Syria that were banned under sanctions, and transmit funds through the Syrian Central Bank and a few other financial institutions.

“This funding will support experienced humanitarian partners to deliver life-saving assistance, including food, protection services, water, sanitation and hygiene services, and health services. This brings Canada’s total humanitarian assistance to the Syria crisis this year to more than $100 million,” said Joly and Hussen.

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Sen. Graham Admits The Syrian Jihadists He Once Supported Are Now Massacring Civilians

After a decade-long American effort to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power in Damascus, Senator Lindsey Graham says the US-backed jihadists that now control the country are causing more concern than ever.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Graham explained that he had “never been more worried about the deterioration of Syria than I am now.” The senator was discussing an outbreak of violence in the country, where forces aligned with the new government are conducting mass executions targeting the Alawites and other religious minorities.

Under President Barack Obama, Washington provided training and arms for Assad’s opposition, hoping to remove him from power and undermine Iran’s regional influence. However, the most powerful rebel factions were violent jihadists, a fact acknowledged in a 2012 internal memo circulated by Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

During Trump’s first administration, he ended US support for the Sunni opposition, but enforced sweeping sanctions on Damascus that prevented the government from crushing Syrian al-Qaeda, led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and then concentrated in the country’s Idlib province.

At least some support for the rebels resumed during the Joe Biden presidency. In 2024, equipped with Ukrainian drones, Jolani’s forces went on the offensive, capturing Damascus and forcing Assad to flee the country.

Jolani and his organization – Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a jihadist umbrella group – then seized control of the country. After dubbing himself the new Syrian leader, Jolani was embraced by Washington and its allies. Last week, when violence broke out in Syria’s coastal region, HTS responded by killing hundreds of Alawite civilians.

The events of the past weekend left Senator Graham questioning whether the US could still work with Jolani and HTS. “Is this al-Qaeda or ISIS-light or is this some new form of Islam that we can all live with?” he asked, adding that before any sanctions were removed, Jolani must comply with unspecified conditions.

Graham has supported the regime change operations against Assad for well over a decade. In 2012, he argued, “We need to form a coalition to help arm the rebels, as well as create no-fly and no-drive zones to stop the slaughter by the Assad regime. I cannot say with certainty what will follow Assad but I can say with certainty that Assad must go, sooner rather than later.”

“If America is seen as being helpful in ending the slaughter of the Syrian people, it will allow us to have a stronger, future relationship with Assad’s eventual successor,” he continued. “Replacing Assad in Syria is critical to regional stability, a major blow to the Iranian regime and will bolster our national security interests.”

The next year, the senator acknowledged that “radical Islamists are hijacking [the Syrian] revolution.” However, that did not sway Graham’s support for regime change.

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Veiled Threat: Possessing Pics of Muslim Women Without Hijabs Should Be Made a Crime, UK Lawmakers Say

Leftist lawmakers in Britain have argued that being in possession of pictures of Muslim women without their hijab headscarves should be a crime akin to child pornography.

Impending legislation originally intended to crack down on revenge porn should include the prohibition against having images of Muslim women’s faces without their hijab if the photos were taken without their express permission.

The Women and Equalities Committee in the House of Commons argued that such pictures should be considered “non-consensual intimate images” and, therefore, come with similar penalties as possessing child pornography, including lengthy prison sentences, the Daily Mail reported.

If government ministers sign off the committee’s proposal, it could become a crime in Britain as early as this year.

At present, the law defines “intimate” images as those in which a person is seen fully or partially nude, is engaging in a sexual act, or is seen using the bathroom.

Responding to the call to criminalise some pictures of Muslim women without hijabs, David Spencer of the Policy Exchange think tank said: “Tackling the problem of ‘revenge porn’ is clearly important – but expanding this to so-called ‘culturally intimate’ images risks extending the criminal law too far.

“The police cannot be expected to wade into so-called ‘cultural’ issues when officers are already struggling to deal with the volume of stabbings, sexual assaults and thefts that occur every day. The Government should be cautious about creating yet more criminal offences.”

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Why Is the Left Conflating Religious Liberty and ‘Christian Nationalism’?

With the recent inauguration of President Donald Trump, many within the religious liberty movement are now breathing a sigh of relief that robust religious liberty protections for all believers seems to be a priority of the new administration.

In recent decades, many of the fights for one of the most fundamental American freedoms have involved litigation to ensure robust religious exercise protections under the First Amendment or legislative fights to enact religious liberty protections via statute (such as Religious Freedom Restoration Acts). While it is true that many of the religious liberty advocates are Christians (which makes sense—about two-thirds of Americans identify as Christians), the fight for religious liberty is clearly a fight for religious exercise of all religions against the coercive power of the state. From George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport to the Mahmoud v. Taylor case currently pending before the Supreme Court, the religious liberty movement in America has consistently involved and defended the rights of diverse religions. 

In recent years, critics of the Trump administration in particular and the religious liberty movement in general have curiously claimed that the whole religious liberty movement has been misused as a vehicle to install “Christian Nationalism” in America. The claim is strange because, as we will explain, all the major religious liberty initiatives in America—including our work at the Napa Legal Institute—are even-handedly advocating for religious exercise rights that apply equally to all non-Christian religions as well as to Christians.

Napa Legal’s Faith and Freedom Index strives to be an objective, even-handed analysis of religious liberty at the state level, analyzing whether state laws allow faith-based nonprofit organizations of every creed to be given the freedom to operate without unnecessary government interference.

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Tulsi Gabbard Identifies Biggest National Security Threat, and It’s Not What We’ve Been Told

In a sane political environment, this would have passed as a decidedly unremarkable, albeit not quite one-hundred-percent accurate, observation. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, recently warned that “radical Islamist terrorism” is the biggest national security threat the nation faces today.

Well, of course. The top terror groups worldwide are all Islamic. On Sept. 11, 2001, Islamic jihadis carried out the largest-ever terror attack on American soil. Numerous other Islamic jihad attacks have taken place in the U.S., at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, New Orleans, and numerous other places. The Biden regime caught numerous people on the terror watch list crossing into the U.S. from Mexico and released at least 99 of them into the country. Gabbard was therefore making an entirely reasonable assessment. 

Gabbard said: “We look at the past four years of open borders, where we had tens of millions of people coming across our borders, many of whom we don’t know who they are or what their intentions are, very specifically the threat of radical Islamist terrorism here within our country is higher than it’s ever been before, not only because of Biden’s open borders, but because of his and his administration’s fear of being called Islamophobes.”

For Gabbard to speak of “radical Islamist terrorism” was not quite accurate, as there is nothing “radical” about Islamic jihad violence. It is mainstream and deeply rooted in the Qur’an and Sunnah. And “Islamist” is a phony word that corresponds to nothing in Islamic theology. It is just an attempt to distance Islam from the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings.

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‘Thank You Jesus’ signs creator arrested on felony child porn charge

Authorities in Randolph County arrested Lucas Timothy Hunt, 25, of Asheboro, known as the founder of the “Thank You Jesus” signs movement, on a felony child exploitation charge after a month-long investigation.

The Invictus Task Force took Hunt into custody on Tuesday and charged him with felony Second-Degree Sexual Exploitation of a Minor. A representative with the organization confirmed to WFMY News 2 that Hunt started the initiative, which has placed thousands of signs across the country promoting the message.

The investigation started in January when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provided a CyberTip to law enforcement, leading authorities to track down the suspect. Court documents state that Hunt received a video depicting two pubescent females engaged in sexual acts. 

After his arrest, officers transported Hunt to the Randolph County Detention Center, where a magistrate set his bond at $75,000. He will appear in Randolph County District Court on Wednesday.

Court records show that Hunt waived his right to an assigned legal counsel and hired his own attorney, Charles Browne. Hunt posted bond and was released. 

President of the Thank You Jesus mission, Connie Frazier, released a statement on the matter, saying, “We will not be commenting on the charges, but we can say that Lucas Hunt, through the Thank You Jesus signs, has helped thousands of people and has been a blessing.”

The parents of Lucas Hunt told WFMY News 2 he did not do what he is accused of but were unable to speak further on the situation. 

The investigation continues. Authorities have not determined whether they will file additional charges. The Invictus Task Force urges anyone with relevant information to report potential exploitation cases to law enforcement.

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Veterans Affairs Whistleblower Exposes Religious Persecution: FOIA Data Unveils a Calculated Assault on Faith-Based Rights

During the era of tyrannical enforcement of the COVID-19 shot mandate by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), a few hundred medical exemptions were processed, but strangely, nearly 2,000 religious exemptions were not.

Sonny Fleeman, a combat veteran and federal whistleblower, once considered his role at the Department of Veterans Affairs to be “a sacred extension of his service” that helped secure benefits for fellow veterans.

But after discovering that he and other employees were targeted for their faith-based rights, the claims rater is now beginning to question his calling.

Armed with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data reviewed by The Gateway Pundit and shared publicly (i.e. request 23-02813-F, 23-03774, and 23-03950-F), Fleeman revealed that “during the COVID-19 shot mandate, the VA processed medical exemptions while stalling religious ones.”

According to him, “this tactic was orchestrated by VA leadership and the Office of General Counsel (OGC) to sidestep Title VII and coerce compliance.”

“I’m fighting an agency that’s betraying the freedoms I defended,” Fleeman told The Gateway Pundit.

His own religious exemption request became a year-long ordeal, met with silence, forcing him to file a medical accommodation request just to have his religious exemption request processed.

“I knew it wasn’t right, so I fought it from day one,” he admitted. “It took a whistleblower complaint to the chief of reasonable accommodations, who battled OGC to prove me right.”

The personal toll was “searing,” Fleeman expressed. “Not knowing if my exemption would be granted left me uneasy but watching my leadership knowingly do wrong because it came from above—that moral injury cut deeper than anything.” He witnessed “managers betraying principles in real time, refusing to resist unjust orders.”

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