First Amendment doesn’t protect protests that disrupt church services, civil liberties org. says

 In the aftermath of last Sunday's storming of Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a nonpartisan civil liberties group says that the First Amendment does not protect protesters who interrupt church services, refuting claims made by political commentator Don Lemon. 

In a post written by one of its board members, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which specializes in First Amendment cases and represents clients from a wide range of backgrounds and political beliefs, stressed that houses of worship are not public forums and that entering a church to disrupt a service is not a protected form of protest.

Board member Samuel J. Abrams clarified that the First Amendment protects speech in traditional public areas such as parks and sidewalks but does not extend those protections to private property where the owners have not consented to expressive activity.

"There is no First Amendment right to enter a house of worship and engage in conduct that effectively shuts down a religious service, even as part of a protest. Nor does anybody have the right to remain on private property after being asked by its owner or authorized representatives to leave," Abrams wrote.

"The First Amendment offers its strongest protection to speech in traditional public forums — streets, sidewalks, and parks — while also protecting freedom of association, religious exercise, and freedom of conscience. A society committed to free expression depends not only on protecting speech, but on maintaining a clear delineation between protected speech, on the one hand, and unprotected civil or criminal conduct on the other."

Several demonstrators associated with left-wing groups like Racial Justice Network and Black Lives Matter stormed the worship service of the Southern Baptist congregation on Jan. 18 to demand that one of its pastors step down because he leads a local ICE field office. The Sunday service ended early after demonstrators screamed at churchgoers. 

First Amendment doesn’t protect church disruptions: rights group | Church & Ministries

Syria: Al-Qaeda–Linked Regime Targets Kurds in Ethnic Cleansing

 Syria’s Islamist government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa—also known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani—is currently waging attacks against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Since January 6, an estimated 150,000 people, including Kurds, Christians, and Yazidis, have been internally displaced by forces loyal to Julani.

Julani is the head of the terrorist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The SDF is a U.S. ally who fought against the Islamic State (ISIS) for over a decade. 

This is the third ethnic cleansing campaign that HTS, backed by Turkey, has conducted since taking over the country’s capital of Damascus in December 2024. The first two campaigns targeted the Alawites and the Druze. Thousands of members of the Alawite and Druze religious minorities in the country were murdered or abducted by Julani’s forces. 

HTS, due to its affiliation with al-Qaeda and ISIS, is blacklisted as a terrorist organization by the UN Security Council. The designation has been transposed to European Union law and is followed by all 27 EU member states.

The ongoing attacks conducted by Julani’s armed forces started on January 6 in the Kurdish-majority neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh (the northern part of Aleppo). 

Videos have since been posted on social media showing Julani’s terrorist forces kidnapping and abusing Kurdish women and beating Kurdish men whom they have abducted. One video shows jihadists throwing a Kurdish woman off a building. Another shows Julani’s terrorists abducting young Kurdish women, describing them as “a gift” [sexual slaves] to someone called “mujahid [jihadist].” Videos also show Kurdish fighters from the SDF, including female fighters, being massacred.

Syria: Al-Qaeda–Linked Regime Targets Kurds in Ethnic Cleansing ━ The European Conservative

Boycott the Super Bowl

 Last year President Trump became the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. This year he is skipping the game. You should too.

Trump told the New York Post in a January 23 interview that the blockbuster event, set for February 8 in California, is “just too far away.” Proximity isn’t an issue for the many millions who will be tuning in on TV and streaming (the global total is around 180–190 million; last year’s game boasted a record American audience of 127.7 million viewers), but they should boycott it altogether because the National Football League leadership is openly dismissive of the interests and desires of American football fans.

As if it weren’t enough that the NFL disrespected the game’s fans in years past by coddling America-hating radicals like Colin Kaepernick who politicized season after season by “taking a knee” during the playing of the national anthem, now the organization is hiring halftime performers who are further alienating fans: Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny and Green Day, one of the most overrated rock bands in history.

Trump himself expressed his distaste for the musical acts scheduled for the event (although noting that they weren’t a factor in his decision not to attend):  “I’m anti-them,” said the president. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible.”

Bad Bunny – real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – is apparently one of the most popular musicians in the world. He was Spotify’s most listened-to artist globally last year for the fourth time – streamed more than 60 million times daily, according to USA TODAY.

For his latest world tour, he didn’t schedule any stops in the United States, he told I-D magazine, because “like, f***ing ICE could be outside [his concert].” That gives you an idea of what kind of audience he draws in the United States.

According to celebrity gossip site RadarOnline, the rapper, who refuses to speak or sing in English, “lives to push envelopes.” (I ask you, is there any artist more boring than one who thinks the point of art is to “push envelopes”?) He reportedly intends to make his Super Bowl halftime appearance “as queer as possible,” paying “tribute to generations of queer activists, drag performers, and cultural icons,” according to The Pink News. According to a stylist connected to Bad Bunny, “He is 100 percent going to wear a dress. A political thunderbolt disguised as couture.” Another source added, “He’s not playing it safe. The NFL has no idea what’s coming. Zero.”

Actually, the NFL, or at least its leadership, knows full well what they’re getting with Bad Bunny. That’s the reason they selected him and defend him in the face of nationwide outrage. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell insists that Bad Bunny’s performance will “unite” people: “It’s carefully thought through. I’m not sure we’ve ever selected an artist where we didn’t have some blowback or criticism. It’s pretty hard to do when you have literally hundreds of millions of people that are watching…”

Really? I don’t recall any controversy or outrage over the choices of Michael Jackson, Shania Twain, Aerosmith, Prince, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, or Bruce Springsteen, to name just a few English-speaking American performers over the years (although admittedly, the five Up With People Super Bowl appearances in the ‘70s and ‘80s were cringy and ill-advised).

Goodell went on to say, “We’re confident it’s going to be a great show. [Bad Bunny] understands the platform that he’s on, and I think it’s going to be exciting and a united moment.”

Really? Goodell thinks Bad Bunny rubbing the noses of American football fans in his gender-bending perversity is going to be a uniting moment?

And then there’s Green Day, which will kick off the Super Bowl’s opening ceremony. Petite frontman Billie Joe Armstrong is predictably an outspoken critic of Trump and the President’s supporters. During a New Year’s Eve performance two years ago, Armstrong altered the lyrics of the group’s forgettable song “American Idiot” from “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”

Armstrong, who pathetically still affects a punk hairstyle and attitude even though he is in his mid-50s, has also blasted America as a “miserable f***ing excuse for a country.” In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, he declared, “F*** America. I’m f***ing renouncing my citizenship.” As always with America-hating celebrities who virtue-signal similar contempt for the country and for the citizens who made them rich and famous, he has not followed through on this promise. He still lives in the country he openly despises.

These are the anti-Americans the NFL chose to entertain American football fans in the biggest game – the biggest cultural event – of the year. The NFL hates you.

Like baseball, football is a quintessentially American game. Elsewhere in the world, “football” refers to soccer, a game in which players hurl themselves to the ground in faux agony anytime a breeze blows; on our shores, football refers to gridiron combat waged by squads of modern gladiators. The NFL may be lusting after a bigger international audience – the 2024 game saw a 10% increase in non-U.S. viewership compared to prior years, reflecting expanding interest abroad – but their globalist greed threatens to undercut their American core audience. No true American football fan wants to see a halftime show featuring a non-English-speaking rapper flouncing around in a dress and celebrating LGBTQ “icons,” whoever they are. The only people who want to see that are gender ideologues who don’t know a first down from a touchdown, and who get a thrill up their leg at the idea of queering – subverting – an institution as American as apple pie (yes, I know apple pie originated in England, but it has flourished here ever since colonial times as an American staple and symbol). Like Bad Bunny himself, they are gloating over the idea of repelling ordinary Americans and conquering another territory in the culture war.

If the NFL wants to thumb its nose at real Americans in order to court a foreign audience, then they don’t deserve us. Boycott this upcoming Super Bowl, and continue to boycott the NFL until it proves its loyalty to America and abandons its globalist, politically progressive agenda.

Boycott the Super Bowl | Frontpage Mag

Disrupting a Church Service is Not ‘First Amendment’ Activity

 Minnesota Attorney General Keith X. Ellison, a notorious racist who had been accused of assault by two women, rallied to the defense of radical leftists who invaded a church and disrupted prayer services to protest ICE, claiming it was “First Amendment activity”.

First of all, let’s be clear, trespassing and disrupting anything is not “First Amendment activity”. Period.

First Amendment activity is the right to protest. It stops being First Amendment activity the moment any kind of crime, no matter how minor, is committed.

The Left has normalized what used to be called ‘civil disobedience’, which is protests involving illegal activity, and made it ubiquitous (but only for themselves, see J6) allowing them to do anything from trespassing to violent assaults and arson while calling it all “peaceful protests”.

The whole point of civil disobedience was to protest an illegal law. It was not to violate the law for the sake of disruption.

That’s the difference between refusing to move to the back of the bus or lunch counter sit-ins and the anti-war Vietnam era campus takeovers and ‘sit-ins’ which completely collapsed the notion of what civil disobedience was. By the current era, every leftist protest is ‘civil disobedience’. And it’s not an act of heroism because the perpetrators go completely unpunished.

Now attacking churches and synagogues in particular, as the Left and its Islamist allies have taken to doing, is a potential FACE Act violation. That’s the federal law that leads to anti-abortion protesters going to prison for 5 years for blocking an abortion clinic entrance. The Feds of course haven’t been enforcing that law for the anti-ICE or pro-Hamas or BLM rioters.

That may be about to change.

And what needs to change is this entire culture of leftist ‘peaceful riots’. Illegal protests are not First Amendment activity. They’re an attempt to threaten and intimidate others. And their perpetrators and backers need to get the full J6 treatment.

Disrupting a Church Service is Not 'First Amendment' Activity | Frontpage Mag

Anti-ICE activists storm Minnesota church service; DOJ vows to investigate

 The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating after a group of activists in Minnesota disrupted a Sunday service at a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul, where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement allegedly serves as a pastor.

The protesters, including members of the Racial Justice Network and Black Lives Matter Minnesota, entered the sanctuary of Cities Church during the service led by senior pastor Jonathan Parnell. The protesters allege that one of the church’s pastors, David Easterwood, leads a local ICE field office in St. Paul. 

They reportedly chanted slogans such as "ICE out!" and demanded justice for Renee Good, the woman who died after being shot by an ICE officer on Jan. 10. The service was forced to conclude because of the disruption.

U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon vowed on social media Sunday that the agency is investigating the incident for “potential criminal violations of federal law.”

“A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest!” Dhillon wrote. “It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws! Nor does the First Amendment protect your pseudo journalism of disrupting a prayer service. You are on notice!”

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she has been in touch with the church’s pastor. 

“I just spoke to the Pastor in Minnesota whose church was targeted. Attacks against law enforcement and the intimidation of Christians are being met with the full force of federal law,” she wrote on X. 

“If state leaders refuse to act responsibly to prevent lawlessness, this Department of Justice will remain mobilized to prosecute federal crimes and ensure that the rule of law prevails.”

Anti-ICE activists storm Minnesota church service | U.S.

Steve Hilton vows to end 'obscenity' of men in women's sports if elected Calif. governor

 A California gubernatorial candidate is vowing to end the “obscenity of biological boys in girls’ sports” as he encourages Republicans to remain optimistic about the party’s chances in the uphill quests to win major statewide races this year. 

Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Church in Chino Hills, California, hosted a discussion with two Republican candidates seeking statewide office in California this year: gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton and attorney general candidate Michael Gates. The two candidates shared their views on the problems roiling California and what they would do if elected.

California hasn't had a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger left office after the 2010 election and hasn't had a Republican attorney general in decades. 

During the conversation, Hilton drew attention to a bracelet he was wearing featuring the words “Save Girls’ Sports.” “It was given to me by a wonderful activist who set up an organization to fight for girls’ sports,” he said. 

Hilton condemned the actions of those who allow trans-identified male athletes to compete in girls’ statewide track and field championships, expressing disgust that a “biological boy” was stealing “the trophies and the honor and the glory from girls who’d worked so hard for it.”

If elected governor, Hilton vowed to overturn Assembly Bill 1266, the 2013 legislation that enabled trans-identified male athletes to compete in women’s sports. 

Steve Hilton vows to end men in women's sports as Calif. governor | Politics

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