Facebook Censors and Threatens Christian for Expressing Biblical View of Homosexuality

Facebook appears to be abusing its corporate power to silence and censor Christians and Christian thought. In the case of Elizabeth Johnston, she was suspended TWICE for doing nothing more than quoting and explaining the Biblical view of homosexuality.

The Christian Post reports that Johnston, a conservative who runs the popular “Activist Mommy” Facebook page, first had her popular page suspended after she quoted the Book of Leviticus, which declares homosexuality (like all sin) “detestable” and an “abomination.”

Facebook not only froze her page for three days, they removed the comment in question. Johnston says Facebook notified her that this action was taken because her comment “doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards.”

Moreover, not that it should matter, according to Johnston, she did not even publish a post about homosexuality. All of this occurred in the comment thread below an unrelated video:

“Someone had commented underneath one of my videos and were commenting under the thread and said something about how Old Testament law prohibits the eating of pork — one of the homosexuals’ favorite arguments to make. I responded with just scriptural commentary and that is considered ‘hate speech’ by Facebook,” Johnston explained. “It was just very intellectual and it was just a commentary on what the Bible says. There was no name calling or anything like that.”

Facebook’s three-day suspension ended February 12. The second suspension — which lasted 7 days! — happened almost immediately after, when Johnston published a post to explain to her followers why her page had been frozen. She included a screenshot of the deleted Facebook comment and accused the social media site of censoring Christian speech. Johnson told the Christian Post:

“That ticked them off and they didn’t like that at all. It was going viral. Just within a few hours, they had banned me again and they were going to make it more painful.”

And by “more painful,” she means the threat of having her page permanently deleted, or if you like, memory-holed.

This behavior by Facebook is of course outrageous.

The Christian Post has screenshots of the Johnston posts in question, and neither is anything close to inflammatory. In fact, her explanation on the biblical view of homosexuality could be described as scholarly.

But even if it wasn’t, even if Johnston was a flaming bigot — so what?

You have a right in this country to be a flaming bigot.

Yes, I know, Facebook is a private corporation that can set whatever arbitrary rules they wish, that can censor us however they like, that has the right itself to be bigoted against Christians… But there is something called corporate responsibility.

There is also something called a monopoly.

Facebook has become the Ma Bell of the 21st Century, the only online communication device through which we connect and talk to one another, to our families, to our friends, to the world. For Zuckerberg to sucker us into his portal, and then to wait until it’s a monopoly to threaten those who wish to express their Christian faith… That might be legal, but it is also immoral and unAmerican.

Secondly, the arbitrary nature of the rationale behind this is also troubling.

Not just on Facebook, but anywhere, without being persecuted by the Left, you can lay out the biblical view of every sin imaginable: adultery, fornication, murder, saying the Lord’s name in vain, stealing, lying… No one cares. But if you dare speak the biblical truth about the sin of homosexuality, you’re suddenly smeared as a bigot, a hater, a “phobe” — you are shunned, silenced, and censored.

Yes, I am well aware that some use the Bible as a sword, as a tool of bigotry to single out and denigrate homosexuals. That is despicable behavior. God loves everyone, including those who are sexually attracted to their own gender. What God hates is sin, all sin, and giving into homosexual desire is a sin, just as giving in to adulterous desire is a sin, just as giving in to greed is a sin, just as lying is a sin.

Nothing that Elizabeth Johnston published (on defense, by the way) colors outside those lines.

Facebook’s track record of censoring conservatives grows more troubling by the day: Left-wing “fact-checkers” with the power to defeat what they deem Fake News, the outright blocking of conservative articles, censoring those opposed to allowing men in women’s locker rooms, removing conservative news from its influential trending news page.

On the issue of free speech, I am a full-blown extremist. Until you are promoting, excusing, or advocating for violence, people should be allowed to say whatever they wish. The best thing about free speech is how it smokes out bigots. Let them talk. I want to know who they are.

Nevertheless, Elizabeth Johnston is no bigot. She’s merely a devout Christian expressing her faith.

Keep the following Big Picture in mind, though…

Overall, there is something much larger and more sinister going on here; a conscious plot hatched by the Left to turn mainstream Christian beliefs into de facto bigotry. What follows is the kind of persecution we see almost daily in the national media, the censorship we’re seeing at Facebook, and a tyrannical State forcing us into the slavery of violating our own conscience.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.