IMG_2427

This Video Is One Of The Worst Things I’ve Seen In A Long Time

This Video Is One Of The Worst Things I've Seen In A Long Time

Adoption

baby

Children

Homosexuality

Matt Walsh

Mothers

Opinion

Same-Sex Marriage

Social Media

The following is an adapted transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1885-hammer-wielding-trans-leftist-arrested-trying-to-break-into-jd-vance-s-house?elementPosition=8&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
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One of the OnlyFans models who slept with a thousand guys in one day, someone named Lily Phillips, has apparently just had a religious conversion.
I don’t know if that’s her real name or a stage name, but here is the question: Is Lily Phillips&#8217;s conversion sincere? And the broader question is how should Christians react to this?
Here&#8217;s the video of her baptism:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
THIS! OF model Lily Phillips gets baptized after viral 1,000-men stunt, says she is now seeking faith and redemption.
I pray this is genuine. No one is ever too far gone for Jesus Christ. 🙏🏾 <a href="https://t.co/bmpvDvXXyx">pic.twitter.com/bmpvDvXXyx</a>
— David J Harris Jr (@DavidJHarrisJr) <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidJHarrisJr/status/2007111451232911551?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 2, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Credit: @DavidJHarrisJr/X.com
There is a nice Kanye pop gospel song behind the video. She appears to be in either an Anglican or Episcopalian church and it&#8217;s a full immersion baptism in a bathtub. Her caption reads, “A day to remember forever.”
Now, some people are accusing her of being cynical. So why do I think she’s sincere? First of all, as you will see, she does not sound cynical to me. But even if she is, I always like to be on the side of credulity when it comes to these matters. Not to the point of absurdity, of course, but I always want to be on the side of grace when it comes to these things.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1885-hammer-wielding-trans-leftist-arrested-trying-to-break-into-jd-vance-s-house">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h3>
Well, turns out she recently did <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/why-onlyfans-star-lily-phillips-decided-to-be-rebaptized-excl/">an interview with US Weekly</a> where she explained her actions, saying:
<blockquote>I think for a while I’d kind of deviated from religion, and I think I was kind of in denial for a lot of it … Quite a big thing happened more in my personal life, where I kind of felt the need to start speaking to God again. I hadn’t really practiced faith for a while. I just wanted to get rebaptized to kind of reinstate my relationship with God.</blockquote>
So right off the bat, there is a major problem: you can&#8217;t get rebaptized. Baptism happens once. The Nicene Creed actually states this. All of the flavors of Christianity, even ones that are a little far flung from Orthodoxy, at the very least recognize the statement in the Creed that says, “I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” It’s one baptism, not two.
The reason you are only baptized once is that baptism is not a personal action of yours. Baptism is an action of God the Holy Spirit. It&#8217;s the grace of God coming down — and God doesn&#8217;t make mistakes. God doesn&#8217;t act insufficiently. It works. When God acts on you, when you are baptized, that leaves an indelible mark on your soul.
People do not have to be rebaptized. It&#8217;s like gay marriage — you can&#8217;t. Why? Because the sacrament works. But in our fallen, broken human life, we just feel like we need to do something more sometimes, and we get it wrong. But I get why people do it.
What she&#8217;s saying is, &#8220;I felt a calling to God,&#8221; and she reacted to that in a way that is silly at best and contrary to the religion at worst. But I think it comes from a good place, and I know other people who have done it.
She <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/why-onlyfans-star-lily-phillips-decided-to-be-rebaptized-excl/">goes on</a>:
<blockquote>I definitely need to do that because I think that there are a lot of Christian girls who are in this industry … but people might not know it and they might not feel comfortable talking about it because of the judgment.</blockquote>
I totally believe that. I totally believe that there are a lot of girls who are baptized Christians who feel a pull toward Christianity, toward God, who work in pornography and all sorts of disreputable fields. Whether we&#8217;re talking about prostitution or whether we&#8217;re talking about law and finance — I&#8217;m sure there are all sorts of people who feel a tension between the work that they do and religious truth. However, here&#8217;s where it gets a little dicey, and I think this is why some people are attacking Lily Phillips. 
She <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/why-onlyfans-star-lily-phillips-decided-to-be-rebaptized-excl/">says</a>, 
<blockquote>I’m definitely not claiming to be a traditional Christian at all. Obviously, I’m not against gay marriage. I am also pro-choice. So I definitely don’t have, necessarily, traditional values. But that doesn’t mean to say that I can’t be Christian. I would just hope that the Christian community welcomes me, because I guess everyone’s relationship with God is bespoke to them.</blockquote>
I think there are a lot of people who feel this way, at least in the early stages of their conversion. But we have to clear up a few things, so let’s break this down.
She says, “I’m not against gay marriage.”
Christianity does not permit so-called gay marriage. It is contrary to the Christian faith. The weird sex stuff broadly is contrary to the Christian faith. And even beyond questions of religious revelation, it just comes down to basic logic: two opposing things cannot be simultaneously true in the same respect, as per the law of non-contradiction. So, no, inasmuch as you believe these things of the world, you are opposing the Christian faith.
She says, “I am also pro-choice.”
The church, since the very beginning, has opposed abortion. You can see proscriptions against abortion in the UK, the very first catechism of the church, all the way back in antiquity, just after the Apostolic Age. You can&#8217;t do it. You can say that you&#8217;re Christian and you can say that you support killing babies, but those things are diametrically opposed. They&#8217;re totally in conflict with each other.
She then says, “So I definitely don’t have, necessarily, traditional values.”
What do we mean by “traditional values”? Are we talking about the traditions of China? No. Are we talking about the Chinese—some different values than we do here? Are we talking about the traditions of Islam, the caliphate? No. When we talk about traditional values in the English language, generally, we&#8217;re talking about the Christian tradition that built our civilization. So if you say, I&#8217;m Christian, but I don&#8217;t have Christian values, that&#8217;s confusing. She sounds confused by the twin darkness into which we are all born — ignorance and sin.
She says, “And I just hope the Christian community welcomes me.” 
We will welcome you. I will welcome you, at least. But not on your terms. But we will welcome you. We&#8217;re not going to force you to do something that is maybe extremely difficult or impossible for you to do. We&#8217;re not expecting you to radically transform everything about your life all at once, but if you want us to welcome you, that means you have to come to the church, which means you have to give your assent to the church.
If two things are going to join together, one of them has to change. The thing that&#8217;s going to change is not going to be the church. It&#8217;s going to have to be you, which is true for all of us.
Every time we go into church, every time we go into confession, every time we go to receive the Blessed Sacrament, every time we go to mass, every time we go into a chapel to pray, we are imperfect — all of us. And when we go there, we are saying, “I want to be transformed by you, Lord.” I don&#8217;t want you and your holy institution to be transformed into myself.
She says, “I guess everyone&#8217;s relationship with God is bespoke to them.”
True, but God is the same for everyone. Everyone&#8217;s relationship with God is bespoke. It&#8217;s not off the rack. It&#8217;s not one size fits all. You&#8217;re right about that. But God is the same for everyone because God is objectively real. He&#8217;s the real God. That&#8217;s why you believe in him in the first place. And yet a lot of people want to make false gods for themselves.
She goes on to say, “I&#8217;m going to take more of a backseat in work and stuff like that, just to really prioritize this.” 
Well, by work she means prostitution. She means pornography. She&#8217;s not going to give it up entirely yet, apparently. Too bad. 
But she does say, “I&#8217;m going to prioritize religion.” Good, love that. 
She then says,
<blockquote>Even though I travel so much, I don&#8217;t necessarily go to church a lot because I&#8217;m traveling, but it doesn&#8217;t mean I can&#8217;t pray and I can&#8217;t practice my religion outside of church. So I will definitely be doing that and taking that forward.</blockquote>
Well, you have an obligation to go to church on Sunday. You have an obligation to do that even if you&#8217;re not feeling it and don&#8217;t want to. You have an obligation to at least do that. You have other obligations too. But she&#8217;s right — you can pray outside of church, and you should. You have to live your faith all the other days of the week too. That&#8217;s true. However, when you don&#8217;t go to church, when you don&#8217;t practice your faith, when you sanction these kinds of awful things that are so harmful to people, you are making a choice to move away from God.
So, what should we do about the Lily Phillips conversion? Should we make her the Archbishop of Canterbury right away? Probably not. Should we put her on the podcast circuit? In this case, probably not just yet. This could take a little while.
Should we say you don&#8217;t have to change anything about yourself or what you believe to be a real, practicing Christian? No. She&#8217;s got to change, but I think we should encourage her.
This is my message to Lily Phillips: This is great news. Wonderful. I love it. I love hearing that this is happening for you. But you have got to keep going, young lady. You were in a very, very bad place and now, by God’s grace, you have apparently taken a step to get out.
It&#8217;s going to be a long journey, but God will be with you the whole way. So just keep going.

MixCollage-07-Jan-2026-06-38-PM-3272

OnlyFans Model Gets Baptized At Church. Should We Believe Her?

Abortion

Catholic Church

Christianity

Michael Knowles

OnlyFans

Prostitution

Traditional Marriage

You can tell a lot about the strength of a particular argument or world view by how long it lasts before reality ends up discrediting it. There are some debates that don&#8217;t need to be settled by consulting with dozens of experts or asking ten different AI models and then comparing notes. Instead, certain events take place, and they resolve the disagreement right away. A catastrophic nuclear meltdown ended any discussion about how effective Chernobyl&#8217;s emergency shutdown mechanism was. An iceberg convinced everyone that, despite all of the marketing hype, the Titanic could in fact sink. There are limits to the ability of liars and charlatans to deceive the population, in other words. Even the most convincing fraudsters face the risk of exposure if their deception is simply too absurd to be compatible with reality. The more absurd the deception is, the faster it falls apart.
By that standard, there are few lies that are more flagrant — and obviously so — than the fiction that gay men should be allowed to adopt children, or to acquire them by paying for a woman to serve as a &#8220;surrogate.&#8221; As we saw recently, a journalist named Glenn Greenwald personally <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/glenn-greenwald-called-me-morally-deranged-then-this-happened">attacked</a> me for holding the position that children should be raised by a mother and a father. He maintained, in a very public and vitriolic fashion, that I was a terrible person for suggesting that gay adoption isn&#8217;t an ideal outcome. He presented himself as infinitely more virtuous than I am because of his decision to acquire young children. And then, within a matter of weeks, Greenwald himself demonstrated through his own conduct — on camera — why my position was correct.
That was back in June. And now, just a month later, it&#8217;s happened again. Reality has caused yet another major problem for the Left&#8217;s narrative about homosexuals who adopt children. Only this time, reality reared its head even faster — as in, within 24 hours. And the implications here are somehow even more disturbing and grotesque than they were with Glenn Greenwald&#8217;s debauchery. This is a story that makes it very clear that laws need to change, and they need to change immediately. And then people need to go to prison.
It all began on Sunday, when an Irish political activist named Derek Blighe discovered some videos that had been posted on a gay couple&#8217;s social media feeds. The videos show the two gay men, both of whom are overweight, marking monthly anniversaries with a child they&#8217;ve obtained. In every video, they blow out a candle on the cupcake. And the videos keep going, as the men seem to somehow get fatter each time. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="001 Gay Couple" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sYxqkeV2XRQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
In response to these videos, on Sunday, Derek Blighe posted simply, &#8220;Unless a miracle happens, this child has almost no chance at a normal life.&#8221;
And he was right, of course.
At a visceral level, this footage is repulsive. Everyone understands that, whether they&#8217;ll admit it or not. When a child is deprived of his mother and father, it isn&#8217;t something to celebrate. It&#8217;s a tragedy that&#8217;s inflicted on someone who cannot possibly deserve it, and who may never recover from it. And that&#8217;s especially true when, in lieu of a mother and a father, a child is obtained by two men who belong to a demographic whose behavior, in a very disproportionate number of cases, is completely incompatible with raising children, to put things as mildly as possible. It&#8217;s also a demographic that&#8217;s disproportionately interested in adopting male children. And again, everyone understands what&#8217;s going on there, though nobody will say it.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1631-the-matt-walsh-show?elementPosition=0&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=The+Matt+Walsh+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
And yet, when Blighe made this simple and straightforward observation, hundreds of thousands of Left-wing activists pretended to be shocked and horrified by what he had written. They also claimed that, in fact, it&#8217;s *better* for the child to be raised by two gay men, than by his own mother and father.
Here&#8217;s <a href="https://x.com/LouiseScot51918/status/1949441171085799511">one representative post</a>, which has more than 6 million views and 220,000 &#8220;likes&#8221; on X:
<blockquote>Makes me happy. That baby is going to be raised not to hate people and will be loved.</blockquote>
Here&#8217;s another post, from someone named &#8220;Bev Jackson&#8221; of a group called &#8220;Alliance LGB.&#8221; This came in response to Derek&#8217;s post expressing disgust at the footage: 
<blockquote>That is homophobic. If the child has two loving male parents, there is no evidence whatsoever that he or she will not prosper.</blockquote>
But Bev Jackson&#8217;s response didn&#8217;t last very long. Just a few hours later, Bev <a href="https://x.com/BevJacksonAuth/status/1949907957203751331">deleted</a> it. And a lot of people like Bev deleted their reactions, too. That&#8217;s because, in record-breaking time, the narrative took an extremely dark turn. The journalists at Reduxx decided to take a closer look at the two gay men in the video with that toddler. <a href="https://reduxx.info/gay-man-who-crowdfunded-surrogacy-journey-with-husband-revealed-as-child-sex-offender/">Here&#8217;s</a> what they found:
<blockquote>A widely circulated video showcasing a gay couple’s &#8216;surrogacy journey&#8217; has revealed that a baby boy is currently in the custody of a registered child sex offender. &#8230; Brandon Keith Mitchell is a Tier 1 sex offender in the state of Pennsylvania, and was arrested in 2016 after attempting to solicit a 16-year-old boy for sexual abuse. The victim in the case was a student at Downingtown West High School, where Mitchell had worked as a chemistry teacher. He was 30 years old at the time.</blockquote>
Here&#8217;s an image of Brandon Mitchell when he was teaching:
<div id="attachment_953911" style="width: 442px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-953911" class="wp-image-953911 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-29-Jul-2025-01-40-PM-9665-432x576.jpg" alt="Chester County District Attorney’s office." width="432" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-29-Jul-2025-01-40-PM-9665-432x576.jpg 432w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-29-Jul-2025-01-40-PM-9665-225x300.jpg 225w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-29-Jul-2025-01-40-PM-9665-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-29-Jul-2025-01-40-PM-9665-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-29-Jul-2025-01-40-PM-9665-1536x2048.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-29-Jul-2025-01-40-PM-9665-scaled.jpg 1920w" sizes=" (max-width: 432px) 100vw, 432px" />Chester County District Attorney’s office.</div>
According to local news reports, Mitchell was, &#8220;charged with texting obscene images and texts to a student, [and] asking for nude images of the underage student.&#8221;
Mitchell taught at this school from 2010 to 2015. And during this period, he reportedly sent more than 12,000 text messages to this student. He ended up pleading guilty to &#8220;felony child pornography possession and one count of Corruption of Minors&#8221; — because police found sexually explicit videos of the child on his personal computer — and was sentenced to nearly two years of incarceration. But he didn&#8217;t serve anywhere near that sentence. Just two months after his conviction, Reduxx reports, he was granted parole. For a crime that should&#8217;ve resulted in life imprisonment, at a minimum, he barely spent any time in jail.
The Reduxx article <a href="https://reduxx.info/gay-man-who-crowdfunded-surrogacy-journey-with-husband-revealed-as-child-sex-offender/">continues</a>:
<blockquote>Part of his conditions included that he have no unsupervised contact with minors and that he surrender his teaching license. He quickly moved on to obtain a job as a chemist at Eurofins BioPharma Product Testing in Lancaster, where he has worked for the past 9 years. &#8230; In 2021, Mitchell married Logan Riley, a second-grade teacher from Maryland, and moved to Seven Valleys, Pennsylvania. In 2023, the two launched a GoFundMe to raise money for a surrogate.</blockquote>
Of course, the GoFundMe didn&#8217;t mention the whole &#8220;convicted sex offender” thing.
In any event, the fundraiser has since been taken down. But it reportedly had a goal of $50,000, and raised just over $2,000, so it wasn&#8217;t exactly a success. Nevertheless, Riley — the husband of the convicted sex offender — reported that, in November of 2023, they had found a surrogate.
<blockquote>Our surrogate went through extensive medical and social worker evaluations in order to be approved for surrogacy. Once approved, the lengthy legal and financial process began. We are so excited that our amazing surrogate will carry one of our embryos for us, helping to expand our family.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s hard to miss the irony here. According to these two gay men, there was an &#8220;extensive&#8221; screening process for their &#8220;surrogate&#8221; — meaning, the woman whose body they were going to rent, so that she would bear a child for them, so that they could pretend to be parents. Social workers, doctors and lawyers were all involved. And yet, evidently, there was no screening process whatsoever for these two gay men. No one in the federal government, or the state of Pennsylvania, saw any problem with creating a new human life, for the sole purposes of handing the child off to a convicted sexual predator. And not just any convicted sexual predator. We&#8217;re talking about a convicted <a href="https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1949915000589443072">sexual predator</a> who specifically preyed on a child.
At first, you might think — well, there must have been some massive, very unfortunate mistake here. Surely, you&#8217;d assume, there must be a thorough vetting process for the parents of children who are born through surrogacy. And somehow, in this particular case, someone must have fallen asleep on the job. Maybe they ran a criminal records check under the wrong name or something like that.
But that&#8217;s not remotely what happened. As it turns out, there is no legal bar in the state of Pennsylvania — or many other states — for convicted sexual predators to obtain children through surrogacy. It&#8217;s completely legal. There are no roadblocks whatsoever.
Again, this is from <a href="https://reduxx.info/gay-man-who-crowdfunded-surrogacy-journey-with-husband-revealed-as-child-sex-offender/">Reduxx</a>:
<blockquote>Reduxx reached out to the division Pennsylvania State Police responsible for maintaining Mitchell’s registration, and was informed that the state does not automatically forbid individuals convicted of sex crimes from having children, gaining custody, or exercising parental rights. While Pennsylvania’s adoption law does prohibit sex offenders from adopting or fostering children, gestational surrogacy circumvents any such laws through pre-birth parentage orders.</blockquote>
You heard that correctly. Individuals who are convicted of sex crimes, including sex crimes involving children — crimes so severe that the guilty party had to agree to have &#8220;no unsupervised contact with minors&#8221; for a certain period of time — are allowed to obtain children in Pennsylvania. The only restriction is that, instead of adopting a child, they have to pay for a woman to give birth to a child. This is a policy that&#8217;s so incomprehensible, and so evil, that it&#8217;s hard to even talk about. And it&#8217;s also a policy that, evidently, a lot of officials in Pennsylvania aren&#8217;t even aware of.
One of Reduxx&#8217;s writers <a href="https://x.com/Slatzism/status/1949926492651024812">posted this</a> on social media, as she was working on this story:
<blockquote>While I was talking to the state police sex offender division, the agent actually stopped for a moment when I mentioned it was a surrogate baby and said, &#8216;But surely … there’s a vetting process for this kind of thing?&#8217;</blockquote>
Well, actually, no. There&#8217;s no vetting process for &#8220;this kind of thing,&#8221; as it turns out.
If someone is a pedophile in the state of Pennsylvania, and they’ve been convicted for &#8220;corrupting minors&#8221; and possessing child pornography, they are still completely free to obtain a child through surrogacy. And not just any child — a newborn with no known relatives, no next of kin to check in on him. And then, once they have this defenseless child in their home, he is entirely at their mercy and helpless, and no one can see what they’re doing, and there is no one who actually knows the child or cares for him. Even his mother isn&#8217;t allowed to speak to him. It&#8217;s almost as if the state went out of its way to create a loophole for pedophiles. There are no words for how dark this is.
And by the way, this is one of the many fundamental, fatal problems with relying on &#8220;statistics&#8221; and &#8220;experts&#8221; who tell you that gay adoption is completely fine and appropriate. Every single mainstream expert will tell you that gay men are just as capable as straight couples to raise children, if not more so. They&#8217;ll tell you to suspend all of your intuitions and common sense, and they&#8217;ll call you a bigot if you disagree. But the truth is, none of these experts actually knows what goes on inside these households where men are raising children that aren&#8217;t theirs.
None of the statistics can capture the reality of what&#8217;s happening, because only the parents who are caught abusing their children will actually be reflected in those statistics.
That&#8217;s why we have intuition and basic morality. And it&#8217;s why we should always pay close attention whenever activists on the other side, in a demonic kind of rage, attempt to claim the moral high ground — only for it to crumble immediately in a matter of days (or hours, in this case). There are some lies that are simply too evil and unsustainable to survive contact with reality. The fiction that gay men are appropriate foster parents for other people&#8217;s children is one of them. In recent months, we&#8217;ve repeatedly seen <a href="https://people.com/ga-couple-adopted-young-boys-filmed-sexual-abuse-house-of-horrors-8766348">glimpses</a> into the horrors that many of these children are enduring behind closed doors. The recent case of William and Zachary Zulock in Georgia is an example of two men who were sexually abusing their two adopted children. They probably would never have been caught, if they hadn&#8217;t bragged about their behavior to others.
Especially in light of stories like this, it shouldn&#8217;t be remotely controversial to say that the safety of children is infinitely more important than any gay man&#8217;s desire to become a parent. Nature has already decided that gay couples will be childless by definition. The law should follow suit. Starting with the state of Pennsylvania — which should immediately change its law and remove this particular child from this household — this very straightforward principle needs to become law. Any society that doesn&#8217;t protect its own children does not deserve to exist. Under the guise of helping children, a system has been created that allows for children to be abused in the most horrific ways imaginable. That system must be dismantled. The abusers should go to prison for the rest of their lives. And no child, no matter the circumstances, should ever be forcibly prevented from having a mother and a father ever again in this country.

Rear view of son with arm around fathers sitting on fence in yard

Gay Sex Offender Buys A Baby Through Surrogacy. How Is This Legal?

LGBTQ

Pennsylvania

Sex Offender

BRAZIL-POLITICS-CORRUPTION-INTERCEPT-GREENWALD

Glenn Greenwald Called Me ‘Morally Deranged.’ Then This Happened.

Glenn Greenwald

As we <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtFCCDy__os">predicted</a> a while back, the most irrelevant and low-energy &#8220;Pride Month&#8221; in the history of &#8220;Pride Months&#8221; is officially underway as of June 1st. The LGBT movement is currently coming to terms with the reality that, after years of browbeating everyone into tolerating and then applauding and then participating in disorder and dysfunction, people are simply too disgusted and annoyed to put up with it anymore.
The signs are all over the place. The city of Boise — far-Left stronghold in an otherwise very conservative state — just <a href="https://www.kivitv.com/downtown-boise/boise-pride-cancels-season-kick-off-citing-insufficient-attendance">canceled</a> its &#8220;Pride Month kickoff&#8221; due to &#8220;insufficient attendance.&#8221; This is the same city that proudly named the so-called &#8220;Pride Flag&#8221; as an official government flag just a few weeks ago, when the mayor claimed that the city is solidly behind the gay agenda. Turns out, he might have overstated the case a bit there. Meanwhile, major corporate sponsors like Meta, Anheuser-Busch and Comcast have fled San Francisco&#8217;s pride parade. And <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/nyregion/nyc-pride-sponsors-trump-tariffs.html">reportedly</a>, one-quarter of corporate donors to New York City&#8217;s pride events — including virtually all of the biggest donors — have either eliminated or greatly reduced their contributions this year.
Something called &#8220;Heritage of Pride,&#8221; which organizes Pride events in New York, says they&#8217;re losing hundreds of thousands of dollars this year. The future of the organization is now in jeopardy. It&#8217;s the same situation in Canada, if you can believe it. Google and Home Depot, along with Nissan, Adidas, and Clorox, have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/30/toronto-pride-google-home-depot-sponsorship-drop">pulled out</a> of the Toronto pride parade, leaving organizers to speculate about whether the event will even be able to take place in the future.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1606?elementPosition=5&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
And they&#8217;re also seeing similar problems in Florida. Watch:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
LGBTQ organizations across the country are reporting substantial cuts in funding due to the Trump administration ending DEI programs. <a href="https://t.co/TLMwpHdAu8">pic.twitter.com/TLMwpHdAu8</a>
&mdash; Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) <a href="https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1928876660251591121?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 31, 2025</a></blockquote>
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They&#8217;ll blame the Trump administration for cutting funding. They&#8217;ll demand that &#8220;the community&#8221; send them more money. But under no circumstances will they change their behavior. They won&#8217;t stop twerking in front of children, or engaging in sex acts in public, or glorifying the chemical castration of children. They won&#8217;t do any of that, because they’re fundamentally narcissistic, and that’s what the whole movement is really about, which is why it’s called “pride” in the first place.
But millions of Americans are very aware of what the so-called “LGBT pride movement&#8221; actually stands for at this point. That&#8217;s why, if you walk into your local department store, you&#8217;ll probably see similar indications that the downfall of &#8220;pride&#8221; is upon us. A woman named Caitlin Francis just uploaded these two photos, showing a side-by-side comparison of a Southern California Target store.
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My Southern California Target June 1, 2024 vs Target June 1, 2025 
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 <a href="https://t.co/pJCEIl4nnS">pic.twitter.com/pJCEIl4nnS</a>
&mdash; Caitlin Francis (@MrsCMFrancis) <a href="https://twitter.com/MrsCMFrancis/status/1929299764950212738?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 1, 2025</a></blockquote>
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The image on the left is from June 1st, 2024. And the image on the right was taken yesterday. They&#8217;ve replaced the LGBT colors and the shirts saying &#8220;trans people will always exist&#8221; with clothing that reasonable people would actually wear. They&#8217;ve got American flag shirts instead of the LGBT propaganda now. It&#8217;s almost as if Target, like every other major corporation, has realized that normal people vastly outnumber the far-Left activists they&#8217;ve been pandering to. 
Indeed, with each passing year Americans are increasingly aware of what the LGBT agenda actually is, and what it entails. They&#8217;re realizing that all of the promises of the so-called &#8220;gay rights movement&#8221; have actually been fraudulent all along. The facade is crumbling. And it&#8217;s crumbling very quickly.

Rainbow markings on asphalt at a pedestrian crossing – LGBT community rights

The Real Reason Why Pride Month Is Now On Life Support

Pride Month

Support among Republicans for gay marriage has plummeted in the last three years, according to a new <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/691139/record-party-divide-years-sex-marriage-ruling.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gallup poll</a>.
Gallup’s poll released on Thursday found 41% of GOP voters support gay marriage, as opposed to 55% in 2021 and 2022. A whopping 88% of Democrats approved of gay marriage in the new poll; the 47-point gap between the two parties is the largest since Gallup first asked the question in 1996. Seventy-six percent of independents approve of gay marriage. In 1996, 16% of Republicans approved; 33% of Democrats and 32% of independents agreed.
86% of Democrats said gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable; 38% of Republicans agreed, a drop from 2022, when 56% of Republicans agreed. Among those who attend religious services at least once a week, 33% said same-sex marriage was morally acceptable and 24% said gay-lesbian relations were socially acceptable. Gallup polling between 2020-2023 <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/507692/church-attendance-lower-pre-pandemic.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found</a> that more Republicans attended weekly religious services than Democrats by 15 percentage points.
When writing a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22067323-dobbs-v-jackson-womens-health-organization-clarence-thomas-concurrence/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">concurring opinion</a> in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made the legal case for overturning Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the last of which guaranteed the right to gay marriage.
Thomas explained that the three cases relied on substantive due process, which he called “an oxymoron that lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.”
Courts have used substantive due process to protect unenumerated rights not mentioned in the Constitution. The right to privacy and the right to gay marriage have been recognized under substantive due process.  
“On the Due Process Clause, Justice Thomas has long argued (consistent with much academic commentary) that insofar as the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates enumerated rights against the states and protects unenumerated rights, this work is done by the Privileges [and] Immunities Clause, and not the Due Process Clause,” Reason <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/26/on-justice-thomas-dobbs-precedent-and-substantive-due-process/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">noted</a>.
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“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents, After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
“Substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority,&#8221; he wrote, “Substantive due process distorts other areas of constitutional law. &#8230; Substantive due process is the core inspiration for many of the Court’s constitutionally unmoored policy judgments. &#8230; The harm caused by this Court’s forays into substantive due process remains immeasurable.”

Group of People Celebrating Gay Pride Parade- Pride Month and Parade-People marching with the rainbow LGBTQ+ flag

Support For Gay Marriage Plummets Among Republicans: Gallup Poll

Clarence Thomas

Gallup

Republicans

Supreme Court

Just a few days after BLM and Antifa set fire to a church outside the White House in the summer of 2020, the mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser, issued an emergency order. This wasn&#8217;t an order about restoring law and order to the streets of the nation&#8217;s capital, or punishing the vandals who had just destroyed property and assaulted Secret Service agents, or anything like that. Instead, Bowser made the decision to hire an elite team of eight artists — yes, eight artists — to meet up at around 3:30 a.m. in the morning. These artists&#8217; mission, if they chose to accept it, was to paint the words &#8220;BLACK LIVES MATTER&#8221; on two blocks of road, in giant fifty-foot-tall letters, just a few blocks from the White House. This street painting would be referred to as a &#8220;mural,&#8221; to give it some sense of grandeur, even though it&#8217;s really graffiti. Nobody knows why it required eight artists to paint three words in Times New Roman font. Maybe they needed one to do the painting and the other seven for spell check. It’s not clear.
But it was clearly a very deliberate decision to have this graffiti painted in secrecy, under the cover of darkness, like they were planning the Bin Laden raid. Apparently the reasoning was that white supremacists would be less likely to jump out of the bushes on 16th street and mess up the paint at 3:00 a.m., because as we all know, at that hour the white supremacists are too busy hunting for the cast of &#8220;Empire&#8221; in Chicago. So the BLM graffiti could be painted in peace. And then, by morning, everyone would awaken to see &#8220;BLACK LIVES MATTER&#8221; on the ground, and racism would be defeated. All of the klan members in Washington D.C. would see the words on the street and say to each other, “Geez, you know what, black lives really do matter.” And then they would throw off their pointy hat hats and go get jobs at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Of course, the actual plan was a lot more modest than that. The real goal was simply to annoy Donald Trump and impress &#8220;The Resistance,&#8221; which applauded any effort — no matter how petty — to advance the BLM scam. To that end, Muriel Bowser renamed the area with the alleged &#8220;mural&#8221; as &#8220;Black Lives Matter Plaza.&#8221; And then she <a href="https://x.com/MurielBowser/status/1269090846160412672" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posted this message</a> on social media: &#8220;We turned on the night light for him so he dreams about #BlackLivesMatter Plaza.&#8221; Yes, according to Muriel Bowser, the plan was to have Donald Trump &#8220;dream about&#8221; some words they painted on the ground. And people loved it. This is the kind of tweet that, on Old Twitter, got tens of thousands of &#8220;likes&#8221; and non-stop praise in the replies. Anyone who disagreed was banned for hate speech.
Given that recent history, it&#8217;s actually kind of astonishing to see how Muriel Bowser and Democrat activists have reacted to Republicans&#8217; latest effort to get rid of BLM Plaza and the street graffiti. Congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia recently introduced legislation that would strip D.C. of most of its federal funding unless they eliminate BLM plaza, rename it &#8220;Liberty Plaza,&#8221; and get rid of the graffiti. And instead of fighting back in any way, Democrats are rolling over. Muriel Bowser has already announced that the BLM writing is going to be removed from the street. Apparently the current plan is to replace it with artwork commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which is coming up next summer. And as various local news outlets are reporting, it&#8217;s not just the mayor who&#8217;s fine with this. One of the artists involved in creating the so-called &#8220;mural&#8221; doesn&#8217;t really seem to care either. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="001 BLM MURAL REMOVAL IS TOTALLY FINE" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_jpuoDnDg8?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
At this point, you have to go out of your way to find anyone in D.C. who cares about this graffiti being wiped away. The people who created it are now distancing themselves from the whole idea. So are a lot of local activists. We went from Mitt Romney saying &#8220;Black Lives Matter&#8221; as he marches along with Left-wing activists, to watching Left-wing activists pretty much disavow the whole thing. And it only took a few years.
To be fair, I did find at least one woman who seemed upset that this beautiful mural is being erased. Here&#8217;s what she told a local news station. As you&#8217;ll see, this woman is wearing a shirt about D.C. statehood, and she begins by talking about DEI, so it&#8217;s safe to say that the BLM mural isn&#8217;t exactly her primary focus. But she eventually gets around to implying that erasing the big yellow words on the street is a really bad idea. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 SOME SAY BLM MURAL REMOVAL TRAGIC" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fskega-onIo?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
It&#8217;d be interesting to get this woman&#8217;s take on all the statues that Democrats have torn down over the years. That&#8217;s the kind of history she wants to see &#8220;erased.&#8221; But some words painted on a street five years ago — a monument to the total disaster of the BLM movement — is something that we supposedly need to preserve at all costs.
Of course, most people in the Democrat Party don&#8217;t think that way. They&#8217;re trying to distance themselves from this &#8220;mural&#8221; as quickly as they can. BLM — which was once a core, unifying pillar of the Democrat Party — has suddenly become a major political liability for Democrats. They can&#8217;t run away from it fast enough. This is progress, of course, in one sense. It&#8217;s a sign that Democrats are abandoning a movement that caused more than a billion dollars in property damage, resulted in multiple murders, suspended the right of self-defense in parts of the country, and kickstarted a nationwide de-policing effort that made this country far more dangerous.
At the same time, Democrats are not abandoning BLM because they&#8217;ve adopted a new, coherent ideology to replace it. They&#8217;re not committing themselves to a more responsible platform or anything like that. Instead, they’re flailing around in a state of total disarray, without any guiding principles whatsoever. They have no leadership and no direction of any kind. We are witnessing anarchy in the Democrat Party, after years of lockstep, disciplined messaging. And it&#8217;s not just the downfall of BLM Plaza that illustrates the chaos that&#8217;s unfolding.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1550-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
Last night the Left-wing outlet Axios <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/democrats-disrupt-trump-speech-reaction" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> that, in the wake of Donald Trump&#8217;s address to Congress, Democrats in Washington are now fighting among themselves about how terribly they came across. Apparently Democrats&#8217; leadership in Congress didn&#8217;t want any kind of props to be used, nor did they call for any kind of interruptions or heckling. And of course, all throughout Trump&#8217;s speech, Democrats were waving their little paddles around, making noise, turning their backs to Trump, rushing out of the chamber, and so on. So there was a complete breakdown of leadership, by all accounts. Axios quotes several Democrat congressmen, including Jared Golden and Tom Suozzi, as saying the outbursts were a major mistake. One Democrat put it this way: &#8220;Not standing for Trump would have been a fine strategy, but you need to separate him from the kid with cancer.&#8221;
But that’s the way it played out, because the Democrats are totally beholden to the most radical elements of their party. This is &#8220;ideological capture,&#8221; and the consequences are a lot more far-reaching than Democrats might like to admit. The issue for them is not simply that voters find their party to be completely unappealing, even though that&#8217;s obviously a serious problem. The bigger issue for Democrats is that voters are now going back and re-assessing how Democrats got to this point. Voters are thinking about everything else Democrats have said over the past decade or so. They&#8217;re wondering what other scams the party has been running.
That might explain why, according to a <a href="https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_uHE5Cxl.pdf#page36" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent poll</a> from The Economist and YouGov, only 48% of Americans support the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage. 38% of Americans oppose it, and the rest are unsure. To restate: Less than half of adult Americans want same-sex marriage to be recognized nationwide. Among political &#8220;moderates,&#8221; support for the nationwide legalization of gay marriage sits at just 51%. Among conservatives, it&#8217;s down to 20%. This is from a poll that was conducted just a few days ago, in the first days of March. Even among self-described liberals, support for gay marriage isn&#8217;t unanimous. It sits at around 84% in that demographic.
Just three years ago, YouGov <a href="https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/43775-51-34-americans-would-back-congress-passing-law-le" target="_blank" rel="noopener">measured</a> much stronger support for gay marriage, when people were asked the same question. A majority of Americans backed it. In other words, things are now so bad that Democrats are even losing ground on an issue that they thought was settled. They viewed gay marriage as a stepping stone to gender ideology, without realizing that the insanity of gender ideology would eventually make people take a closer look at gay marriage. And that was a major tactical error, because when it comes to the culture war, no argument is ever really settled. People on our side have said for years that the marriage debate is over. We lost. There’s nothing we can do. But that’s not true. It’s never over. After all, the “traditional” definition of marriage — which is to say the actual definition — was settled for thousands of years. Until it wasn’t.
The reality is that, just as quickly as America was overtaken by the moral panic of BLM and the emotional blackmail of trans activists, we can return to some semblance of sanity. It doesn&#8217;t take much. What conservatives need to do, as quickly as possible, is to capitalize on Democrats&#8217; weakness and start passing laws that reverse the derangement that&#8217;s been so dominant for so long. If conservatives do that, they might be able to drag more concessions out of Democrats than we ever thought possible. After all, no one thought they&#8217;d cave on the BLM movement as quickly as they have. But they did. And it stands to reason that they can be beaten on gender insanity and voter ID and open borders and all of their other &#8220;must-have agenda items&#8221; just as thoroughly. All Republicans have to do now is take advantage of their position of power and apply pressure, just like the congressman from Georgia did. In response, Democrats might howl and stomp their feet and wave paddles around. But in the end, they will lose.

House Minority Leader McCarthy Hosts Back The Blue Bike Tour

Sanity Is Making A Comeback

Black Lives Matter

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Muriel Bowser

President Trump

Washington D.C.

White House

Woke Culture

People are widely praising President Jimmy Carter’s Christian faith after his passing, a reaction that reveals a telling double standard in how elites treat different expressions of Christianity.
For example, a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2025/01/01/jimmy-carter-evangelical-baptist-faith/">Washington Post</a> writer declared, “For Jimmy Carter, faith was inseparable from politics and life.” The Hill <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/5060618-jimmy-carter-christian-example/">wrote</a>, &#8220;Jimmy Carter was the Christian most politicians pretend to be.” And The New York Times<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/30/us/carter-on-death.html"> profiled</a> how Carter’s faith defined his activities and outlook in public life.
By all accounts, Carter’s Christianity was a particularly pietistic expression of Mainline Protestantism. This is a faith whose doctrinal core has been hollowed out for decades by theological liberalism. It’s a modernized Christianity that sheds the most controversial and supposedly outmoded elements of biblical doctrine to placate the spirit of the age.
For example, Carter is on record celebrating same-sex marriage and defending abortion. He publicly opposed Southern Baptist conservatives as they sought to return the denomination to a more biblically faithful position, ultimately departing it altogether.
Carter’s faith resonates with liberal ideals — service, humility, and social justice. His Christianity embodied what one of my old professors called “BOMFOG” (Brotherhood of Man and Fatherhood of God). This version of Christianity wins praise. 
Of course, service, humility, seeking justice, and loving your neighbor are beautiful and vital parts of Christianity. But Christianity also addresses sin, human nature, family structure, the exclusivity of Christ for salvation, sexual morality, repentance, and absolute truth. These are the harder truths of the faith that don’t play well in progressive circles.
When conservative Christians act on their faith, public opinion and media framing shift. Suddenly, Christianity becomes a problem. When conservative Christians act in line with their beliefs on issues like life, family, or religious liberty, they are met with criticism and labeled intolerant or regressive. It’s a threat to democracy and an illiberal force in society. 
Just look at the past eight years. Evangelicals have been relentlessly vilified in the media, even by fellow Christians at elite publications. Yes, there’s some nutty behavior out there among evangelicals. But on the whole, if you take your Christian faith seriously and it becomes a threat to the cultural comfort zones of progressivism, you are persona non grata. Consider the ominous media analysis of Sen. JD Vance’s supposed “post-liberal” Catholicism. The tone makes it seem like his faith is as sinister as Darth Vader’s theme song.
The difference? Carter’s faith comforted the cultural Left. It posed no threat to the dominant liberal order.
To be fair, his faith motivated many good works for which I will not criticize him. But Carter’s Christianity ultimately allowed him to serve as a chaplain to progressive America. It represents the convergence of religious sentimentality with progressive moral values. In effect, Carter’s faith symbolizes the one form of church-state establishment that liberalism will tolerate: a Christianity stripped of its harder truths, its calls to repentance, and its moral clarity.
Biblical, orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, confronts the liberal order with truths it refuses to hear. And when those truths are voiced, orthodox faith is sidelined or castigated as intolerant. Liberalism will not accept a Christianity that proclaims Jesus Christ as the only way to God, that defends unborn human beings discarded as medical waste, or that challenges the decadent sexual deviancy now treated as routine.
The lesson? Our culture tolerates a Christian faith that aligns with its values but resists a Christian faith that challenges it. This dynamic reveals something fundamental about true Christianity: it is to do both, comfort and confront.
If your Christianity is celebrated in the highest echelons of culture, maybe that’s a sign something is amiss. That doesn’t necessarily mean compromise is present, but it should at least raise questions. On the other hand, being so hard-edged and “prophetic” that you’re unbearable to be around is also a problem. Authentic faith should embody love and truth (1 Corinthians 13:6), reasonableness (Philippians 4:5), and sober-mindedness (1 Peter 5:8).
Carter’s life invites us to examine how faith is understood and celebrated in public life. The irony is clear: society embraces a faith that serves its agenda while rejecting a faith that stands apart from it. True Christianity, however, is neither a servant of the age nor its unrelenting critic. Instead, it provides both the comfort of grace and the challenge of repentance, which our culture desperately needs.
So, let’s not selectively celebrate faith only when it fits a preferred narrative. If faith matters, it matters in full, whether it aligns with our politics or not. That’s the beauty of Christianity. It’s the one worldview that provides both comfort and confrontation, truth and grace, and it’s what we need in this moment of cultural upheaval. 
Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. He is a Fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Former President Jimmy Carter Teaches Sunday School

Jimmy Carter And America’s Double Standard For Celebrating Christianity

Jimmy Carter

Southern Baptists

The legal team for former <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/kentucky" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Kentucky</a> clerk Kim Davis say they are fighting back following a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/kentucky-clerk-who-refused-to-issue-licenses-following-scotus-gay-marriage-ruling-must-pay-over-260k-in-fees-judge-rules" target="_blank" rel="noopener">controversial ruling</a> against Davis, and even suggested the case could end up undoing the U.S. Supreme Court&#8217;s landmark decision on gay marriage in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/it-would-be-more-than-a-little-chaotic-ted-cruz-explains-why-supreme-court-is-unlikely-to-overturn-gay-marriage-decision" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Obergefell v. Hodges</a>.
Davis in 2015 refused to hand out a marriage license to David Ermold and David Moore after the pair walked into the Rowan County Courthouse alongside journalists and protesters seeking the license. Last week, Davis was ordered to pay $260,104 in attorneys fees to the couple&#8217;s lawyers, on top of the $100,000 she was already ordered to pay to the couple directly.
&#8220;The plaintiffs in this case are part of a larger agenda that are intent on punishing people of faith who hold the values that marriage is the union of a man and a woman,&#8221; Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/kim-davis-case-overturn-supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-ruling-legal-counsel?dicbo=v2-DlzGkzQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> Fox News. The organization is representing David.
&#8220;While it appears at this stage that they have been able to succeed, this case now is set up that it could possibly be the undoing of the very case that started this whole matter and that&#8217;s Obergefell v. Hodges from 2015 that has no basis in the Constitution,&#8221; Staver added.
The legal team will argue in an appeal that Davis &#8220;could not bring herself to violate her deeply held Christian beliefs,&#8221; and was entitled to a religious accommodation under the First Amendment, Fox noted.
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&#8220;Clerks in Kentucky (were) &#8230; provided conscience opt-outs for hunting and fishing licenses,&#8221; Staver said. &#8220;Kim Davis wanted a conscience opt-out for the same-sex marriage licenses.&#8221;
At the time, then-Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, doled out an exemption for his attorney general, who said he could not defend the state&#8217;s marriage amendment. Davis was not awarded one, however, and spent days in jail.
Currently, clerks in the state are allowed to opt-op from such participation.
Despite the legal team&#8217;s outlook, some conservatives do not believe Obergefell v. Hodges will be overturned. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R), for example, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/it-would-be-more-than-a-little-chaotic-ted-cruz-explains-why-supreme-court-is-unlikely-to-overturn-gay-marriage-decision" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in 2022 that the 2015 decision was “clearly wrong,” but he does not believe the high court has any “appetite” to review the case. He added that it would be “chaotic” to disrupt such unions that occurred in accordance with the law.
“Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” Cruz said at the time. “Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell, some states were moving to allow gay marriage, and other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting.”
&#8220;In [Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision,] what the Supreme Court said is Roe is different because it’s the only one of the cases that involve the taking of a human life and that’s qualitatively different” than Obergefell, Cruz said.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/kentucky-clerk-who-refused-to-issue-licenses-following-scotus-gay-marriage-ruling-must-pay-over-260k-in-fees-judge-rules" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Kentucky Clerk Who Refused To Issue Licenses Following SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling Must Pay Over $260K In Fees, Judge Rules</a>

owan County Clerk of Courts Kim Davis waves to a crowd of her supporters at a rally in front of the Carter County Detention Center on September 8, 2015 in Grayson, Kentucky.

Kim Davis Fighting Back After Ordered To Pay $100,000 To Gay Couple, Could End Up At SCOTUS, Legal Team Says

Kim Davis Is fighting Back After Being Ordered To Pay $100,000 To Gay Couple, Could End Up At SCOTUS, Legal Team Says

Courts

Kentucky

U.S.

Kim Davis, the former <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/kentucky" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Kentucky</a> clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses after the Supreme Court&#8217;s landmark decision in 2015 on gay marriage, must pay $260,104 in fees to attorneys who represented a couple, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
Despite Davis’ attorneys arguing that the fee request by the same-sex couple’s lawyers was excessive, U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning said that the former clerk’s lawyers exaggerated and “belie[d] logic,” the Lexington Herald-Leader <a href="https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article283727788.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. The $260,104 in attorneys fees is in addition to $100,000 in damages a jury ordered Davis to pay David Ermold and David Moore, a couple who won a lawsuit against her last September. Davis’ attorneys are expected to appeal Bunning’s ruling.
“They sought to vindicate their fundamental right to marry and obtain marriage licenses, and they did so,” Bunning said of the couple.
The ruling is the latest in a more than eight-year legal struggle for Davis, an evangelical Christian who was the county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, in 2015, shortly after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which ruled that same-sex couples are guaranteed a right to marry under the U.S. Constitution. Davis made headlines after the decision when Ermold and Moore walked into the Rowan County Courthouse followed by journalists and protesters, seeking to obtain a marriage license.
To avoid issuing any marriage licenses to gay couples, which Davis said was against her religious convictions, she refused to hand out marriage licenses to any couple. After entering the courthouse in September of 2015, Ermold asked Davis “under whose authority” she refused to issue a marriage license, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/us/same-sex-marriage-kentucky-kim-davis.html?smid=pl-share" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to The New York Times.
“Under God’s authority,” she responded.
Davis was then jailed for five days for contempt of court, and the gay couple’s marriage license was issued by a deputy clerk after Davis’ name was removed from the form while she was behind bars. The former county clerk was also sued by another gay couple whose license she denied, but a separate jury didn’t award them any damages, WKYT <a href="https://www.wkyt.com/2024/01/02/judge-kim-davis-owes-250k-attorneys-fees/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>.
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Davis lost her re-election bid in 2018 to Democrat Elwood Caudill Jr. by eight percentage points, Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/judge-rules-former-clerk-refused-issue-same-sex-marriage-licenses-pay-260000-legal-expenses" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. Ermold, one of the men to whom Davis refused to issue a marriage license, also ran in the primary against Caudill Jr. in 2018, but came up short. After his primary loss, Ermold said he would prefer Davis win the election over Caudill Jr.
&#8220;I just want him to lose. I would rather Kim Davis win,&#8221; Ermold said. &#8220;At least Kim Davis has the integrity to stand up for what she believes in. Elwood Caudill is a liar.&#8221;

Kim Davis

Kentucky Clerk Who Refused To Issue Licenses Following SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling Must Pay Over $260K In Fees, Judge Rules

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Pope Francis clarified this week that Catholic priests can bless individuals in same-sex couples but cautioned that such a blessing does not sanction the union and cannot resemble a marriage ceremony.
Couples in &#8220;irregular situations,&#8221; including same-sex relationships, can receive blessings that do not &#8220;sanction or legitimize&#8221; their unions, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which exists to defend Catholic doctrine, clarified in a <a href="https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2023/12/18/0901/01963.html#en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">document</a> published Monday.
The document, called &#8220;Fiducia Supplicans,&#8221; was signed by Pope Francis as well as the Dicastery’s new prefect, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.
Priests can give people in same-sex couples a &#8220;spontaneous blessing,&#8221; but the blessing cannot be a &#8220;liturgical&#8221; act or resemble the sacrament of marriage, the document says.
A blessing on people in same-sex couples cannot be given in connection with a civil union, and no &#8220;clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding&#8221; can be included in order &#8220;to avoid any form of confusion or scandal,&#8221; the document says.
&#8220;Rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage — which is the &#8216;exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children&#8217; — and what contradicts it are inadmissible,&#8221; the document warns.
Instead, the Vatican said that a priest can give a blessing in other contexts, such as a visit to a shrine, a meeting with a priest, a group prayer, or during a pilgrimage.
In the blessing, the priest can pray for the individuals to have &#8220;peace, health, a spirit of patience, dialogue, and mutual assistance — but also God’s light and strength to be able to fulfill his will completely,&#8221; the document states.
&#8220;There is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness,&#8221; the document adds.
The Catholic Church does not sanction same-sex marriage, and that official position remains unchanged, the document emphasized.
&#8220;The Church’s doctrine on this point remains firm,&#8221; the document says.
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&#8220;At the same time, one should not prevent or prohibit the Church’s closeness to people in every situation in which they might seek God’s help through a simple blessing,&#8221; the document adds.
In recent years, there has been much speculation around whether Pope Francis would change the Catholic Church’s approach to people in same-sex relationships.
On Monday, media outlets and commentators <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesMartinSJ/status/1736752055362936938" target="_blank" rel="noopener">presented</a> the Vatican&#8217;s document as a major shift for the Catholic Church.
However, the Catholic Church <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/does-doctrine-change" target="_blank" rel="noopener">never changes</a> its official doctrine, although it often clarifies particular points.

Vatican Hosts World Meeting Of Families

Pope Says Blessings For Individuals In Same-Sex Relationships Cannot Resemble Marriage

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A Christian social worker in the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/united-kingdom">U.K.</a> is taking legal action after his job offer was rescinded for his Christian views of sexuality and marriage.
Felix Ngole was offered his “dream job” as a mental health support worker at Touchstone Support Leeds, a charity <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/services/service-directory/touchstone/N10499434">partnered</a> with the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), but weeks later, the company <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12278659/Christian-job-offer-rescinded-company-learns-victory-free-speech-case.html">rescinded</a> the offer when it found out about his Christian beliefs and past victory in a religious liberty case.
Several weeks after receiving his acceptance letter, he received an email from Touchstone Deputy CEO Kathryn Hart, saying he was not fit for the position because the company had “identified some significant areas and concerns” that did not “align with Touchstone Leeds’ ethos and values.” 
“In particular, we can see that you have very strong views against homosexuality and same-sex marriage, which completely go against the views of Touchstone, an organisation committed to actively promoting and supporting LGBTQ+ rights,” Hart continued.
She said that she would reconsider if he would embrace Touchstone’s values, including “the promotion of homosexual rights.”
The father of three was then invited to a meeting with Hart and the company’s operations director, Dave Pickard, who questioned him intensely about his beliefs.
Ngole, who fled persecution in Cameroon, compared the questioning to interrogations he experienced in his home country. “They called it a discussion but it felt like I was being interrogated back in Cameroon,” he said. “Every question had an LGBT slant. … I think they were concerned that employing me could risk their Stonewall ranking.”
&#8220;What I cannot do, and you cannot reasonably expect me to do without yourselves being discriminatory, is make my participation in the &#8216;promotion of homosexual rights&#8217; a condition of my employment,&#8221; Ngole responded in the meeting, assuring them he would not discriminate against anyone. 
A week after the meeting, he received an email from the company officially rescinding his job offer, stating that his beliefs would be “upsetting and offensive” to their patients and would “exacerbate … [their] anxiety and depression.”
Touchstone Support <a href="https://touchstonesupport.org.uk/about-us/senior-leadership-team/">boasts</a> its “Top 100 LGBTQ+ Inclusive Employer” ranking and “Gold” award from the controversial organization <a href="https://www.stonewall.org.uk/">Stonewall</a>, which <a href="https://www.stonewall.org.uk/join-diversity-champions-programme">promotes</a> left-wing LGBTQ agenda items in workplaces. The company’s logo even dons the Pride and transgender flags’ colors.
Ngole is now pursuing legal action against the organization under the U.K. Equality Act, which forbids discrimination on the basis of religion. 
Andrea Williams, of the Christian Legal Centre, which is representing Ngole, said, “Telling an employee they must &#8217;embrace and promote&#8217; homosexuality as a condition of employment sets a dark and troubling precedent. If left unchallenged it would see Christians who manifest their beliefs barred from working in the NHS.”
The Centre <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/christian-social-worker-takes-legal-action-job-withdrawn-told-embrace-promote-lgbt-rights">said</a> that he was “the best performing candidate in interview, gaining the highest marks of any candidate on an equality and diversity assessment.”
Religious discrimination is not new for Ngole, as he won a case against the University of Sheffield, which had expelled him for his Christian beliefs. In 2016, the university expelled him for quoting Bible verses about homosexuality in a Facebook discussion and told him not to express his views, even in church, according to <a href="https://www2.cbn.com/news/world/british-court-upholds-right-christians-freely-express-their-faith">CBN News</a>. 
The U.K. Court of Appeal rebuked the university in a landmark free speech victory, saying, “The mere expression of religious views about sin does not necessarily connote discrimination.&#8221; The Court of Appeal also found that Ngole would “never discriminate against anyone” because of his religious views. His victory in the case played a role in the offer being rescinded, according to The Daily Mail.
This type of discrimination is on the rise in the U.K., <a href="https://www2.cbn.com/news/world/christian-social-worker-uk-denied-job-refusing-pledge-allegiance-lgbt-flag">according</a> to Williams. &#8220;What we see here is the confident totalitarianism of an organization that has been captured by Stonewall and will do anything to keep their Stonewall ranking as high as possible,&#8221; she said. &#8220;Viewpoint discrimination is escalating in the UK at an alarming rate &#8230; Anyone who does not comply and celebrate LGBT ideology must become a &#8216;non-person.'&#8221;
Viewpoint discrimination is a rising concern for British politicians. As The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/u-k-bank-refuses-to-open-account-for-conservative-parent-group-report">reported</a>, U.K. banks backed by the Stonewall group have denied or shut individuals’ accounts for their political views or positions. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12258933/Rishi-Sunak-issues-warning-banks-blacklisting-customers-controversial-views.html">vowed</a> to investigate such discrimination.

Felix Ngole court case

Christian Social Worker Sues After Losing Job Offer, Told He Must ‘Embrace And Promote Homosexual Rights’

Christian Social Worker Sues After Losing Job Offer, Told He Must 'Embrace And Promote Homosexual Rights'

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