homophile

A lawmaker in Colorado who challenged the authors of SB200, a new law that bans discrimination based on the "perception" of gender, during House debate says it was written to give a wide open door to anyone who wants to banish Christian beliefs or the Bible.

"This is so loaded. It's written in an open-ended fashion that anybody can take just about any part of it and grow it into a huge monstrosity," state Rep. Kevin Lundberg told WND today. "It was written with intentional [vagueness]."

He spoke with WND after a news conference at which a number of groups and organizations announced plans to challenge the law. Among those promising to dispute the new limitations on speech and actions was Liberty Counsel, which is reviewing the situation now in preparation for a legal challenge.

"Section 8 of Senate Bill 200 is a wide open door for any judge to censor anything that condemns homosexuality, including Scripture," Lundberg said at the news conference. Section 8 is headlined, "Publishing of discriminative matter forbidden."

Justice Louis Butler

A Wisconsin attorney is challenging a state Supreme Court decision that he should pay a $90,000 penalty because the deciding vote was cast by a justice who accepted money from the attorney's opponents.

The case that sparked attorney James Donohoo's dispute with the high court was brought against a "gay' activist group called Action Wisconsin, which later called itself Fair Wisconsin. That group had described visiting pastor Grant Storms, who appeared at a conference on homofascism, as having advocated the murders of homosexuals.

Donohoo, on Storms' behalf, brought a defamation action, which a trial court judge, Patricia McMahon, dismissed as frivolous. An appeals level panel reversed the decision, concluding that the jury should have been given the dispute to resolve.

The state Supreme Court, however, stepped in and with the vote of Justice Louis B. Butler Jr., who had accepted campaign contributions from those opposing Donohoo, reinstated the order for him to pay about $90,000 in legal fees incurred because of the case.

Homosexual-rights advocates have asked California's Supreme Court to block citizens from voting this fall on a measure voters originally brought to the ballot: Proposition 8, the California Marriage Protection Act.

Proposition 8, so labeled when Secretary of State Debra Bowen certified it earlier this month for placement on the November 4 ballot, is a constitutional amendment that states, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." The amendment was created by voter initiative with the signatures of 1.1 million voters, more than the required 694,354 needed to place an issue on the ballot.

Lawyers representing the ACLU and Equality California, however, filed a petition earlier this month in the state's highest court to strike Proposition 8 from the ballot, claiming the measure is not merely an amendment, but a revision, which a lawyer told WND is defined as a radical rewrite of the Constitution that would drastically upset the social fabric of California and require convening a constitutional convention to approve.

Liberty Counsel founder, Mathew Staver, told WND that if there was any radical rewrite of California's social fabric, it was done last month when the Supreme Court ignored over a century of precedent in the state's definition of marriage with a 4-3 ruling that deemed a law defining marriage between one man and one woman unconstitutional.

"They're suggesting the Supreme Court can rewrite the entire institution of marriage, but people can't amend the Constitution to go back to its historical definition," Staver said. "It's absolutely ridiculous to argue that courts can turn society upside down in 30 days but the people have no right to define it."

Criticizing homosexual marriage's legal advocates, Staver said, "Their agenda is to trample the will of the people and elevate by force the will of four individuals on the Supreme Court over the will of millions of voters."