Stone the Preacher

A businessman cited for displaying a gospel message on his own property is suing the town of Gouverneur, New York, accusing it of violating the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech and private property rights.

Daniel Burritt placed the evangelistic message on a trailer located on his commercial property adjacent to U.S. Route 11, and was issued a criminal citation for violating a local ordinance that allegedly requires a permit to display such a message.
(Read the rest here from OneNewsNow)

A strip club owner in Ohio is pursuing legal means to stop the campaign of a local church whose members witness to patrons coming to visit his business.

“Foxhole” owner Thomas George has accused New Beginnings Ministries of harassing patrons, and even causing an explosion outside his property — while law enforcement just looks on. The church’s pastor, William Dunfee, says the federal lawsuit’s charges are over-exaggerated and reflect the desperate attempt by George to stop the effective outreach of parishioners who have helped to bring the club’s business in New Castle and Coshocton County to a trickle. Click here to read the rest from OneNewsNow!

A Colorado city is considering a plan that one attorney calls the epitome of the war against Christmas.

Tonight, the Fort Collins City Council will meet and decide the fate of a task force report that urges the city to decorate with white lights, winter symbols not traditionally associated with any particular holiday, and unadorned garlands of greenery. City staffers are also encouraged to remove ornaments or stars from trees and red ribbons from wreaths. (Read the rest here.)

A Gideon member who was threatened with arrest while handing out Bibles near a Florida public school has been granted a preliminary injunction by a judge in a federal civil lawsuit. The motion will allow Thomas Gray to freely witness and hand out literature in a disputed 500-foot zone around the school.

Gray was handing out Bibles on a public walkway inside the alleged zone outside of Key Largo school in January, along with Gideons International team members Anthony Mirto and Ernest Simpson when confronted by authorities. (Click here to continue reading.)

A Georgia judge has granted a preliminary injunction against a Cumming city parade ordinance after the jailing of a man who was distributing tracts and witnessing on a street corner. Click here to read the rest from One News Now.
Read the background here.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a man who was told by government officials that he couldn’t distribute gospel tracts at the Mt. Rushmore National Monument. Read the rest here.

An evangelist in Illinois is suing the city of Naperville for being ticketed while street preaching last month, allegedly because a sign he carried was a violation of an ordinance regulating street sign location.

In September, Elmer Joe Christopherson of Burning Hearts Outreach Ministries says he and his colleagues had been witnessing for about three hours before the incident occurred, and he had been using the sign the entire time.

“It’s a 4′ x 6′ sign on a twelve-foot pole. It said, ‘Lied? Stolen? Lusted? Abortion? Stop sinning. Call on the Lord Jesus and escape hell fire,” explains Christopherson. (Read the rest at One News Now here.)

Orange County, Florida, has settled a lawsuit with a woman who claimed her First Amendment rights were violated when county employees prohibited her from distributing religious literature in a local public park. Read the rest here.

A man who says his constitutional rights were violated when he was arrested for passing out religious literature has filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Cumming, Georgia. His attorney says it’s an attempt to make sure the ordinance under which he was arrested is removed from the books.
 

This man was arrested for having a parade without a permit! Read the rest here!

Every now and then, there is some good news to report when it comes to our religious/free speech rights:

Florida Judge Dismisses Charges Against Gideons
Charges have been dropped against two individuals after they were accused of trespassing on a sidewalk outside of a Florida public school.
The two men had been handing out Bibles. (Read the rest here.)

Free Speech Back After Ordinance Withdrawn
A Jacksonville, Alabama, man who was prevented from speaking on a public sidewalk about his faith while using a speaker for amplification has won the repeal of a city ordinance that was responsible. The repeal was part of a settlement in the lawsuit he filed in U.S. District Court over the incident. (Read the rest here.)

Judge Dismisses Charges in Case of One Man’s ‘Witnessing Parade’
Charges against a Georgia man have been dropped related to his witnessing efforts and distribution of tracts. A Forsyth County Superior Court judge agreed that a parade ordinance cited in the arrest of Frederic Baumann did not legally apply. Read the rest here.

A Florida resident who once successfully sued Orlando International Airport for the right to hand out religious literature at Easter time has decided she will sue again. This time Shirley Snyder is suing for the right to distribute flyers and gospel tracts to people at an Orlando public park.

Snyder has retained First Amendment public interest law firm Liberty Counsel to ask the court to declare the city’s parks and recreation policy governing the handouts unconstitutional. Counsel founder Mat Staver explains Snyder was attempting to pass out flyers inviting attendance at her church’s Easter service while at the Cypress Grove Park in Orange County on April 1 — and was informed by a county employee, and later by the park supervisor, that non-approved distribution of literature was prohibited. (To continue reading, click here!)

Last Tuesday, I posted an article concerning some of the things that are happening to our country as we rapidly decline to an anti-Christian nation. I believe that this is in large part due to our lack of evangelistic zeal and lukewarm Christianity. The most shocking part of the article was the Hindu priest who was allowed to pray to his gods in the U.S. Senate for the very first time. 3 people tried to shout him down and it was recorded as a one minute video:

This was his prayer: “Let us pray. We meditate on the transcendental glory of the deity supreme who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the heaven.”

A Christian commentator said the three Christian activists, Ante Pavkovic, his wife, and his 19-year-old daughter, who were arrested for disrupting the Hindu prayer “are heroes and history will show them as such.”

Do you agree?
Do you condone this type of disruption?
Is it right for the Senate to offer prayers to false, pagan gods?
What responsibility do Christians play in all this?

Frederic Baumann, a resident of Cumming, was arrested on April 22 for distributing tracts outside the Cumming City fairgrounds. The charges? Officials told Baumann that he did not have a parade or demonstration permit.
Attorneys for Baumann are waiting for a judge’s ruling following a hearing this week, in the unusual case and lawsuit against his alleged violation of a parade ordinance.
(Read the rest at OneNewsNow, here.)

Charges have been dismissed against a man who was arrested last year for sharing the gospel and distributing religious literature on the campus of Schenectady County Community College in New York state. According to attorneys for minister Greg Davis, a Schenectady city court judge acquitted him of alleged criminal trespass that led to his arrest in September.

Davis’s attorney Brian Raum says his client has a regular ministry of public evangelism on college campuses, but on the day in question last fall, an assistant dean at the school told him he “had no right to be there and had to leave.” Click here to read the rest from OneNewNow!

At what price have Christians kept their mouths shut?

History was made in the Senate last Thursday.

“Let us pray. We meditate on the transcendental glory of the deity supreme who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the heaven.” Those were the words of a chaplain with the Indian Association of Northern Nevada, Rajan Zed, who delivered the first Hindu prayer ever on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The city on a hill is hidden…

The chaplain of the Family Research Council, Pierre Bynum, says Thursday’s Hindu prayer was a major departure from the “thoughts and plans” of America’s founding fathers. “We sing the song My Country ’tis of Thee, [saying] ‘to Thee we sing.’ The faith of our fathers, is being left behind,” he contends, “and we’re opening up to a bunch of religious ideologies and groups that were not part of our founding documents, were not part of our heritage.” He said the farther America gets away from the faith of its founding fathers, the more troubled and confused the country will become.

…the salt thrown out… a nation soon to be trampled underfoot.

Look closely at what’s missing on the new government issue dollar coins.

“In God We Trust?” I was just informed that it is there—on the edge, small and discreet (so no atheists will be offended?).

“I am the LORD, and there is no other.
I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I the LORD, do all these things.”
(Isaiah 45:7)

Todd Friel, the co-host of the daily Way of the Master radio show that teaches people how to witness using the Ten Commandments says the church in America has strayed from biblical evangelism.
He says modern Christianity has made the church the focus of evangelism. “Biblical evangelism used to be, ‘go and make disciples; while going, make disciples.’ [But] in the 21st century — with the best of intentions — instead of sending people out, instead we’ve turned the church into the evangelism arm.”“We’ve been commanded to go,” he emphasizes. “[We need to] stop using the church for the evangelism tool and start hitting the streets ourselves.”

Who’s to blame?

(Articles by OneNewsNow, with permission.)

The worldwide ministry Jews for Jesus recently filed a lawsuit against the Long Island, New York, community of Oyster Bay for violating the free-speech rights of one of its evangelists.

As part of Jews for Jesus “Behold Your God” campaign last summer, Susan Mendelson attempted to distribute gospel tracts and talk to people about Jesus in a park in the township of Oyster Bay. But Mendelson says police repeatedly escorted her out of the park and eventually ticketed her for “distributing leaflets at a public event.” In April, a Nassau County judge threw out the citation, ruling it violated Mendelson’s constitutional rights.
(Click here to read the rest of the story.)

A clergyman who was forced on several occasions to turn off a speaker used to amplify his preaching in public has filed a lawsuit challenging a Jacksonville, Alabama, noise ordinance — one that prohibits any amplified speech that can be heard from more than ten feet away.

On two occasions this past March, Wesley Sewell attempted to share his faith in the vicinity of a local post office and was told by police that his speaker would have to be lowered or turned off — and on one of the occasions, he was told he needed a permit to speak, although another city employee later told him there was no official mechanism to obtain such a permit. To continue reading this report from One NewsNow click here!

A federal court has struck down the policy of a public school in New York state that didn’t allow a fourth-grader to distribute religious flyers during non-instructional time. Three years ago, Michaela Bloodgood was a fourth-grader at Nate Perry Elementary School in Liverpool, New York. She asked permission to distribute, during non-instructional time, a flyer that she had written to her friends and classmates. The flyer shared how Christ had saved her and had also healed her parents’ marriage.

But school officials said Michaela could not hand out the flyers because people might think the school was endorsing a religious message. Click here to read the rest from OneNewsNow!

Two Christian groups say they were ejected from a Pennsylvania university campus for preaching the gospel to an angry group of students.
Activists with the groups Repent America and Life & Liberty Ministries say they were on the Kutztown University campus to pass out gospel literature and speak with students about what the Bible teaches regarding a variety of issues, including abortion and homosexuality. When a crowd of about 300 students gathered to either listen to the preachers or ridicule their message, police told the Christian groups they were not permitted on campus because they did not give two weeks notice and were not sponsored by a campus group. Click here to read the rest from OneNewsNow!

After agreeing to dismiss trespassing charges against two members of the Gideons International missionary organization for handing out Bibles on a sidewalk earlier this year, the State of Florida has now charged the men under a different statute for that same incident.

The attorney feels the state’s actions border on religious persecution. “The First Amendment obviously protects the rights of individuals to engage in speech on a public sidewalk,” he says. “So the question is, why is the State of Florida prosecuting two Gideons for handing out Bibles on a public sidewalk?”
To continue reading this report from OneNewsNow, Click here!