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Breaking-Exclusive: Activist Admits Her Testimony To Senators On Texas Anti-Gay Bill Was False

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A leader of the anti-gay organization Concerned Women for America has admitted her testimony to the Texas Senate over a bill that would shield clergy and churches from same-sex weddings was not true.

Last week lawmakers on a Texas Senate committee heard testimony on SB 2065, a bill designed to shield clergy members and churches from performing same-sex weddings. While the First Amendment already provides this protection, this bill would allow clergy members who are employed by the state as justices of the peace or county clerks to refuse to marry same-sex couples. Texas lawmakers are engrossed in a battle against their LGBT constituents, and this month over two dozen anti-gay bills before them, including one that would literally defund same-sex marriage in the Lone Star State.

LOOK: Texas Lawmakers Begin Week Focusing On Anti-Gay Bills By Voting To Shield Clergy And Churches

On Monday, May 4, Beverly Roberts, an Area Director for Concerned Women for America, delivered testimony before Texas Senators. Concerned Women for America (CWA) is a right wing religious anti-gay, anti-abortion activist group that opposes same-sex marriage, a woman’s right to choose, the teaching of evolution in schools, feminism, pornography, stem cell research, and advocates for school prayer.

The mission of CWA is to protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens – first through prayer, then education, and finally by influencing our society – thereby reversing the decline in moral values in our nation,” its website states.

“I have a question for you,” Roberts, in red in the photo above and video below, told the Texas Senators as she began her testimony. “Is it necessary for a couple to be married by a minister to be legally married?” she asked.

“If not, why are homosexual couples in states where same-sex marriage is legal, demanding that ministers perform their marriage ceremonies?”

“Should we not consider these to be hate crimes?,” Roberts continued. “Are these not instances of targeted bigotry? Are these couples not engaging in the same bullying tactics they profess to deplore? Why are they attacking a minister when they don’t even need him to perform their marriage? So again I ask you, who are the bullies, the bigots and the haters?”

The New Civil Rights Movement reached out to Roberts via email on Monday, asking her to point us to “the story or stories you testified about,” as, to our knowledge, there are no actual instances in reputable news reports of same-sex couples demanding that ministers perform their marriage ceremonies.

In an email response received Monday night, Roberts effectively admitted that her testimony was false.

“My testimony did not relate to a specific instance,” Roberts told NCRM in her email, adding it was “to put a law into place ahead of a possible Supreme Court Ruling requiring all states to perform same-sex ‘marriages.'”

“We know that, given the tactics of the LGBT community, it would not be long before they started suing churches and ministers who decline to do their ceremonies,” Roberts wrote. “They just move incrementally as they force their agenda on the rest of us and we have begun to fight back.”

And yet, Roberts clearly asked Texas Senators, “why are homosexual couples in states where same-sex marriage is legal, demanding that ministers perform their marriage ceremonies?” while being unaware of any same-sex couples who, to her knowledge, have demanded that ministers perform their marriage ceremonies. All she could offer NCRM was, “We know that, given the tactics of the LGBT community, it would not be long before they started suing churches and ministers who decline to do their ceremonies.” That is not an instance of it having happened.

In her email Roberts included a link to an article in the Washington Times about last year’s story from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where right wing blogs and websites falsely claimed one same-sex couple had demanded ministers who own a wedding chapel marry them, but those reports were proven false long ago, as NCRM reported in, “Almost Everything You’ve Been Told About The Idaho Wedding Chapel Story Is A Lie,” and “Entire Hitching Post Controversy Is False: ACLU Finds Chapel Falls Under Religious Exemption.”

It’s important to note that Roberts pointed to the Washington Times story not as an example – although it would have been false – of same-sex couples demanding that ministers perform their marriage ceremonies, but rather, as she wrote in her email, in relation to “the ordinance that I was using as an example for what is to come.”

After Roberts’ testimony, and the testimony of others, including pastors who compared same-sex marriage to bestiality and pedophilia, as John Wright at Towleroad reported, the committee passed the bill 5-1. Yesterday, the Texas Senate passed the bill, 21-10. It is awaiting a vote by the Texas House.

The New Civil Rights Movement reached out again to Roberts today asking if she had anything additional to add. We have not received a reply.

Related:

Lawmaker Totally Certain His Unconstitutional Bill Will Override Supreme Court Marriage Ruling

Texas Anti-Gay Lawmaker And Gay Son Suffer Fallout Over Anti-Discrimination Bill

Texas Attorney General Sues Feds To Stop Same-Sex Spouses From Taking Care Of Each Other

 

Image: Screenshot via Lone Star Q/YouTube
Video from an article at Towleroad by John Wright

 

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Trump: Democrats Are Plotting ‘Total Obliteration’ of Supreme Court

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President Donald Trump is claiming that the top priority of Democrats is the “total obliteration” of the U.S. Supreme Court. His remarks came just hours after SCOTUS gave Republicans a 6-3 win along partisan lines, in the form of approving Texas’s redrawn mid-decade congressional maps that could help add five GOP-held seats to the U.S. House of Representatives. A lower court had ruled the redrawn Texas maps were likely racially biased.

Although there are different ways to measure, one study by Court Accountability this fall found that the Supreme Court has ruled in Trump’s favor 90% of the time.

“Most of these wins for the president came from the court’s ‘shadow docket’ slate of opinions — where the court has typically, in the past, only ruled on administrative measures,” according to Truthout. “However, in recent years, the Supreme Court has been making announcements on cases, issuing injunctions or allowances of actions to remain in place, that have the same effect, essentially, as a final decision.”

READ MORE: White House Touts Trump’s ‘Track Record’ on Affordability

On Friday, the president declared that the “Democrats number one policy push is the complete and total OBLITERATION of our great United States Supreme Court.”

“They will do this on their very first day in office, through the simple Termination of the Filibuster, SHOULD THEY WIN THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS,” he wrote.

Trump has strongly advocated for Republicans to eliminate the Senate filibuster.

“The Radical Left Democrats are looking at 21 Justices, with immediate ascension,” he wrote, claiming that Democrats would more than double the current size of the court.

“This would be terrible for our Country. Fear not, however, Republicans will not let it, or any of their other catastrophic policies, happen. Our Country is now in very good hands. MAGA!!!”

Some court reform advocates have suggested the Supreme Court be expanded to 13 justices, one for each of the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals.

READ MORE: Trump’s Ballroom Seen as ‘Key Evidence’ He’s Out of Touch as Cost of Living Spikes

 

Image via Reuters 

 

 

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White House Touts Trump’s ‘Track Record’ on Affordability

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As President Donald Trump calls Democrats’ push for affordability a “con job,” a “hoax,” and a “scam,” the White House continues to try to promote his focus on that very word — a focus many Americans say is, at best, insufficient.

“It’s a con job. I think affordability is the greatest con job,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Tuesday, as CNN reported. The news network noted that “for Trump, calling affordability a scam is doubly strange because it’s the very issue that helped propel him back to the White House.”

“Candidate Trump,” CNN added, “used remarkably similar language to what President Trump now dismisses as a hoax.”

For example, at an August North Carolina rally, Trump vowed, “We will target everything from car affordability to housing affordability to insurance costs to supply chain issues.”

READ MORE: Trump’s Ballroom Seen as ‘Key Evidence’ He’s Out of Touch as Cost of Living Spikes

“Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” Trump said in a late September rally in Pennsylvania.

A new Politico poll released on Thursday shows that many Americans blame President Trump for the affordability crisis they are experiencing on a daily basis.

“Almost half — 46 percent — say the cost of living in the U.S. is the worst they can ever remember it being, a view held by 37 percent of 2024 Trump voters,” Politico noted. “Americans also say that the affordability crisis is Trump’s responsibility, with 46 percent saying it is his economy now and his administration is responsible for the costs they struggle with.”

While candidate Trump vowed to end inflation “on day one,” the White House now promises that President Trump will “continue to focus on delivering on his Day One priority of ending Joe Biden’s inflation crisis.”

On President Joe Biden’s last day in office, inflation was officially at 2.9%. For the month of January, it came in at 3%. Through September, the last month of the official Labor Department reports, inflation stood at 3%.

Kevin Hassett is the Director of the White House’s National Economic Council, a senior advisor to the President on economic issues, and rumored to be a top Trump pick to run the Federal Reserve.

On Friday, he spoke with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, who decried Democrats’ ability to “rally around” the affordability crisis.

READ MORE: Inside Trump’s ‘Golden Age’: Troubling New Trends Emerge

“I just think, all of a sudden, the Democrats have found a way to get affordability to stick to their brand,” Bartiromo lamented. “And, Kevin, President Trump came into office with this priority of getting inflation down.”

“How is it possible that the Democrats have been able to rally around this word, ‘affordability,’ and make people think that that’s what they’re focused on and not what the Republicans are focused on, going into an election year?” she asked.

“You know,” Hassett replied, “it’s just what happens sometimes when, you know, one political party has a lot of the media echoing what they’re saying.”

Promising that “there’s lots and lots of things that we could do to reduce the problem of affordability,” Hassett declared that “the affordability problem is 100% created by the Biden administration, with their runaway regulation and their runaway inflation.”

He then touted Trump’s “track record” on the issue, referencing a topic from the first Trump administration.

“The thing I want to remind you is that the President has a proven track record on affordability in healthcare, and it’s this,” he insisted. “If you go back and look at our first term, when we came in and we started to negotiate with the drug companies and make sure that the FDA was approving generic drugs, we had two years in a row where the consumer price index for drugs went negative.”

“We had declining drug prices,” Hassett said. “The only two years that that happened, going all the way back to World War II, we did it then. We’ll do it again.”

READ MORE: Trump Urges Judge Aileen Cannon to Keep Jack Smith Report Secret

 

Image via Reuters

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Trump’s Ballroom Seen as ‘Key Evidence’ He’s Out of Touch as Cost of Living Spikes

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The White House reportedly will be submitting plans for President Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom to a federal planning commission later this month, after the East Wing of the White House has already been demolished and as the president replaces the project’s top architect.

“The 90,000-square-foot ballroom will dwarf the White House itself, at nearly double the size, and President Donald Trump has said it will accommodate 999 people,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday.

Critics blasted the latest news.

“Let me get this straight,” wrote U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), in response to the news. “Trump has a plan for a new ballroom, but barely has a concept of a plan to lower the cost of health care?”

READ MORE: Inside Trump’s ‘Golden Age’: Troubling New Trends Emerge

“Millions are losing health care, but hey, a ballroom! Unbelievable,” declared U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA).

“It seems like the Trump White House is working harder on constructing a new White House Ballroom than averting huge spikes in monthly premiums for 20 million Americans next year,” observed Brendan Duke of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

Those sentiments align with a new study from Navigator Research about how some Americans in six Senate battleground states feel about President Donald Trump’s focus.

“The wealthy are seen as benefitting from a rigged system,” Navigator reported on its findings, “and politicians are seen as not getting it. Many view President Trump as particularly out of touch, with his ballroom project as key evidence.”

“Trump is seen as out of touch with working class people, with several citing his ballroom project as a proofpoint,” Navigator added.

READ MORE: Trump Urges Judge Aileen Cannon to Keep Jack Smith Report Secret

The study noted that focus group participants “are struggling mightily to afford the basics – like dog food or energy bills – and see no real sign of the situation improving.”

Navigator also cited comments from focus group participants who shared a variety of concerns, including about the cost of living — and the president’s ballroom.

“I see the president building a ballroom when there’s people that can’t feed their families,” said a Michigan woman, described as a “weak Democrat.”

A woman in New Hampshire, also a weak Democrat, shared, “I blame Trump. He’s greedy, he wants to make money for him and his rich friends. They are throwing Americans aside, cutting, SNAP,” she said of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. “Everything’s gone to the wayside so that the rich can get richer.”

“I’m scared,” said a New Hampshire woman, an independent. “I’m scared. I’m scared of us losing our healthcare, of him not getting the care that he needs, and me not being able to provide for my family, even though I went to school and got a career to do so.”

A New Hampshire woman described as a weak Democrat said, “I think the economy’s going to tank because when we all lose healthcare starting in January, or most of us like me, I’m going to lose it in January, what is that going to do to the economy? People can’t afford to buy anything now. It’s going to just kill it.”

“How about a ballroom?” asked a Maine woman who was described as an independent. “A billion dollars. How much was it? $5 billion, $3 billion or something? Do we really need a ballroom, ladies? Are we going to go to a f – – dance?…They’re all out for themselves. ‘Let’s do the ballroom. Let’s do stuff that don’t need to be done and screw the American people.’”

READ MORE: Student’s Bible-Based Essay Grade Leads University to Put Instructor on Leave

 

Image via Reuters

 

 

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