Homophobes giving invocations at Dallas City Council meetings. What about your city?
The horrific homophobes I found giving invocations at Dallas City Council for just one summer. How to do this project and defend the Gay community.
Homophobes giving invocations for Dallas City Hall meetings.
The photo is a tweet made my Jim Denison on twitter in which he makes use of monkeypox to assert that Christian faith is against homosexuality.
Project development of how to respond to city hall enabling homophobic Christians.
Though I am going to describe an effort in Dallas, Texas, the method I am using could be applied to any place where they have invocations for meetings and anti-Gay people religious individuals and groups are being enabled.
Outline
1. Why is this important?
2. June and August month investigations.
3. How to investigate and report homophobes giving invocations.
Why is this important?
Being selected gives both prestige and legitimacy to the religious individual and the group he represents as well as an audience of those attending the meeting. It empowers anti-Gay religious groups.
First Period – Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson and City Council member Adam Bazaldua.
During Pride month, though City Hall had Pride flags, both speakers in June 2022 were people who were part of significant anti-Gay organizations.
On 6/8/2022 City Council meeting, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson had the president of Dallas Baptist University give the invocation.
If you go to this LGBT group which investigates and reports on universities, Campus Pride,
You will see a table for the “Worst List,” the “Absolute Worst Campuses for LGBTQ Youth.”
https://www.campuspride.org/worstlist/
And on that list is Dallas Baptist University and an explanation why.
On 6/22/2022 City Council member Adam Bazaldua had Pastor Jesse Perez of Victory Outreach of Dallas and praised him. They are very anti-Gay and they global it seems. This is online for the whole denomination. You can download it.
https://victoryoutreach.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/victory-outreach-beliefs-document.pdf
What does it say about Gays? The word “homosexual” appears 44 times in the document. Here are some examples from the above document. On page 1.
Here are some prime examples of how faithful God is to forgive sin and to what extent He will pardon the wrongdoer: The Corinthians were involved in swindling, thievery, idolatry, drunkenness, sexual immorality (including prostitution and homosexuality), and yet by the grace of God their sins were washed away and they were set apart as saints for God’s kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9-11).
Page 28 is devoted to their “position on homosexuality.” It basically states that homosexuality is condemned in the Bible and is contrary to Christianity.
A quote from page 28.
While studies have been conducted to show that homosexuals are born gay, many psychiatrists and psychologists affirm that almost every case of homosexuality involves patients who have had very negative childhood experiences. In actuality, homosexuality is a behavior and preference – not a condition – and this means it is curable. There have been numerous testimonies of those who were once gay, but have been changed forever from their former lifestyle through the power of God in Christ Jesus. Real change is possible for the gay person, but much like drug or alcohol addiction, sexual addiction and homosexual orientation requires a person to be determined to say no to his/her vice, …
Dallas City Council person had the Associate Pastor from Victory Outreach to speak at the 8/3/2022 City Council meeting. (In July the Dallas City Council didn’t meeting.)
I made two videos which people could watch online and learn about who these invocation speakers. Skip over these videos to see the 2nd Period
Second Period
Whereas June was terrible, August turned out to be horrific.
Dallas City Council member Jaynie Schultz had Nick Pitts, Board Chair for the Dallas Christian Leadership Prayer Breakfast give the speech. Searching on the Internet I found references to his writings, but the links didn’t go to an existing page.
I had to use the Internet Archive (
https://archive.org/
) Wayback Machine to track things down and I did. The Internet Archive is a little slow on loading pages. (Don’t confuse archive.org with archive.com or other similar named websites.)
Notice that this was on the Dennison Forum, an organization hostile to Gay rights in the City of Dallas. (Not Denison, Texas.)
It appears to be named after Jim Denison.
In this case Nick Pitts isn’t happy that an Evangelical church in San Francisco had become more accepting of Gays.
This article is in defense of trying to supposed therapy to make Gays straight.
Here Nick Pitts expresses his opposition to Gay marriage.
On the 8/17/2022 City Council meeting Jaynie Schultz had John Gibson of Market Place Chaplains speak. This is an organization which provides on staff ministers to businesses. This means some minister is on the company’s payroll for you to go to talk over problems. I did find out that it was founded in the 1980s at a meeting at First Baptist Church Dallas, when W.A. Criswell was pastor. In the 1980s Criswell gave sermons in which he said AIDS was God’s punishment for “sodomy,” the word Criswell used.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1984/the-last-judgment/
Quoting from the above sermon made in 1984.
But if we disobey those laws, there is disaster, failure that awaits us. Let me give you dynamic and traumatic illustration of that in a terrible way. Because of the teaching of the Word of God, that it is wrong for a man to have sexual relationships with another man, and it is wrong for a woman to be sexually intimate with another woman, because of the teaching of God’s word, AIDS the disease of AIDS was eradicated from the earth. It was never known. It was never heard of. It had disappeared from the surface of God’s created planet.
In our lifetime, we are scoffing at the Word of God, laughing at these old-fashioned puritanical ideas, and opening up society and culture to the permissiveness of the lesbian and the sodomite and the homosexual. Now the terrible disastrous judgment of the sin and disease of AIDS startles and frightens the earth. [Boldface added.]
Here is another sermon.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1985/the-sin-of-sodom1/
Quoting from the above sermon:
I have seen them parade through the city on television, and I have seen pictures of them in the daily paper; two hundred fifty thousand sodomites in one city. And, of course, having expatiated on that at the early service, one of the men, one of the fine men in our church came up to me after the early service and said, "Pastor, did you know the third city in America in the number of sodomites in it is the city of Dallas? Did you know that?" And he said, "Not only that, but did you know that the third city in the United States in the number of AIDS, the disease, the blight, the curse, the judgment of AIDS, is in the city of Dallas, did you know that?" [Boldface added.]
You can read all of Criswell’s sermons which used the term “sodomy” in which he attacked Gays at this link. https://wacriswell.com/search/?wpv_post_search=sodomy
These are Criswell’s sermons which used the term “aids”. https://wacriswell.com/search/?wpv_post_search=aids
However, on their webpages I don’t find anything. There has been some commentary about the reality of their image, but I am not going to go into that here.
However, it was Cara Mendelsohn, District 12, who had Rochia Green, Chief Operations Officer of Denison Ministries give an invocation on 8/24/2022.
This is a seriously anti-Gay operation in the City of Dallas focusing on attacking Gay rights.
Lots and lots of sermons against Gays at this website. At the bottom of the page it indicates there are nine pages of articles found using the search term “homosexual.”
https://www.denisonforum.org/?s=homosexual
Here Jim Denison talks about monkeypox and Gays in this May 24, 2022 article.
In the article found with the above link, Jim Denison complains that he might unjustly be called homophobic and then wishes his readers to consider the following when they think about monkeypox.
· Homosexuality is not God’s design for us.
· God loves all of us, whatever our sexual orientation.
· We are all broken sexually.
· And no one is beyond his redeeming and transforming grace (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:9–11).
Denison didn’t waste anytime exploiting monkeypox. I would also point out that when people like this have influence in local government is it any wonder that things might have been more aggressive in Dallas County in responding to monkeypox than it was. I don’t know, but when these currents are circulating through their connections in government, I think the question can be raised. Though the response to monkeypox might be what it is because of a slow to respond government.
A sample of his articles.
Opposes effort against bullying in schools.
https://www.denisonforum.org/daily-article/day-of-silence-supports-homosexuals-in-school/
This is a May 2, 2022 article.
https://www.denisonforum.org/resources/what-does-the-bible-say-about-homosexuality/
This is the webpage for his book.
https://www.thecomingtsunami.com
This is Jim Denison’s tweet on monkeypox.
This person is devoting considerable time and energy to attack Gays and his organization was given the prestige and validation that occurs when a person from their group is asked to give an invocation as a person from Denisonforum.
How to you do this.
1. Make an Excel sheet with the columns, “No., Governmental unit, Date, Invocator, Title, Church/Institution, which government official chose the person, Information (links to their church or key information), a column on whether you got the documentation of the invocation (Yes/No), a column as to whether you created your presentation (Yes/No), a column whether you have your documentation folder completed, and a Notes column. You will really need an Excel sheet to organize your investigation. Notice I use color coding to mark off things. You don’t have to do it exactly this way, just make sure you have a grip on your project.
This allows you to be organized and also break the task into smaller tasks and leave off and pick up on the project.
2. You need to have for the documentation a file YYYY-MM-DD Government Unit for the documentation in which you keep everything organized for each invocation.
3. You will want to printout PDFs of each web page you are referring to or linking to. Stuff on the internet disappears.
4. Submitting a webpage for archiving at the Internet Archive is good, since even if they delete it, it will be at the internet archive. Make sure you have somewhere recorded the link, since they are very long.
https://archive.org/
For example, I just now saved the Denisonforum page against efforts to eliminate bullying to the Internet archive. It isn’t that difficult.
Just submit the URL for the page of interest you want to save, and if it isn’t saved, the Internet Archive will ask if you want to save it. This essay is now at the following link and can’t disappear.
5. The Dallas City and Dallas County meetings are video recorded and you can download video segments of the meetings. You will need to find out where this is record.
6. Then write your report or create your video. You can create a PowerPoint video and make sure the times of the slides are set, and then PowerPoint will export it as a video. It won’t have sound unless you have added in sound files. However, what you want to say can just be slides with text which people read as the video progresses. This is a barebones method that is simple. Of course you can do it with video software if you have it.
7. Upload the video to your YouTube account. Share the video on multiple platforms to the public.
8. Visit and speak before your city council or county people and get yourself on video speaking on this issue and hopefully get some press coverage.
Summary
It doesn’t take any special computer or internet talents to do this project. It only takes a few hours a week at most. Initially it will take a little time to come up to speed on some things, but it isn’t that difficult.
The result could be that you uncover a serious problem in your city or county and also the failure of your local elected officials to take Gay rights seriously.
This is one thing in which a Gay atheist could have a significant impact and also push back against anti-Gay Christianity.
