Gag Order Lifted; City Worker Free to Share About Jesus Again
by Rusty Pugh
(AgapePress) – Political correctness has suffered a setback in Arizona.
A federal judge has ordered the City of Phoenix to remove a gag order placed on a city employee to silence his religious views. Attorney B.J. Brown of the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy says the city had placed the gag order on Richard Behn after he discussed Jesus Christ and scriptures with the son of a city supervisor.
City officials told Behn that the city's “zero-tolerance training” on the subject of mutual respect prohibited employees from discussing religious views in the workplace. Brown says the city considers sexual orientation as a protected topic, but not religion.
“It's amazing how intolerant those who push tolerance codes can be,” Brown says. “But the greatest irony is that the whole time Behn was under this gag order — due to the ostensible harm that his mere religious utterances might cause — his supervisors blasphemed with impunity [and] sexual deviants were guaranteed the right by city policy to openly discuss their various and sundry orientations.”
The attorney also points out that during the trial in city court, those who “fitted Richard with an iron mask” were allowed to communicate “their own irreligious musings at will.”
Behn has been instructed by his attorneys to make full use of his new-found freedom, which Brown says was late in coming due to the foot-dragging by the City of Phoenix.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
by Fred Jackson
(AgapePress) – In words that sound very much like former President Clinton, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather has offered an after-the-fact apology for participating in a Democratic Party fundraiser.
Attentive viewers have long been suspicious of the left-leaning views of many of the nation's “media elite.” In recent years, they dubbed CNN “the Clinton News Network” and expressed outrage when the White House correspondent for ABC News, John Cochrane, had Al Gore to his house for dinner at the start of last year's Presidential election.
Now comes word that Dan Rather was the guest speaker recently at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Texas. That a network news anchor, who is supposed to be unbiased, would do such a thing has media critics like Brent Bozell demanding an on-air apology from Rather.
“How many times have Rather and his colleagues in the establishment media railed at so-called 'partisan politics'?” Bozell asks. “Without a genuine and sincere apology to the viewing public, Rather's lips will forever drip with hypocrisy.”
But it looks like that is not going to happen. Instead, Rather has issued a statement, calling his speech to the Democrats “an embarrassing and regrettable error in judgment.”
According to USA Today, that apology is all Rather will have to do to get off the hook. The newspaper quotes CBS News President Andrew Hayward as saying he now considers the matter closed.
