Retaliation: LA County Cancels Church's Lease as John MacArthur's Congregation Continues to Worship God

Grace Community Church and its pastor, John MacArthur, have chosen to defy an unconstitutional order banning indoor church services in the name of fighting the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Los Angeles County has engaged in ridiculous court shenanigans to force the church to shut its doors but to no avail. So on Friday, the county’s Department of Public Works unilaterally decided to cancel the church’s lease agreement for a large portion of the church’s parking lot.

“Los Angeles County is retaliating against Grace Community Church for simply exercising their constitutionally protected right to hold church and challenging an unreasonable, unlawful health order,” Jenna Ellis, who is representing MacArthur and the church, and is a personal lawyer for President Donald Trump, said in a statement. “In America, we have a judicial system to ensure that the executive branch does not abuse its power, and Grace Community Church has every right to be heard without fear of reprisal.”

“The Democrats’ message to Americans is clear—if you don’t bow to every whim of tyranny, the government will come after you,” Ellis added. “The Church has peacefully held this lease for 45 years and the only reason the County is attempting eviction is because John MacArthur stood up to their unconstitutional power grab. This is harassment, abusive, and unconscionable.”

The lease concerns a large portion of the church’s parking lot, and has been in place since 1975. Under the terms of the rental agreement, either the church or the county can terminate the agreement if it gives 30-days notice. While the Department of Public Works letter giving the church notice does not cite a reason for the lease’s termination, it seems virtually certain that the move is a form of retaliation amid the religious freedom battle.

The religious freedom battle

Both Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) and the County of Los Angeles have health orders prohibiting indoor church services. MacArthur and his church have challenged those orders in court while continuing to meet in person, and LA County has tried — no fewer than four times — to convince judges to issue restraining orders preventing the congregation from gathering to worship God in church.

Rather than enforcing the existing health order, which imposes a fine of $1,000 and jail time, the county has sought court orders, ostensibly to shift blame to the court but also to penalize the church further. The county has asked a judge to find MacArthur and his church in contempt of court, which would cost the church more than $20,000 and attorney’s fees. Courts repeatedly rejected these shenanigans.

Gov. Newsom has reportedly threatened to cut off power to any church that continues to meet in-person. Yet he is facing a large movement of civil disobedience. A network of California churches sued him last month and many churches throughout the state have vowed to hold in-person worship services despite the state ban on gatherings.

Charles LiMandri, one of MacArthur’s lawyers, noted that California “has given free rein to protestors, and is not similarly restricting marijuana dispensaries, large retail outlets and factories, and abortion providers.”

“Nothing about this is truly about health. It’s an unconstitutional power grab,” Ellis told PJ Media earlier this month.

In a powerful Daily Wire op-ed last week, MacArthur explained why his church is facing this aggressive prosecution. He noted that in the wake of post-structuralist (deconstructive) reasoning, most Americans believe that each person has a different “truth” based solely on experience, so “it’s impossible to know anything with settled certainty” which means Americans “can’t really believe anything, either.”

MacArthur also quoted Romans 1, in which Paul warns what happens to people who embrace sin and reject God. “Just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:28-32).

The pastor warned that the shapers of culture in music, the arts, the academy, and the media “have indoctrinated recent generations to accept and even encourage every imaginable kind of depravity and radical ‘alternative lifestyle.'”

“We’re not supposed to notice the overtly self-destructive nature of popular moral deviancies or the aberrant subcultures they spawn,” MacArthur noted. So the mainstream media “will, for example, portray months of lawlessness and rioting as legitimate expressions of free speech — insisting that it has been ‘mostly peaceful,’ even though the destructive result is clearly evident to anyone with eyes to see.”

“Meanwhile, nothing is more politically incorrect than religious belief. Genuine faith in God is commonly represented as a dangerous, disqualifying disorder,” the pastor argued. “Just this week, for example, former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, speaking live on a national news network, suggested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo does not qualify to serve in public office because he is ‘overtly religious … which in itself is problematic.'”

Government policies regarding the coronavirus pandemic offer “more stunning examples of how far our culture has gone in losing its religion. States and counties across the nation have classified places like casinos, abortion clinics, liquor stores, and massage parlors as essential businesses, permitting them to remain open — while churches are commonly categorized as ‘nonessential’ and kept closed. The governor of California and county officials in Los Angeles have shown a determination to keep our church closed, even while encouraging massive political protests by angry people in the streets.”

The attack on religious faith ultimately traces back to human sin and America’s normalization of it. Church is essential, and not just for psychological health amid the dangers of a pandemic and riots. The foundational truths of Judaism and Christianity are the bedrock for western civilization and modern freedom and prosperity.

In attacking religious freedom, Newsom and LA County are attacking the roots of America’s civilization. While this legal battle is a matter of justice, it is also more important than just John MacArthur and Grace Community Church.

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Why Racial Tensions Are So High in the Least Racist Society on Earth

It is really easy to explain.  The Left traffic in hate. It appears to suit their nature. They use hate to get into power. But they have to have something to point to as the hate object.

For a long time the hate object was "the bosses".  And that got them a substantial working class vote.  Since the working class began voting conservative in droves, however, a new target was needed.  The old hate was no longer working

And the Left have been casting around for a while in trying to find a new target.  They tentatively tried America as a whole for a while but they have now refined it to white America.  Whites have been caricaturized as racists when it is in fact the Left who rely on race for their messages

We will see in November how well that strategy is working. It seems plainly silly, if not desperate



Rational analysts — that is, admittedly a small and vanishing group — agree: the Black Lives Matter narrative about “systemic racism” in the United States is completely contrary to reality. It is propaganda constructed in order to exacerbate racial division and has about as much truth to it as the Nazis’ narrative about how Jews conspired to sabotage Germany’s World War I war effort. America is actually the least racist society on earth, one of the only countries ever to have elected a member of a formerly despised minority to its highest office, and a nation that fought a bloody civil war and labored for a century thereafter to secure equality of rights for all. So why is there so much racial tension?

As Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster explains, the answer to that question is clear: there is so much racial tension because certain forces in the American public sphere benefit from its persistence. This is nothing new; in fact, it goes back to what should have been and what was heralded as the end of racism in the United States: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

What no one expected in 1964 was that the Civil Rights Act would herald not the end of racial tensions in the United States, but their aggravation. As a result in large part of the act, segregation ended in the South and equality of opportunity was virtually assured, with stiff penalties for those who denied it. Yet even as actual racism was becoming unusual, civil rights activists began to insist that racism was so deeply embedded in the psyche of the nation that had done more than any other to eradicate it that much more legislation was required, including measures giving not just equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which would require special boosts and privileges to minorities. This all but guaranteed that racial friction would remain a feature of the American landscape.

Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty replaced segregation in the South with nationwide programs that were even worse for the poor, as they took away incentives to work and created a permanently unemployed underclass in which an ever-larger group of people essentially became wards of the state.

That may have been the idea all along. The famously coarse Johnson is said to have boasted about the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “I’ll have those n—-rs voting Democratic for two hundred years.” Between that act and the War on Poverty, he certainly did create a bloc of black Americans who could be counted on to vote Democratic – at least until the advent of Donald Trump. Whether or not those votes were in the best interests of those who cast them was highly debatable, but no one dared debate it.

Then came Barack Obama. Throughout his tenure, Obama stoked racial tensions rather than calming them. When he took office, the Justice Department was pursuing a case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, abruptly dropped the case in May 2009 and refused to cooperate with further investigations, giving the impression that the Black Panthers were getting away with voter intimidation because of their race.

Obama’s response to several widely publicized incidents also exacerbated racial tensions. On July 16, 2009, black intellectual Henry Louis Gates found himself locked out of his Massachusetts home and began trying to force his way in. An officer arrived to investigate a possible break-in; Gates began berating him and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Obama claimed that the police “acted stupidly” and noted the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by police disproportionately,” although there was no indication of racial bias in the case. He invited Gates and the police officer to the White House for a “beer summit,” which the media hailed as a manifestation of his determination to heal racial divisions, when in fact it was just the opposite: he was taking a case of misunderstanding and disorderly conduct and portraying it as a racial incident requiring presidential reconciliation.

Obama also made matters worse when a young Hispanic, George Zimmerman, on February 26, 2012, shot dead a young black man, Trayvon Martin, in what was widely reported as a racial hate crime. NBC edited a recording of Zimmerman’s call to the police to give the false impression that Zimmerman was suspicious of Martin solely because he was black. Instead of trying to calm the situation, Obama stoked the idea that Zimmerman acted out of racial hatred and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”  Yet Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and the Justice Department declined to prosecute him for a hate crime.

As Rating America’s Presidents shows, it is two Democratic presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, who are primarily responsible for the high racial tension in the country today. Those who are hailed as the healers of racism actually made the condition of the patient much worse than it would have been otherwise.

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The European towns declaring themselves to be LGBT-free zones

Tuchow, a town of 6,500 people that lies 65 miles east of Krakow, is among a wave of Polish communities making such declarations after the country’s ruling Right-wing party ramped up rhetoric against ‘the cult of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] ideology’.

Politicians, priests and popular newspapers have called on people to stand firm against ‘a rainbow plague’ invading from abroad, even comparing its threat to the Communists and Nazis that so devastated their country last century.

The LGBT-free zone decision, taken by a small commune in the conservative rural heartlands of a Catholic country, strikes at the principles of the EU – of which Poland has been a member since 2004 – which was founded on shared values of democracy, freedom and tolerance.

One prominent politician called it a ‘chilling echo from previous times in a town barely 100 miles from Auschwitz’.

‘I learned in history books about Jew-free schools and shops and now they talk of LGBT-free towns,’ said Robert Biedron, a gay MEP from the liberal Left. ‘It reminds us of terrible times in the past.’

In a highly symbolic move, Tuchow and five other towns making similar anti-gay declarations had funding requests for twinning projects rejected last month by Brussels.

One horrified French commune has also suspended ties after 25 years.

But fears remain that Brussels is avoiding taking tougher action against both Poland and Hungary, despite seeing the two countries’ hardline populist leaders chip away at some core values of democracy such as freedom of the press, human rights and judicial independence.

‘Europe must defend its values,’ said Biedron. ‘But the trouble is our government is Eurosceptic so it will say the horrid West will not protect our children in Poland.’

This issue flared up last year after Rafal Trzaskowski, the centrist mayor of Warsaw, signed a landmark pledge of support for LGBT citizens that included anti-discrimination lessons in schools.

With elections looming, this was seized upon by the ruling Right-wing Law and Justice party in conjunction with the Catholic Church. They claimed it was a threat to family values, arguing that it would sexualise children and ‘propagate paedophilia’.

As the issue found traction with conservative voters, the rhetoric became cruder with ‘imported LGBT ideology’ compared to the social engineering of Nazis and Communists.

Marek Jedraszewski, archbishop of Krakow, even used last year’s 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising that liberated the capital from the Nazis to denounce ‘a rainbow plague…born of the same neo-Marxist spirit’ as Bolshevism ‘that wants to control our souls, our hearts and minds.’

Then the Law and Justice party made this subject a central issue in last month’s presidential election, with its incumbent candidate Andrzej Duda claiming gay ‘ideology’ was more destructive than Communism and being ‘smuggled’ into schools.

He beat Trzaskowski by a small margin.

Meanwhile, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party leader who really runs Poland, calls homosexuality ‘a threat to Polish identity, to our nation, to its existence and thus to the Polish state’.

Others claim Poland – which decriminalised homosexuality almost a century ago, before other European nations – is trying to protect family values against ‘alien’ concepts such as gay marriage and gender fluidity.

‘It’s not fashionable to talk about Christian and traditional values but people see them as being disrupted in a way that is as alien to their country as Communism,’ said one sympathetic analyst, adding: ‘This is not to say that we are anti-homosexuals.’

Such thoughts were echoed by party officials in Tuchow. ‘I don’t think homosexuals are worse than other people,’ said Grzegorz Niemiec, 32, a city councillor. ‘But the Polish model of family, with men and women being married, is a traditional one we should defend.’

He said ‘LGBT-free zones’ were designed to protect children in schools, claiming there was international pressure to enforce sex education and inflict gender choice on primary school pupils as young as four.

Poland has had a remarkable run of economic success since Communism ended in 1989, with growth stretching back 28 years aided by huge Brussels handouts.

Yet Trzaskowski admits his party shares some responsibility for some disenchantment in struggling communities from its time in government between 2007 and 2015. ‘We were changing the country so rapidly,’ he said.

‘But some people said they’d had enough of paternalistic elites telling them to be happy when gaps were widening.’

Or as Nina Gabrys, who heads the equality committee on Krakow city council, says: ‘We were building bridges but left behind the people who wanted their country back. Now this is being done in the most horrible way.’

The Law and Justice party cleverly exploited such concerns under its leader Kaczynski, a wily 71-year-old political operator who started out as an anti-Soviet activist.

A lifelong bachelor and strong nationalist, Kaczynski has never owned a computer, only opened his first bank account in 2009 and has taken just one holiday outside Poland to visit cousins in neighbouring Ukraine.

However, the situation is not nearly as bad as in Hungary, where autocratic prime minister Viktor Orban poses as a defender of traditional Christian values, takes pride in creation of the ‘illiberal state’ and scorns EU elites while his wealthy cronies milk the system.

Hungary, and now Poland, have shown Brussels’ weakness in face of aggressive threats to the EU’s core values.

Last month, the two nations fought off attempts to link spending by Brussels to compliance with the rule of law.

Eight months ago, the European Parliament condemned bigotry against LGBT citizens and told Poland’s government to revoke the hostile declarations being made by towns such as Tuchow.

Its demand was ignored.

Then the Warsaw government gleefully stepped in to make up the town’s loss of income after Brussels rejected its application for a grant of up to £22,000 under its twinning programme – and handed it more than twice that sum.

‘We are supporting a municipality that promotes support for well-functioning families and fights against the imposed ideology of LGBT and gender, which is being pushed by the European Commission,’ said Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro.

The courts’ failed attempts to stand up to the Polish government’s hardline agenda have dismayed activists such as Artur Barbara Kapturkiewicz, a transgender doctor and co-founder of a Christian group called the Faith and Rainbow Foundation.

‘These people think that Poland is the only moral country that will reawaken the West and renew Christian values,’ he says.

‘But this is the politics of discrimination and dehumanisation – and it soils our nation.’

SOURCE






How the middle class got screwed by globalisation

You could see the pandemic coming. It wasn’t as though there was no warning. The virus emerged in China but arrived in North America before we were ready, and it landed with the destructive force of a tsunami. Record-setting consumer spending hit a brick wall as shoppers stayed home.

New car sales went over a cliff. And following just like clockwork, unemployment went through the roof as shops and factories shut down. An unprecedented bull run on the stockmarket quickly turned into panic selling, and the Dow cratered, seemingly overnight. The S&P 500 dropped over 20 per cent into bear market territory, and the result was a global recession that seemed to come out of nowhere. More than 116,000 people died in the United States.

Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show that year, the frisbee was invented, Ford introduced the Edsel with great fanfare, Canada unveiled the Avro Arrow jet fighter, the USSR launched Sputnik, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as president of the US. It was 1957.

By the way, the world recovered almost immediately from the Asian flu, as that pandemic was known. After a staggering 10 per cent decline in gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of 1958, by the third quarter growth had spiked to 10 per cent — a 20 percentage-point swing. So, no big deal, right?

The economy got the flu, it took some time off, and it went right back to churning out jobs and profits. In fact, when economists and historians talk about the “Eisenhower Recession,” they seldom even mention the Asian flu as a cause.

It would seem to follow, then, that we have a model to help us predict what the recovery from COVID-19 will look like. Just look at 1958, and then wait for the jobs and the markets to return to form and the good times to resume — not quite the catastrophe we feared.

But if you’re thinking that what was true in 1958 is true today, this book is for you. Because while consumer spending, consistent GDP growth and a record-breaking bull run on the stock market may make it feel as though we’ve wandered into the Eisenhower era, that is a dangerous illusion, especially if you’re a member of the rapidly shrinking middle class. Because consumer spending, GDP growth and stocks have almost nothing to do with your economic health.

In fact, as you will see, those things measure only rich people’s economic health. And of late, these folk haven’t been getting rich by making more Edsels or engineering more Arrows.

Those cars and planes belong to a different world, a world in which factory jobs paid a middle-class wage and products on the shelves came from factories down the road. A world in which local labour was so essential that their jobs were secure. And a world where taxes were so progressive that the rich actually paid their freight. That was a long time ago.

Looking backward in politics is usually considered poor form. It’s much safer to be considered progressive and look ahead. But the fact is that the late 1950s and early 1960s may

have marked the greatest economic equality in history. And that economic health was like immunological health. The economy got better quickly because it was already healthy.

But two other things happened in 1957 that give us some sense of why the recovery from the COVID-19 recession might be a lot harder than shaking off the Asian flu.

First, the Treaty of Rome was signed in March of that year, establishing the precursor of the European Union (the European Economic Community). Though the tight political and economic integration of a “United States of Europe” was still just a dream, the Treaty of Rome was an important step in creating a common market. Up until that point, each country had the ability to impose tariffs to protect key industries and the associated jobs. From that moment on, France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg would give up that ability in exchange for the right to sell in each other’s markets without facing tariffs.

In other words, it was a form of free trade and a precursor of what was to follow. Free trade was an idea that was sweeping the world. The General Agreement on Tariffs

and Trade (GATT), a treaty designed to increase international trade by removing protections for industry and labour, had been signed into law in 1947, and went through several rounds

of updates, each slashing more tariffs. In 1956, the so-called Geneva Round (because it was negotiated in Geneva), eliminated $2.5 billion of protections between twenty-six countries.

So, globalisation was swirling in the air as the Asian flu was making its way across the Pacific. The Asian flu could have cratered the global economy, but it didn’t.

If a worker from 1957 could see Detroit today, what would he think? The shuttered factories across North America, the boarded-up main streets, the empty union halls — the physical

toll of globalisation would be inescapable.

Which brings us back to the flu.

Early on in the COVID-19 crisis, the scale of the required government response was often compared to that needed during the Second World War. It was time for our ingenuity and

industrial might to be put to good use and mobilised, much in the way it had been a couple of generations ago. The US built more than twenty-seven hundred Liberty-class freighters between 1941 and 1945. That’s two fourteen-thousand-tonne ships every three days (or more than thirty-nine million tonnes of ship.) Surely, the world’s biggest economy could make some N95 PPE masks.

Well, not really. On March 19, 2020, Taiwan announced it could spare 100,000 masks per week for the US (their sole military ally, which has been protecting them from Communist China for generations at immense cost). That’s out of a weekly output of 7 million masks. So the Taiwanese were willing to set aside 1.4 per cent of their mask capacity for their much larger ally.

The EU also adopted a policy of “every man for himself.” In March, Brussels banned the export of medical equipment, even to other European countries, before eventually relenting in the face of pleas from member countries like Italy which were hit particularly hard by the pandemic. Exasperated Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic stood in front of television cameras and said, “European solidarity doesn’t exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.” Shortly thereafter, Serbia shut its borders. The only foreigners allowed to enter the country? Chinese doctors. Vucic called China “the only ones who can help.”

He did have a point (though Russia also sent several transport planes full of equipment and medical personnel). Before the crisis broke, half of the world’s masks were made in China.

Since then, the country has increased production twelve-fold.

By the end of March, factories in China were pumping out 115 million a day (which puts the Taiwanese gift in perspective). But there’s more to the story than Chinese manufacturing output.

Many of those Chinese factories are making masks for international companies. On paper, Canadian company Medicom was making 3 million masks a day at its Shanghai factory. But rather than being shipped to Canada, they were all claimed by the Chinese government. American chemical giant 3M also has mask plants in Shanghai, but according to American trade officials, the factories had effectively been “nationalised.” They may have been under contract to the American company, but when push came to shove, the Chinese government had priority.

So sure, our companies still make things. It’s just that the factories are somewhere else. And the jobs are somewhere else. And, when we need them, the masks are somewhere else too.

What the COVID-19 crisis has shown us is that questions of economic theory aren’t just about economic health. They’re about health. Period. Because it’s not just masks and protective gowns the Chinese government effectively control. For years, lax regulatory control and low wages have made China a major source for the majority of component chemicals that go into generic drugs — that is, nearly all of the drugs Canadians and Americans are prescribed.

The same goes for antibiotics. In the 1980s, the United States had far-ranging emergency-response readiness, including antibiotic manufacturing capacity spread across the continent. The US produced 70 per cent of the world’s supply. Now it is dependent on imports from China.

In a world frequently described as “globalised,” that’s not supposed to matter. The magic of just-in-time-delivery, combined with efficient labour markets and economies of scale, is supposed to provide us with whatever we need, in abundance and at the best prices. That may work for flip-flops and lawn furniture, but, as it turns out, it doesn’t work in an emergency.

It doesn’t work when you absolutely need it to work.

It shouldn’t have taken a bat peeing on a pangolin in Wuhan to teach us this lesson. The evidence has been piling up around us for years. But tragedy has a way of focusing one’s attention.

Global deregulation was always a bad idea. It was always set up to benefit a small number of people at immense cost to everyone else. Exactly what that cost is becomes clear when we compare today’s economy with 1957’s.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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