Detailing the 84th #TXLEGE's Religious Liberty Failures

"The Lord is righteous in her midst,
He will do no unrighteousness.
Every morning He brings His justice to light;
He never fails,
But the unjust knows no shame.",
Zephaniah 3:5

Dave Welch of the Texas Pastors' Council has the grisly details:

Many reasons were given to us as to why SB 1155 in the Senate and HB 1556 in the House never even had a hearing – except the real reasons. It is important that pastors know the truth so we can be better prepared going forward.

We had difficulty finding a “senior” Senator who was willing to author this bill that would put the brakes on the proliferation of “bathroom bills” in every city in the state like those in San Antonio, Houston and Plano. We ran into a general fear of what the national media and pro-LGBT jihad did in Indiana. Sen. Bob Hall, a freshman in tenure but a solid and seasoned man agreed to author and file the bill, which became SB 1155. The Texas Association of Business, a powerful lobbying group soon held a press conference with the ACLU and pro-LGBT groups like Texas Freedom Network openly opposing ALL marriage protection or religious freedom bills.

These city “Equal Rights Ordinances” are spawned by the radical LGBT national Human Rights Campaign (led by a recently arrested sexual predator), and do nothing for equal rights but create new protected “characteristics” in sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression that not only don’t exist in state or federal law, they have a different definition in every city – but ALL carry criminal punishment for those who (as in San Antonio) “in word or in deed” disagree.

SB 1155 would have stopped this in its tracks by creating a uniform, statewide standard for discrimination protections. Senator Hall tried through proper channels to move the bill, including formally requesting on March 27 that Senator Huffman schedule a hearing, which she declined. (HB 1556, authored by Rep. Rick Miller (Sugar Land) was the same bill in the House, however Speaker Joe Straus’ team assigned it to Urban Affairs Committee chaired by Houston Democrat Carol Alvarado to assure it died there.)

Jonathan Saenz from Texas Values (affiliated with Focus on the Family) later met with Huffman’s staff, he and I met with her personally in mid-April and she continued to basically parrot the talking points provided by the Human Rights Campaign to the Texas Association of Business.

Read the whole thing here.

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Texas Values has A LOT more here.