What they told him is:
"You need to stop volunteering, because
we're afraid that some parents
might be upset about your homosexuality
and not want to leave you with their children."
There was this 20-year-old guy who has been going to the church, volunteering with the church.
He's like the model churchgoer, if that's your thing.
He's gone on mission trips with this church. He's volunteered for them so much
and he's gay.
And recently, you know, it became known that he's gay.
And so the church's leadership had a decision to make
which is, "How do you respond when there's an openly gay person in your congregation?"
What they told him is:
"You need to stop volunteering, because
we're afraid that some parents
might be upset about your homosexuality
and not want to leave you with their children."
That's what they said to this kid, like stopping a volunteer
because other people might be bigots
and they're really homophobic
and so, you're on your own here, yeah.
You can come to church. You can tithe and give us money all you want,
but you can't really volunteer with the kids.
In the next couple of months, we're seeing a lot of the Sunday Assembly, "the atheist church". You're seeing a lot of those services
spread throughout America
and in other countries as well.
But Ken Ham, who is the founder of the Creation Museum, the guy who runs Answers in Genesis,
total creationism proponent,
he said that he knows why these atheists want to join churches:
And it's because, secretly, we believe in God.
There's an article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press newspaper recently,
about how high school football coaches in
Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Southern states basically, like 32 of them,
all said prayer is a part of football practice. It's part of the football culture
in high school, by the way.
And what they were basically saying is that prayer, and a team prayer,
is just a part of their daily routine. It's what they do
to prepare for football games on Friday nights.
And they're just proud of it.
They're saying: "This is what we do here. It's the way it is and you can't stop us."
But here's what scares me, because I don't really care about the coaches, I care about the students.
And if you're a student on any of those football teams and you are not a Christian,
or you're a Christian who,
you know, believes in separation of church and state,
you don't really get a choice here. You are basically coerced into joining these prayers.
A lot of these kids know the locker room is no place for dissent.
And they know that you basically have to pray to play.
They're just-- They're asking for a law suit. And I hope it comes because they deserve it.
There's this Catholic priest, father Greg Reynolds. He's from Melbourne, Australia.
And he recently got excommunicated from the Catholic Church. What he did is he said:
"I think it's okay for women to become ordained in the Catholic Church."
"And gay marriage? I'm fine with that, like I would ordain, you know, a gay marriage."
And the Vatican basically said,
"You can't do that. You're going against everything we stand for
and you're out of here," like you're excommunicated. "You can't
take communion anymore," which is a big deal to them.
And here's the thing that really gets to me:
We've been seeing so many headlines. I've even made a video about Pope Francis
and how he's really out of the mold for a lot of Catholics, because he's
openly saying we shouldn't be focusing on these divisive issues like
gay marriage and abortion, and everything.
But even though he could have said,
you know, "I'm okay with this father
and, you know, he should not be excommunicated,"
he didn't do that.
Jessica Ahlquist was a high school student at Cranston High School West in Rhode Island
and a couple years ago,
she basically filed a lawsuit, or she was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit,
because there was a religious mural
in her high school. And she said:
"That shouldn't be there, because it says Amen and it references, you know, Our Father as if we all have
this heavenly Father."
And she won her lawsuit.
The class of 1963 from that high school, they were the ones who initially
made that mural that went up in the school, the religious mural
that was now taken down.
They said: "You know what? For our 50th reunion anniversary,
we want to offer the school a new mural."
"And this one is constitutional."
And so they dedicated that mural this past weekend,
and they invited. It was a closed-door session kind of to celebrate the unveiling of this mural.
And guess who wasn't invited.
Of course, Jessica. Jessica wasn't invited at all.
Which is just stunning, because you would think when they're unveiling this mural that
they need to unveil because of what Jessica did,
and because she was right and because she won that lawsuit.
Nope, they didn't reach out to her at all. The young woman stood up for the Constitution.
The courts agreed with her
and they're so mad because they have this crazy notion
that Jessica somehow took away their rights as a Christian.