Tosh 3.0: What the No-Free-Speech ordinance "actually" does
By Jay Rogers
Published May 18, 2013
City Attorney Larry Brown and the Winter Park Police try to explain
WINTER PARK, Florida (www.forerunner.com) – On October 22, 2012, Winter Park City Attorney Larry Brown gave details explaining what the city’s anti-picketing ordinance actually does.
The city and the city commissioners have been sued for the recently enacted anti-picketing ordinance which simply prohibits picketing within a 50-foot buffer from private residences. Picketing is defined as “standing, milling about, loitering” in front of someone’s residence while you’re protesting the specific people inside the residence. The ordinance doesn’t prohibit marching, parading. It doesn’t prohibit general expression. It just prohibits the focus right in front of someone’s home. – City Attorney Larry Brown
Now if someone could just explain this to the Winter Park City Police and the City Commissioners!
Compare this with the following explanation on April 13th, 2013 by the Winter Park Police.
See: http://www.forerunner.com/blog/tosh-20-retaking-winter-park-s-no-free-speech-buffer-zone.
The police got it partly right and partly wrong. The police say in the video that they had been on the phone with the city attorney all morning trying to understand the ordinance. They understood that “protesters” cannot picket inside the buffer zone. They also thought that no one can “loiter” outside the buffer zone. Either City Attorney Larry Brown was not telling the truth or they were confused.
Here is how one pro-life evangelist explained his understanding of the ordinance and how the City Commission responded:
Now fast forward to three weeks ago, April 27th.
Again they get it wrong. But they are less wrong this time. This was the second challenge to the “no-free-speech” buffer zone ordinance. Two weeks prior to this the police understood that we could not picket in side the buffer zone. They also thought that we cannot “loiter” outside the buffer zone.
This time they gave us a little more. They said we can march back and forth inside the buffer zone and camp out outside, but we cannot stand still inside the buffer zone even if we did not have signs targeting the residence.
This got a little confusing for a next door neighbor who thought that we were going to jail because we were outside her home.
It remains to be seen what would happen if someone stood outside the 50 foot buffer zone targeting the Planned Parenthood CEO and another person stood in front of that residence targeting the next door neighbor in the video 50 feet away from her property line.
In conclusion, I don’t blame the police or anyone in Winter Park for being confused about this ordinance. It is confusing. The best thing to do with the First Amendment is to just leave it alone. We can’t have freedom inside our homes unless we have the freedom to demonstrate our First Amendment rights outside.
Stay tuned for Tosh 4.0.
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Dr. Schaeffer, who was one of the most influential Christian thinkers in the twentieth century, shows that secular humanism has displaced the Judeo-Christian consensus that once defined our nation’s moral boundaries. Law, education, and medicine have all been reshaped for the worse as a consequence. America’s dominant worldview changed, Schaeffer charges, when Christians weren’t looking.
Schaeffer lists two reasons for evangelical indifference: a false concept of spirituality and fear. He calls on believers to stand against the tyranny and moral chaos that come when humanism reigns-and warns that believers may, at some point, be forced to make the hard choice between obeying God or Caesar. A Christian Manifesto is a thought-provoking and bracing Christian analysis of American culture and the obligation Christians have to engage the culture with the claims of Christ.
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Patrick Henry’s famous declaration not only helped launch the War for Independence, it also perfectly summarized the mindset that gave birth to, and sustained, the unprecedented experiment in Christian liberty that was America.
The freedom our Founders envisioned was not freedom from suffering, want, or hard work. Nor was it freedom to indulge every appetite or whim without restraint—that would merely be servitude to a different master. No, the Founders’ passion was to live free before God, unfettered by the chains of autocracy, shackles that slowly but inexorably bind men when the governments they fashion fail to recognize and uphold freedom’s singular, foundational truth: that all men are created in the image of God, and are thereby co-equally endowed with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
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Is there a connection between pagan religion and the abortion industry?
This powerful presentation traces the biblical roots of child sacrifice and then delves into the social, political and cultural fall-out that this sin against God and crime against humanity has produced in our beleaguered society.
Conceived as a sequel and update to the 1988 classic, The Massacre of Innocence, the new title, The Abortion Matrix, is entirely fitting. It not only references abortion’s specific target – the sacred matrix where human beings are formed in the womb in the very image of God, but it also implies the existence of a conspiracy, a matrix of seemingly disparate forces that are driving this holocaust.
The occult activity surrounding the abortion industry is exposed with numerous examples. But are these just aberrations, bizarre yet anomalous examples of abortionists who just happen to have ties to modern day witchcraft? Or is this representative of something deeper, more sinister and even endemic to the entire abortion movement?
As the allusion to the film of over a decade ago suggests, the viewer may learn that things are not always as they appear to be. The Abortion Matrix reveals the reality of child-killing and strikes the proper moral chord to move hearts to fulfill the biblical responsibility to rescue those unjustly sentenced to death and to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves (Proverbs 24:11,12; 31:8,9).
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