If you haven’t already lost significant respect for Snopes as an impartial fact-checker, its analysis of a bill that bans all transactions involved in stating Christian beliefs about homosexual behavior should. That bill passed 50-18 on April 19 and is being considered in the state senate. Snopes’ insistence that California Assembly Bill 2943 would not result in the Bible being banned in California is akin to Snopes calling “demonstrably and clearly false” the claim that Joseph Stalin killed everyone around him.
True, Stalin did not kill “all” around him. Indeed, so far as we know he never personally killed anyone. But he did have a great many people killed (estimates indicate that he was responsible for the deaths of 20 to 25 million people), sent many others to the Gulag, and generally terrorized both his own country and Eastern Europe for decades.
Sure, it is virtually impossible that California will immediately attempt to ban the sale of the Bible itself. Not even the hard Left in California has that kind of chutzpah. But citations of Bible verses in the context of declaring homosexual practice and transgenderism to be morally debased could indeed get one into serious trouble with the law if it comes in the context of selling or advertising a product or service.
Here are the problems with Snopes’s case .......
FactCheck.org never bothered to do the most basic investigative work of all: “factcheck” the bill’s author and his assisting attorney in relation to the language of AB 2943.
...... Who could have imagined that when “sexual orientation” non-discrimination laws were passed in the 1980s and 1990s it would lead to Christian bakers, florists, and photographers being fined tens of thousands of dollars and put out of business? Or children compelled to undergo gender identity indoctrination from kindergarten on?
.... while the state might not immediately ban the sale of certain books, it could prosecute someone who recommended or shared such books with a person struggling with same-sex or transgender desires. The state could also prosecute someone who, at an event in which books advocating against homosexual practice or transgenderism are sold, urges homosexually active or transgender-identified persons in an audience to change their behavior.
After people adjust to this draconian step, the state might well decide to use the law to ban books outright. In the meantime, as French adds, “the law would loom over booksellers and churches, establishing a chilling effect and providing a pretext for even more secular booksellers to refrain from stocking certain Christian titles.
... What’s the bottom line? Either Low and Samson are deliberately misrepresenting matters to secure passage of this bill, or they have ignorantly constructed one of the most poorly worded bills imaginable. Whichever answer one goes with, the end result is the same: AB 2943 does not exempt from state action any oral or written communications associated with a monetary transaction that convey, in whole or part, that people should stop engaging in homosexual practice or expressing themselves as a gender at odds with their biological sex established before birth.
To those tempted to accept Low and Samson’s assurance I say: Caveat emptor.
Emboldened by the past several years, the LGBT group is now a steamroller, avidly determined to stamp out any/all resistance to their agenda. And their chief target is anyone holding to the truth of the Biblical worldview. Groups like Snopes and Factcheck.org gullibly play right into their hands.
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. (John 16:33, ESV)