Legendary footballer Vassilis Tsiartas.
TWO ARTICLES IN ONE POSTING…
SEE THE RELATED ARTICLE FOLLOWING THE ONE PERTAINING TO VASSILIS TSIARTAS RECEIVING A JAIL SENTENCE FOR STANDING UP TO THE HOMOSEXUAL/TRANSGENDER LIE THE WORLD UPHOLDS AND EMBRACES…
Sports Star Jailed 10 Months for ‘Transphobic’ Message that ‘God Created Adam and Eve’
November 8, 2022
By Ben Johnson
Reprinted from The Washington Stand
One of the most legendary soccer players of his time received a jail sentence and a fine for posting “transphobic” social media messages citing the Bible’s creation account.
“God created Adam and Eve,” wrote retired Greek football legend Vassilis Tsiartas in the second of two Facebook posts opposing a 2017 law that would have lowered the age to legally change one’s gender to 15 and removed other legal barriers.
The 49-year-old initially responded by saying, “I hope that the first sex changes will be made to the children of those who voted for this abomination.” Members of Parliament may as well “legalize pedophiles and complete their crimes” against nature, he wrote.
While citing the Book of Genesis, the 18-year soccer standout explained his faith-based objection to extreme gender ideology and the redefinition of marriage. “Anyone can have his preferences whether he is a man or a woman, and I completely respect that. For me, however, a couple is only a man and a woman, the rest are just together. I’m not going to accept all the weddings, all the parades, and anything else they do as normal,” Tsiartas wrote. He said he had no time for anyone who claims “those who don’t agree are racists.”
Human “dignity,” he said, came from a higher power than mankind. “God created Adam and Eve. The rest [of gender identities] were manufactured for consumption,” he concluded.
Tsiartas received a 10-month suspended prison sentence and a suspended fine of 5,000 euros from the Single-Member Misdemeanor Court of Athens. The Transgender Support Association, which brought the lawsuit, called punishing his biblical views “particularly important for the transgender community.” Tsiartas plans to appeal the decision.
The ruling marks at least the second time a European court has ruled that biblical values violate the human rights of transgender individuals.
In 2019, a British court ruled that “belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism, and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others.” Genesis 1:27, often cited as the cornerstone of human rights, states: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
“This I understand to be legalese meaning that my belief in God and the dishonesty of using transgender pronouns is akin to Nazism,” wrote Dr. David Mackereth, a Reformed Baptist physician who was fired from his job with the U.K.’s Department for Work and Pensions in 2018 for theoretically declining to refer to “any six-foot tall, bearded man” as “madam.”
“The teaching of Genesis 1:27 is repeated throughout the Bible, including by Jesus Christ himself,” said Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, which represented Mackereth. “It is fundamental to establishing the dignity of every human person but is, in a bizarre ironic twist, being branded as incompatible with that dignity.”
On June 29, the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled that the lower court had erred in saying that Mackereth’s “belief in Genesis 1:27 did not amount to a protected characteristic” covered by the freedom of religion secured by the UK’s 2010 Equality Act. It also took aim at the lower court’s contention that Mackereth’s views were “likely to cause offence” to others. “The fact that a belief is likely to cause offence cannot, however, mean that it is automatically excluded from protection,” ruled EAT.
But EAT ruled that Mackereth’s actions stemmed from his “belief in Genesis 1:27, not the present state of information available” on transgenderism. Ultimately, EAT let his termination stand, saying that Christians have the right to practice their faith, but only if it does not conflict with the “rights” of others, such as lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, and queer provisions.
“I am grateful to the court for recognising that a belief that we are made by God, both male and female ‘in His image’ is not incompatible with human dignity,” said Dr. Mackereth, while he opposed its decision that religious liberty ranks below other putative rights.
Mackereth announced he will take his case to the Court of Appeal, because “my case affects everyone, not just me and Bible-believing Christians, but anyone who is concerned by compelled speech and transgender ideology being enforced on the NHS and other public services.”
“As Christians, we are not trying to be unkind to people in any way. As Christians we are called to love all people with Christian love,” Mackereth concluded. “But we cannot love people truly when we live and disseminate a lie.”
Ironically, the controversial bill’s supporters also invoked God while arguing for its passage. “What God is it that has us take decisions that push children into bullying, humiliation and suicides?” asked left-wing then-Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, promoting a bill the Greek Orthodox Church called “Satanic.” Tsipras lost his position in 2019 to the more conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who opposed the measure.
U.S. President Joe Biden has also cited the Bible to argue in favor of transgender injections and surgeries for minors.
Sources inside the Orthodox Church did not immediately respond to The Washington Stand’s requests for comment on the Tsiartas case.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
5 Ways Joe Biden Is Cursing the Soul of America
By Ben Johnson
Reprinted from The Washington Stand
In a speech brimming with dehumanizing and erroneous statements, President Joe Biden hit upon a truth: “I believe we were in a battle for the soul of this nation.” His insight is true, if unoriginal. Unfortunately, Biden’s fighting on the wrong side.
Biden drew on his Catholic background while trying to infuse a crassly partisan speech with higher purpose. “I believe the soul is the breath, the life, and the essence of who we are. The soul is what makes us, us. The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God; that all are entitled to be treated with decency, dignity, and respect; that all deserve justice and a shot and lives of prosperity and consequence,” he said.
The president then defined the forces he sees arrayed on the other side of that spiritual warfare: “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”
Forget that many evangelical leaders exhibited extreme skepticism toward Donald Trump until well into his administration. Biden clearly views those who uphold biblical values as the nation’s “MAGA” enemies. He believes America’s soul will be saved by “the Left’s radical social policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy, paid for by you,” and “the indoctrination of our children in our public schools” with “radical sexual ideology,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins as he returned to hosting “Washington Watch” after Labor Day. Far from effecting national salvation, Biden vows to “fight for those things that are in and of themselves destroying our country,” Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) told Perkins.
Biden’s speech reveals that he’s cursing the “soul of America” in (at least) the following ways:
1. Abortion
The second Catholic president, who once championed the Hyde Amendment, launched a “whole-of-government” effort to overturn pro-life protections, signed or proposed a number or measures expanding abortion-related funding, and recently announced VA hospitals will perform abortions in apparent violation of national law. The Bible records that, after Cain committed the first murder, God replied, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10); so does every one of the 63,000,000 abortions committed since 1973. Forcing taxpayers to fund abortion requires us to participate in another person’s sin. Biden also made it easier to distribute medication abortion, which makes women four-times more likely to suffer complications; women with undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies will die. Their blood, too, will cry to Heaven against our nation.
2. Abortion, Masquerading as ‘Contraception’
Biden and his party have deliberately conflated “contraception” with medication abortion and other drugs that may have an abortion-inducing effect.
3. Biden Implies God Created Transgenderism
Biden turned biblical phrases on their head to advance extreme gender ideology. On several occasions, including a message for one of the holy days of the reigning elites’ new religion (the “Transgender Day of Visibility”), Biden has said people who identify as transgender are created “in the image of God.” At first, this seems unobjectionable and undeniable — but Biden’s speechwriters deceptively parroted theological liberals to imply that God created people transgender, that transgenderism reflects His design and order. Is God the author of confusion? Would God condemn men, women, and an ever-increasing number of children victimized by Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another to years of mental anguish that can ultimately be corrected only by high-paid surgeons’ mutilations? The nation’s largest denominations — Roman Catholicism and the Southern Baptist Convention — teach sex and gender represent an inseparable unity that reflect His glory and our identity in Him. Biden denies 2,000 years of unbroken Christian teaching on gender, while sinisterly insinuating that those who defend biblical truth and biological reality have buddied up with Beelzebub.
4. Biden’s ‘Right to Privacy’ Means Hiding Minors’ Transgender Transitions from their Parents
In addition to a third euphemism for abortion, the Biden administration has used the “right to privacy” to hide children’s gender transitions. A report from Biden’s USAID lectures teachers, “do not reveal a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity without the student’s permission — even to the student’s family. Students may elect to hide their sexual orientation or gender identity from family and close friends, which makes it imperative that educators respect students’ right to privacy.” (Emphasis added.) Compare that to the Trump administration, which argued in a 2020 HHS rule that giving males with gender dysphoria access to areas where females disrobe might violate the women’s right to privacy. The Biden administration promotes the same restroom policy as the Loudoun County (Virginia) Public Schools, which reportedly covered up a 15-year-old girl being raped and sodomized in a stall by a teenage boy wearing a skirt. In addition to usurping parental authority, the move violates Christ’s words that it would be better for anyone who offends one of His little ones “that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).
5. The 2SLGBTQIA+ Agenda
As The Washington Post reported, Biden’s “ambitious LGBT agenda poises him to be the nation’s most [radically pro-2SLGBTQIA+] president in history.” For instance, to fight monkeypox, rather than call for a complete cessation of men having sex with men — the way Democrats throttled “non-essential businesses,” including church services — the Biden administration suggested people who identify as gay take up alternative deviate sexual practices. Although it is unfashionable to say so, the Bible affirms that, while God loves all people and willingly forgives all who repent, He sent angels with a warning for Lot to flee from Sodom and Gomorrah, because of the seriousness with which He views this sin: “We will destroy this place, because the outcry against them has grown great before the face of the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it” (Genesis 19:13).
The fact that the commander-in-chief has declared a spiritual “war” on those who uphold traditional morality is a nightmare for Bible-believing Christians. “I don’t know any greater fear that a citizen of any country would have … than their own government being weaponized to come against them,” Hice told Perkins. But Christians experience greater pain in watching “their” president weaponize their government against their faith, kindling the righteous wrath of God against their nation and attempting, like Emperor Nero, to fix the blame for his failing policies on Christians.
Attempting to stigmatize the Body of Christ itself persecutes the soul of America. The ancient Christian writer Mathetes wrote an apostolic-era letter to Diognetus that said, “What the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world. … The soul is imprisoned in the body yet keeps together that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they keep together the world.” Christians created the spiritual dynamism that turned 13 squabbling colonies into the greatest superpower in world history; Joe Biden’s spiritual war against the soul of America threatens to reverse that process.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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