Has political ineptness reached an all-time low when government officials don’t realize a sermon is a speech?!
It all started in September, when Houston Mayor Annise Parker and City Attorney David Feldman issued an “overly broad” subpoena for the sermons of select ministers who opposed the city’s equal rights ordinance. Because of intense national opposition from even Texas’ attorney general, this past Wednesday, Parker and Feldman appeared to recant or at least reduce their flagrant overreach and disregard of the ministers’ legal protections under the First Amendment. By the weekend, however, the truth came out that they were only using political smoke and mirrors to try to simmer the patriotic fury; they were not changing course to constitutional compliance.
At first, Parker and Feldman tried to fly under the radar by issuing the subpoenas to the five pastors because they have association with Christian conservative activists who are rightly suing the city over its claim that they did not have a sufficient number of signatures to put a referendum on the ballot to repeal the equal rights ordinance. (They actually collected 50,000 signatures, though they needed only 17,259.)
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