Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday weighed in on the controversy surrounding the Church of the Highlands, Alabama’s largest church.
The Housing Authority of Birmingham District (HABD) board of commissioners earlier this week voted to stop receiving assistance from the church, citing Church of the Highlands Pastor Chris Hodges following and “liking” social media posts by Turning Point USA founder and prominent conservative media figure Charlie Kirk.
This quickly became a national story, with Donald Trump, Jr., and Kirk publicly bashing HABD.
On Tuesday evening, the “cancelling” of Hodges and Church of the Highlands continued, with another Birmingham government entity ending its beneficial relationship with the church.
The Birmingham Board of Education, per Alabama Media Group, has voted to end its leases with the church, which has paid approximately $817,000 to use the facilities in recent years.
The church reportedly paid an average of $12,000 a month each to rent Parker High School and Woodlawn High School as satellite locations for Sunday worship services.
Following this development, Sessions released a statement on Wednesday calling the respective actions by the local school board and housing authority “un-American” and “blatantly anti-religious.”
He further called on the two entities to reverse their decisions “immediately,” and advised that Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin should step in and call on them to do so. Sessions views the matter as a First Amendment issue on multiple levels.
Sessions’ full statement as follows:
The actions taken by the Birmingham Housing Authority and the Birmingham Board of Education against the Church of the Highlands represent an attack on both religious liberty and freedom of speech.
This cannot happen in America, and certainly should never happen in Alabama. Birmingham will not become Berkeley.
The First Amendment guarantees to every American the right to freely express their religious beliefs. Too often, this right has been ignored. This grave error must end.
There’s also a very real free speech issue here. The withholding of public facilities and the refusal to allow a church to minister as a result of a social media “like” implicates freedom of speech in a profound way. It is intolerable for a government agency to deny access and discriminate against a faith-based organization, based on a political or religious disagreement. This is a dangerous trend we’re seeing today. It is the vicious and ugly side of political correctness. If this intimidation in the name of “tolerance” by the Birmingham government is allowed to stand, don’t be surprised if politically correct officials begin trying to condition government contracts, approvals, and permits on whether the applicant has ever “liked” a social media post that suggests support for President Trump or conservative causes.
As Attorney General and as a United States Senator, I relentlessly championed and defended the First Amendment right of all Americans to speak and to freely exercise their religious beliefs. This is at the foundation of our freedoms as Americans. Protecting religious liberty and freedom of expression and stopping the abuses of political correctness will be a top priority of mine when I return to the Senate.
Government resources cannot be used as a hammer to suppress personal viewpoints, but that is what is happening here: the Birmingham Board of Education and the Birmingham Housing Authority are using government power to coerce people into specific viewpoints. They are seeking to bludgeon faithful and service-oriented citizens to adopt certain viewpoints on issues, and demanding that Alabamians bow to politically correct viewpoints before they can serve the public or have access to public facilities. At its base, this action is outrageous, and amounts to a rejection of the American ideal of individual freedom. It must not stand.
The Housing Authority is an extension of the Mayor, and it is Mayor Woodfin’s responsibility to call for a reversal of the Authority’s outrageous action, and this he must do now.
The members of the Board of Education should likewise immediately reverse their blatantly anti-religious decision to terminate lease agreements with the Church of the Highlands.
Make no mistake, the people of Birmingham and Alabama will not accept apparatchiks at the Housing Authority and officials at the Board of Education bludgeoning admirable citizens because of political differences. Alabamians will not be told what to do or how to think.
This action against the Church of the Highlands cannot be seen as a small disagreement—it reveals that the Housing Board, the Mayor, and even the government of Birmingham share the radically liberal and anti-religious and anti-free speech policies of places like Berkeley and Portland. We can never allow the government to dictate what American citizens say or believe. These actions, at a most fundamental level, are un-American.
The Church of the Highlands, by all accounts, has been an extremely effective partner with the Housing Authority in serving Birmingham’s citizens. So, let me be clear, this matter is not going away. It is wrong at a very deep level. The leadership of the government of Birmingham must recognize this enormous overreach and reverse it, and they must do so immediately.
Sean Ross is the editor of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
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