Houston Mayor Annise Parker has received a flood of Bibles — somewhere between 500 and 1,000 according to a spokesman for the mayor’s office — after the city subpoenaed the church sermons of five local faith leaders opposed to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which the mayor signed in May. “This is more dangerous than anything I’ve ever seen,” Glenn Beck said last week after interviewing one of the five subpoenaed religious leaders. “This is not about equal rights. … This is about shutting people down.”
Steve Riggle, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Houston, told Beck that the city not only demanded his sermons, but anything he had said about Mayor Parker in 17 different forms of communication.
“People of faith are under attack,” Beck said. “Our churches and our institutions, our pastors, our preachers, our priests, our rabbis are under attack.”
Beck, in addition to former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R), encouraged Americans across the country to stand in support of the subpoenaed religious leaders by flooding the mayor’s office with religious texts.
“Go find the best sermons you can find on religious liberty and send them to city hall in Houston,” Beck said.
Mayor Parker acknowledged Monday that she has received a number of Bibles, telling KHOU-TV that Huckabee is “doing what he can to pump ratings for Fox News.”
But she also added that it was a “very productive way for folks who disagreed with our legal strategy to express that disagreement,” and she will be distributing the Bibles to local churches.
