After a federal court struck down North Carolina's ban on gay marriage in October, several magistrates in the state voluntarily left office rather than perform gay marriages and Mat Staver and Matt Barber are not happy about it, using their "Faith and Freedom" radio program today to call upon anti-gay government officials to "stand their ground" by refusing to follow the law ... just like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.
"What would have happened," Barber asked, "if Martin Luther King, Jr. had just stood down and said, 'No, I can't participate in all of this, I'm just going to remain silent, I'm going to resign and go on my way'"?
Instead, he said, magistrates should stay in their positions and tell the government "you're going to have to come after me, you're going to have to fire me, you're going to have to jail me."
"This is about civil rights," Barber said and Staver readily agreed, saying that America is undergoing "a civil rights revolution."
"But it's not the homosexual agenda," Staver said, "because you can't elevate sexually immoral behavior to the level of race or religious freedom as a civil right. It has been historically condemned as immoral, it has been historically, throughout western civilization, been considered a crime against nature. The fact of the matter is you can't take something that has been so historically thought of and elevate it to this preferred level and then force everyone to applaud it without resistance."
More and more Americans, Staver said, are realizing that this "intolerant agenda" must be stopped: "This is not America. This is not freedom. This is totalitarianism."
"Homosexuality is a moral wrong," Barber added, "so this is the next civil rights movement here and it's an anti-Christian attack, systemic, government-organized and facilitated attacks against freedom of religious expression and Christians":
