NEVERMIND:
The LifeSiteNews.com story published Tuesday on the jailing of Pastor Lerle in Germany has been retracted after LifeSiteNews.com was informed that we were working with false information from trusted news sources. While Pastor Lerle has in the past been jailed for anti-abortion activities his current one year imprisonment stemmed solely from charges of holocaust denial and not from comparing abortion to the Nazi Holocaust as we erroneously reported Tuesday.
My sincere apologies for this serious error.
Germans persecuting people of a particular religion? No. That will never happen again. This is the 21st century! Germany’s our friend, right? Remember David Hasselhoff sang “Looking for Freedom” on top of the Berlin Wall.
But this week, a city court in Bavaria gave Lutheran Pastor Johannes Lerle a one year jail sentence for the “crime” of comparing abortion to the Nazi holocaust. Pastor Lerle compared the annual murder of 150,000 babies through abortion in Germany to the murder of thousands of innocent Jews in Auschwitz. I’ve got to admit I’ve done that like twenty times. But a judge ruled that this statement made Lerle a holocaust denier.
Huh? A holocaust is a holocaust folks. According to dictionary.com a holocaust is “any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.” Ok. That fits.
Lerle defended himself by saying that his statement was in no way making light of the tragic sufferings of the Jews. But the punishment handed down by the judge is so severe due to the pastor’s six previous convictions, which have seen the pastor serve two prison terms lasting eight and a half months in total for calling abortionists and their aides “child murderers.” Now I’ve got to admit I’ve definitely done that.
This is not an aberration in Germany today. German pro-life advocate Günter Annen, called for an end to “unjust abortions” in 2005 and received a 50-day jail sentence on the grounds that her claim that abortion is “unjust” was legally inaccurate. The courts decided that her words wrongly implied that abortion is illegal in Germany. Are these people kidding me?
People in Germany are being arrested for metaphors, folks. So far I have heard nothing from Amnesty International over this. Wonder why? Thank God this couldn’t happen in America, right?
Leave a Reply