Employees of a small Texas town removed a prominent church sign on Friday that read “Jesus Welcomes You to Hawkins” in what was the latest chapter in a multi-year legal saga.

The sign along U.S. 80 stood on land that members of Jesus Christ Open Altar Church said the congregation owned. Officials with Hawkins, Texas, though, said the city had an easement to build on the site, according to the Longview News-Journal.  

The town is planning on building a street on the property.

The sign was erected in 2015.

“The city employees destroyed our church property, pulled up our crosses and destroyed everything,” church trustee Mark McDonald told the newspaper. 

The sign was removed at night so that church members — who often guarded the site — wouldn’t try and stop the city’s workers.

“We’re treating it like a hate crime of religious discrimination that was conspired by the city. We have enough documents to prove that,” McDonald added. “The city was warned [Thursday] by our attorneys not to touch it and not to bother it. There’s been closed meetings, closed records [and] a lot of things wrong.” 

A county court ruled in the city’s favor, and an appeals court upheld the decision in 2017, according to the News-Journal.

Police Chief Manfred Gilow said the Texas Department of Transportation forbids any signs that would obstruct drivers’…

A new poll by Gallup shows that Americans vastly overestimate the U.S. gay and lesbian population, a trend the polling organization says may be due in part to the “group’s outsized visibility.”

The survey, conducted in May and released on June 27, found U.S. adults estimate that nearly one in four (23.6 percent) Americans identify as gay or lesbians. In contrast, that figure is more than five times the percentage of those actually identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in a 2017 Gallup poll. In that survey, Gallup polled respondents who self-identified as LGBT, estimating that population to be 4.5 percent, up from 3.4 percent in its inaugural 2012 survey on that topic.

“Exactly who makes up the LGBT community and how this group should be measured is a subject of some debate,” Gallup reported in 2012, adding “there are a number of ways to measure lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientation, and transgender status. Sexual orientation can be assessed by measuring identity as well as sexual behaviors and attractions.”

Even so, all existing methodologies estimate the actual LGBT population to be far lower than what the public estimates.

“No measurement procedure has produced any figures suggesting that more than one out of five Americans are gay or lesbian,” according to the survey summary.

The latest survey on…