The mayor of Houston, Texas has had a change of heart regarding her fight against evangelical Christian leaders who oppose legislation promoting LGBT rights.

During a Wednesday press conference, Houston Mayor Annise Parker announced that she has decided to withdraw the subpoena for sermons of pastors who are part of a movement to overturn an ordinance banning discrimination against LGBT people, reports Fox News.

Earlier this month, Houston officials subpoenaed the sermons of five pastors who oppose the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, a bill that protects gay and transgender people. According to officials, the subpoenas were an attempt to determine what the preachers told their congregants to do in order to get the law repealed. However, the religious community argued that the subpoenas were an affront to religious liberty.

"After much contemplation and discussion, I am directing the city legal department to withdraw the subpoenas issued to the five Houston pastors who delivered the petitions, the anti-HERO petitions, to the city of Houston and who indicated that they were responsible for the overall petition effort," said Parker, according to Click2Houston.

The mayor said that she came to the decision after he had a meeting with local pastors and clergymen from across the country this week.

"These pastors came to me for civil discussions about the issues," said Houston's first openly gay mayor. "They came without political agendas, without hate in their hearts and without any desire to debate the merits of the HERO. They simply wanted to express their passionate and very sincere concerns about the subpoenas."

Mayor Parker passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance in order to prohibit businesses from discriminating against gay and transgender people. The bill also allows transgender individuals to choose whether to use male or female public bathrooms, according to their self-declared gender identity.

In response to the law, a group of local pastors and religious leaders began collecting signatures to get a referendum to repeal the law in November. However, City Attorney David Feldman blocked that attempt, declaring that thousands of signatures didn't meet the criteria to qualify. Local religious leaders then filed a lawsuit, claiming that Feldman illegally disqualified the referendum.

The five pastors who received the subpoena, however, were not among the activists who sued the city.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious liberty law firm representing the pastors, says that the subpoenas violate First Amendment rights to free speech.

"We are gratified that the First Amendment rights of the pastors have triumphed over government overreach and intimidation," said the group's attorney, Erik Stanley, after Parker's announcement, reports The Huffington Post.

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