Alabama lawmakers have voted 24-4 to allow Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham to establish a police department. The church has over 4,000 members and is also home to a K-12 school and a theological seminary with 2,000 students and teachers:
"After the shooting at Sandy Hook and in the wake of similar assaults at churches and schools, Briarwood recognized the need to provide qualified first responders to coordinate with local law enforcement," church administrator Matt Moore said in a statement, referring to the mass murder of 20 first graders and six teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut by a deranged man with an AR-15 style rifle just before Christmas 2012. "The sole purpose of this proposed legislation is to provide a safe environment for the church, its members, students and guests." The church would pay the bill for its officers.
[...] "It's our view this would plainly be unconstitutional," Randall Marshall, the ACLU's Acting Executive Director, told NBC News. In a memo to the legislature, Marshall said they believe the bills "violate the First Amendment or the U.S. Constitution and, if enacted, would not survive a legal challenge." "Vesting state police powers in a church police force violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment," his memo states. "These bills unnecessarily carve out special programs for religious organizations and inextricably intertwine state authority and power with church operations."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @05:19AM (4 children)
Christian nutballs have killed less people in 30 years than Islam dirtbags have killed in the last 6 months.
Do we count the Irish Republican Army or the US Army in those numbers? Are we taking into account all of the civil wars in the Middle East where they mostly kill each other, mostly caused by the US destabilizing those countries? Or do we only count mass shootings and other "terrorist" attacks, which ones do we count, and which ones do we not since they are not caused by Muslims and are therefore "not really terrorist attacks, you know"?
Looking from outside of the US, it sure looks like the most deadly, irrational, destabilizing influence in the world today is the US :/
World police, my ass.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Thursday April 13 2017, @05:34AM (2 children)
Not this fallacy again. Are the IRA or US Army killing people for the purpose of advancing Christianity? No.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @07:13AM
Not this fallacy again. Are the IRA or US Army killing people for the purpose of advancing Christianity? No.
The Lord's Resistance Army sure the fuck is and the Pope just apologized for the catholic church's complicity in the Rwandan genocide.
Don't forget the Bosnian genocide of muslims at the hands of christians either.
Meanwhile ISIS is mostly killing other muslims, regular muslims who aren't killing anyone for the purpose of advancing anything.
When the vast majority of muslims think ISIS are unislamic assholes, [pewresearch.org] deciding that they are representative of islam is just motivated innumeracy.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 14 2017, @08:22AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 13 2017, @06:16PM
I'll just leave this here [youtube.com] completely debunking your argument but protip: The IRA didn't have diddle shit to do with religion, they didn't target civilians, and again killed less in 30 years than the Islamists do in 6 months.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.