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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: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Thursday April 13 2017, @07:30AM (1 child)
It would've made no sense for the ACLU to be involved in the UC Berkeley case, as the campus had fully backed his right to appear and had provided campus security (who also acted as armed escorts to & from the location). He was in the student union building waiting to speak when masked anarchists (who have become a huge problem at Bay Area protests) showed up at the peaceful student protest outside and essentially began rioting — smashed the student union's massive windows, threw fireworks, etc. They evacuated him for safety reasons at that point, put the whole campus on "shelter in place" lockdown and called in help from local police & other campuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @08:56AM
So. What you are saying is. Its all the ACLU's fault and they should sue themselves into non-existence?