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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: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday April 13 2017, @08:33AM (1 child)
Oh, dear, my precious AC! Yes, people have died. They sometimes die for really stupid reasons. You memory, however, is very, very short term. As a 2400 year old philosopher, let me remind you of some more recent atrocities, to allow you to balance your perspective.
Just hearing a lot on the radio (Alright, NPR, you might not hear of this if you are listening to Hannity, but if you are, there is your problem) about Jim Jones and his People's Temple: 900 people drank the Koolaid. (Funny, the radio reports keep saying something like "dried powdered fruit punch": It was Koolaid, People's of the Temple! This is where we get the phrase "Drank the koolaid" as in "jmorris has drank the koolaid". And Hairyfeet? He drank the Microsoft Koolaid, and then he got "better", but it hasn't made a difference on his wacko political positions.
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Speaking of Waco, The Branch Davidian! Koresh was the re-incarnation of Jesus, which as I understand it, means you were obligated to have sex with him, and stockpile automatic weapons. Alright, it was Texas, so to the neighbors it was not all that unusual. But still, a lot of folks, many of them children, died in the standoff, one that did not have to happen if the leader had not been batshit-nutjob-insane. 86 dead.
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Oklahoma City, right-wing nut-job vet. 168 casualties. Evil bastard blew up a day care. Babies. Even the Donald recognizes that this is wrong.
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Kent State? Only four.
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Haymarket?
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Homestead Strike? Pinkertons, the "Blackwater" of the day.
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So what is your point, AC? A very few religious crazies have killed a very few number of Americans? Kind of like totaling up the Lord's Resistance Army's number of kill of abortion doctors, isn't it? Or as I prefer to do, the number of deaths of church groups in buses going to or from the casinos or whorehouses that are killed by some idiot Christian Texan in a Dually who is texting so hard as to cross the centerline? What is your point, AC? Do I have to come over there and point out to you that I will not kill you, today? But that God may well kill you tomorrow, for no goddamned reason. God is like that. Ask not, for he works in mysterious ways, and one of those mysterious ways may be just killing you, or giving our dear Hairyfeet some well deserved dementia. Helps him sleep at night, after he has got all those youngers off his damn lawn. And trust me, having been alive as long as I have, I have seen this go down many, many times. You should pray for mercy, so you do not end up like Hairyfeet. Poor, poor bastard.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 13 2017, @06:15PM
Your rant would have been more impressive if it had been based in the same time-frame that you were responding to. And it could have been.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.