This court is now in session for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Repent or be jailed.
In a breathtaking assault on the First Amendment, The town of Bay Minette, Alabama has decided to give non-violent offenders a “choice”: jail time or a year of attending church.
Operation Restore Our Community or “ROC”…begins next week. The city judge will either let misdemenor offenders work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine or go to church every Sunday for a year.
If offenders elect church, they’re allowed to pick the place of worship, but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed.
Make no mistake about it. This is a test case to bring before the Supreme Court. The goal here is not to “change the lives of many people heading down the wrong path” as Bay Minette Police Chief Mike Rowland claims. The goal is to circumvent the First Amendment entirely.
According to Chief Rowland:
…the program is legal and doesn’t violate separation of church and state issues because it allows the offender to choose church or jail…and the church of their choice.
If you’ve been following me for a while, this highly dubious line of reasoning should sound disturbingly familiar. I covered this exact legal chicanery back in July:
The Establishment Clause forbids government money to be used to by an organization to evangelize as part of the disbursement of those funds. In other words, if you take government money to feed the hungry, you cannot promote your religion while doing so. Also, under no circumstances, can you withhold services based on your religious beliefs.
Vouchers, on the other hand, eliminate this prickly proselytization problem. The legal argument goes like this: Since the money is not coming directly from the government, all bets are off. By giving the voucher to the “consumer,” the choice of where to spend that money is solely up to them. The Establishment Clause does not apply.
By making it a “choice” the powers that be in this town are looking to set a precedent that would have far reaching ramifications. Much like the repeated attempts of Creationists to force religion into schools, so, too, would this force religion into the courtroom. No doubt the more conservatively religious the judge the more stark the choice will become. Six weeks in jail or one year of church for littering. A $10,000 fine or two years of church for jaywalking. The opportunity for abuse and proselytization become limited only by the fanaticism of the judiciary in a given area.
If you doubt this, ask yourself this: What are the chances a Christian judge would offer the condemned the opportunity to serve their sentence at a Mosque? Yeah, that’s what I thought…
Read more about the latest Right Wing attack on the Constitution here
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Why not have atheists or progressives or Libertarians or Pastafarians develop community programs and call them churchs, and then let the prisoners be released to them? A Sunday spent building Habitat For Humanity housing is more likely to better an offender’s attitude that any amount of time being preached at. But established churches have the advantage of being established so they get their way … whereas humanists are unfortunately just whining.
100% pro-constitution and 100% pro-God,there is no paradox.
@ James Ray:
Unless it’s laws/parts of the Constitution that oppresses people they don’t like, such as the Fugitive Slave Act, Dred Scott, Plessy v Ferguson, Bush v Gore, Citizens United, and Snyder v Phelps.
@Nurmi Hussien -
Hmm. Yes, there are. But if you consult any AA directory you will see that the vast majority of them take place in churches. The one founder, Dr. Bob, was a strict evangelical, and if you read his take on where AA ought to go in his autobiography, it was to funnel people into the church.
If you actually go to the meetings, you hear, more than you’d expect, people saying things like “I’ve chosen my higher power, and his name is Jesus”.
There are non-secular versions of this program, but they all rely on a text that was written in the 1920′s and revised 5 times since then. The offshoot groups like ‘Rational Recovery’ basically have the same problem with the program that I do. And 90% of the time, it IS in a church basement, and it is attended to by religious woo-ha’s who drank too much box wine and never got out of the house and now found a group of people willing to accept them for the loser they are. They embrace the hardcore sinner, who fucks them over some way, and find a god excuse for that fuck up.
The entire premise of the program is that you are not god, and when you fuck up it’s because you didn’t follow his will, but when you do good, then you are doing god’s work. So it’s like there’s no god in you. It is a giant peer pressure ponzi scheme of self denial, and I see No difference between AA and the actual church it cometh from.
Ryan
This is why my father – who is in heaven (if such a place exists) – decided not to join up when he resolved to get sober back in the late 50s. He decided the religion in it was as much of an addiction as the drink. And so he went cold turkey. I gather that there ARE Atheist groups – but taking all the godtalk out is virtually impossible. I also understand there are rehab and recovery groups that are atheist that are quite unassociated with AA.
And you are surprised about this How ?
No one in Alabama or the south as a whole has any respect for the Constitution.
I’d actually like to disagree with that second statement.
I live in Tennessee, about 45-50 miles north of the Alabama border now. Yeah, a lot of people just plain don’t care or want to run everything over with religion they force on other people. The best example is ACLU taking up a lawsuit over a student prayer event (See You at the Pole) where teachers were actively involved in praying event in the school district I attended from first grade to senior year. I’m tempted to get them over to my state-run community college because the same event was planned and organized by the faculty. They also invite the Gideon Bible people to campus every single year for an activities/college fair and give them a prime location in the corner of the student center that is between the cafeteria where you get food and the hallway to get out. If you want to eat, the only way to avoid the table is to leave campus and go into the heart of town since the closest thing with hot food other than the school is a Hardees about two miles away. As a non-Christian who practically lives in the student center when not in class, I’m not okay with being harassed or made uncomfortable when I have to pass the bible table or any of the other highly religious oriented tables. I try to just politely say “No, thank you.” when approached, but you either get looked like as if you were the devil and ought to be ashamed, asked why not, or both. One of my good friends, also non-Christian, simply blurted out she is Wiccsn and walked away. I’m not quite that abrupt and doubt I could do that myself. I want to do something about it, but I’m just not sure where the law is in concern with a state-run college over a public school system.
Not everyone is like that though, as evidenced by the ACLU actually even doing something against the school district. Its a pretty low ratio of people, if we are lucky its 1:15 in my area for people who actually care and will do something. Here, church is a hobby or interest, considered on par with playing sports after school. I have seen it literally suck the life out of people and it all starts with the “Teen Nights” almost every church is starting, where soon the church is the only social activity some kids have and you are shunned if you don’t go. I had two close calls with this indoctrination myself, once in middle school and once in high school, and would like to help stop it. I care about the Constitution and I am rather sick of being the Oracle Cassandra here. Soon, it will be against the law to not attend church if one is not careful.