Only for Christians

You can laugh a bit and console yourself that it doesn't matter all that much if an Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice tells us the first Amendment only applies to Christians -- maybe even if you are like me, not a Christian. It's only Alabama, right?

They didn't bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship, the Mayflower,

Justice Roy Moore announced to the mob at the Pastor for Life Luncheon. Maybe you'll remember that Jefferson owned one however and that he wasn't shy about warning us of religious tyranny. Maybe you'll remember Moore as the former justice who was removed from office for fighting to erect the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, but like that tumor you thought the chemo got rid of he came back two years later singing the same tune:

Let's get real. Let's learn our history. Let's stop playing games.

I would agree with that, but as we know, to the religious right, history is baked fresh every morning. The English colonists brought slaves, white and black, and Moore's ideological ancestors fought like hell to keep them, Bibles in hand.

Buddha didn't create us. Mohammad didn't create us. It's the god of the Holy Scriptures,

said Moore with the authority not granted him by anyone in particular, and grossly misrepresenting Jefferson and Madison and the U.S. Supreme Court with a stream of non sequitur he insisted that freedom of religion is only for Christians.

A newly-released video shows him expounding all this and worse in Jackson, Mississippi last January to a group called Pro-Life Mississippi. Of course it's hardly a game he's asking us to end, it's secular democracy, the pride of the age of Reason and Humanism, and like a stag at bay it's destined to be torn to ribbons and its head displayed on some courthouse wall. For nothing in our Constitution is as important, as hallowed by the blood of patriots, as the cracks, the loopholes, the weak spots that may just allow traitors and secessionist sons of the Confederacy to eviscerate it, hang it from its heels, bleed it and gut it like an animal to be sacrificed to his tyrannical, bloody-handed God.


That's not the scary thing. The scary thing is that he's hardly alone. The man who thought it was funny to put pubic hair in a woman's soft drink thinks there's a weakness in the First Amendment wording because it only forbids the U.S. congress to establish a state religion. It's just fine if a state like Alabama were to do it on their own, says Clarence Thomas. Perhaps Thomas was too busy harassing female students when he was supposed to be reading about the Incorporation Doctrine and thinks that we are or should be back in the early days of the Republic. Or perhaps he just for some bizarre reason doesn't like equal protection under the law.

But what Thomas doesn't seem to address is the rest of the First Amendment. Does he think Alabama and the rest of the Confederacy has the right to make state laws "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Are the rest of the God-addled, functionally stupid secessionist Republicans going to pass laws silencing us, and the media, and imposing curfew and forbidding us to complain? Sounds like it!

Are we going to do something about this or are we going to go on making sure that nobody gets to say racist things in their own homes in private? Are we going to watch reality TV and endless discussions about missing airplanes while reality surprises us when it's too damn late? 

You know the answer.  It's always the same.