Going to church can keep you out of jail

3

Apparently there are some places where going to church is an option to avoid going to jail. The first is out of Bay Minette, Alabama where those convicted of a misdemeanor will soon have a choice of going to jail and paying a fine or attending church every Sunday for a year.

There’s several issues with this:

  • According to the news article the only alternative is to go to church every Sunday, so that would seem to exclude Seventh-day Adventist churches, Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques, etc. As such it would give a legal preference to one subset of one religion over all others.
  • Atheists would not have any good option here, so it shows a preference for religion over non-religion.
  • A Christian who goes to church every Sunday already would not have to change anything, thus that person would have no punishment.

Belief in the local preferred superstition should not qualify someone to get off scot-free. Why not make petty criminals actually contribute to the community through something like community service?

A little closer to home for me is an optional “treatment” program for early release on drug charges right here in Boise, ID. This “discipleship/recovery” program at the Boise Rescue Mission is nothing short of a Pentecostal indoctrination program. In fact, as Janene Cowles found out in 2006 if you don’t convert you get sent back to jail.

I am very glad that we have national organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation because it sure seems like there are a lot of government officials who just don’t seem to get that the establishment clause applies to their religion too.

(Via Friendly Atheist)

3 Comments


  1. Christianity appears to be excepted from the First Amendment because it's different from all the other religions because it's THE RIGHT ONE. 


  2. If not for Americans United, what happened to me at the Boise Rescue Mission and losing the court battle five years later would have been unbearable. Americans United made a lot of noise for me and it is due to their effort I have any sense of validation. In the end it occurs to me that a human right should trump all others, always. The Mission's legal right should not have come before an individual's human right. Ultimately, it is an individual's freedom that can be violated; an organization doesn't feel the pain of persecution; the purpose in protecting an organization is to safeguard the individual's human right. How does a Christian organization reconcile that may take for granted their absolute freedom to practice Christianity and fight a five year battle in court so that they may have the absolute freedom to take that freedom from any individual at their discretion…and our government supports this hypocrisy.


  3. Yes, AU is good at making noise and I'm happy to help spread it. 

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