So, recently, the chief of the Childress, Texas Police Department got a letter from one of the best organizations fighting for sanity in the U.S. today, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, requesting that he stop violating the Constitutionally-mandated wall of separation between church and state, and remove "In God We Trust" from the Department's vehicles.
Anyone who is familiar with places like Childress will not be surprised in the least by his response: "go fly a kite".
This is the full text of the letter:
After carefully reading your letter I must deny your request in the removal of our Nations motto from our patrol units, and ask that you and the Freedom From Religion Foundation go fly a kite.
Classy as hell. Or, "klassi", if you will (pronounced "K-I classy", by the way). (He's also guilty as charged of Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma, Abuse of Sentence Structure, and Ardent Abuse of the Apt Apostrophe, all in the first degree.)
Source: Childress, Texas Police Department Facebook Page
The chief's "reasoning" for slapping that on the cop cars can be summed up in this excerpt from the Amarillo newspaper's story, linked to above:
“I think with all the assaults happening on officers across the country and the two that happened in the past few days in Harris County and Abilene, it’s time we get back to where we once were,” Garcia told the Red River Sun, a newspaper serving the Childress area. “This is our nation’s motto ... it’s even on our currency. It’s nothing new.”
This guy's behavior is offensive, and represents two major problems in the United States today: smug, corrupt, immature cops (and their sycophants) who are convinced they are saints who do no wrong and Christian bigots who think that "freedom of religion" here in the U.S. only means the "freedom" to be whatever kind of Christian you want to be.
More below the fold...
Let's start with the more obvious side of this story. The Founding Fathers of this country, who people like Chief Garcia claim to love, intended there to be a wall of separation between church and the state (government). Promotion of any religion in any way by governmental entities, at any level, is blatantly unconstitutional, as per the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The reasoning for this constitutional secularism spans a lot of territory. A government that's kept in the secular realm keeps any one religion from codifying its doctrine into law and policy, which oppresses people of different sectors of that religion, people of other religions, and people of no religion at all. It also keeps religious messages, displays, et cetera out of the commons (public property, such as government buildings), among other positive things.
In fact, in order for a country to truly keep freedom of religion alive for its citizens, its government must keep in the secular realm, so that the religious are free to practice their beliefs (within reason), and the non-religious don't have religion force-fed to them. The simple fact is, "freedom of religion" also means freedom from religion.
There is a scarily large number of the Christian population in the U.S., however, that pooh-pooh the whole idea of this secularism and this freedom. As stated above, they think that freedom of religion only extends to Christians. Most of them, with some exceptions, also believe in extending that to Jews.
Others, however, they don't mind oppressing. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, athiests, and other non-Christians' freedoms of and from religion are complete non-factors in their minds. Call them out on this crap, and out comes the crappy mainstays of their rhetoric: that they are, in fact, the ones being oppressed (wrong); that the country was founded on religious principles (wrong again); that taking sledgehammers to the Constitutional separation-of-church-and-state wall is okay and doesn't hurt non-Christians (buzz!).
And, finally, there's the fact that they think it's okay for them to be douchebags about the whole thing. In comes rational people (like the FFRF) saying to respect the Constitution and non-Christians, and they start wailing in the media, forcing prayer on people who don't want it, telling said rationalists they're "going to hell" (it's actually not that bad a place), and (explicitly or implicitly) saying that rationalists do not matter. The "'merica! Love it or leave it!" canard abounds here--"it" of course being "backwards culture and policy". It's nothing short of a form of bigotry, and this guy is neck-deep in this goop.
The second part of this story is just as abhorrent, if not even more so. Most police officers, at all levels, in the U.S. have severe "God complexes". As stated earlier, they are convinced they are saints. They're the "knights in shining armor, defending the lands from criminal scum". There's no wrong in the way they operate.
Of course, this is also false:
- Police have a peculiar habit of pulling over Latino and Black pedestrians, cyclists, bikers, scooterists, and drivers a lot more often than they do White ones; this also extends to the "arrests versus tickets versus warnings" ratio being much more weighted towards "arrests" and "tickets" for Latinos and Blacks. This misconduct is so common that "driving while black" is common slang now. Latinos and Blacks are often pulled over simply for existing in a given place at a given time (this happened to me back in April of this year). The outrageous stories abound, such as the black man who got pulled over for making eye contact with a cop (gasp!).
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Look at the three above images. Which one of these guys stole the bike they are photographed with? Of course you don't know--you can't answer the question just by looking at them. But many police officers in America believe they can.
- Police in the U.S. beat up and put bullets in Latinos and Blacks much, much more often than they do so to Whites. This includes both armed and unarmed citizens.
- Two words: civil forfeiture. For those of y'all not familiar, CF is basically the ability of the police to seize your property, simply by uttering the magic words "we think this has been, is being, or might be used in the commission of a crime". They don't need evidence for such; they simply need to say it. They seize your stuff, they keep it, and they either use it or sell it. It's a special subset of policing for profit that I like to call "robbery by cop". This, once again, has a racial bias in it (even Rand Paul's crazy self admits this in a stopped-clock moment), though I can confidently say that CF is something cops also target a lot of white people with--after all, seized property is profitable, no matter who it came from. That Honda, Harley, Benelli, or Schwinn will fetch a pretty penny at police auction, regardless if the last ass on the seat was white, brown, or black.
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This is an actual picture of my dream bicycle, a seven-speed Electra Townie, that I lost to civil forfeiture earlier this year. I was never charged, in part because of the gross misconduct of the arresting officers. The full story of what happened to me at the hands of the Fort Worth P.D. will be the topic of my next article.
- Police have a thing for intimidating and prodding people they are questioning. They love them some coerced confessions. If a citizen gives their account of what went down, and it's not them incriminating themselves and/or others, they can't leave it the hell alone. They just "have" to get that arrest/ticket in. (This is one of the many reasons that we all need to remember our Fifth Amendment right not to talk to the police except to self-identify, as well as to refuse searches, et cetera.)
- Ethical police officers do not like to give out tickets, nor do they like to arrest people. They view both as last resorts. But most officers are not ethical; they get straight-up jollies out of doing both. They smile and laugh and back-slap about it, even when they know straight-up that the people they have just burdened or locked in the slammer are completely innocent. Citing people and/or jailing them is a very big deal, and is not something that deserves being joked about or taken lightly. Don't believe me? Go to YouTube and watch a few episodes of Cops.
- Speaking of policing for profit, judicial systems all across this country quite frequently operate as money vacuums, sucking money out of disadvantaged Latino and Black communities. Ferguson is the most prominent example.
What I listed is not nearly the extent of police misconduct. There're many more types and examples. It can be said with great accuracy that we live in a police state here in the United States.
Obviously, there are cops that aren't twisted, and are honest servants to and protectors of the communities they police. But, by this point, as I stated earlier, I feel safe in saying a majority are twisted. While I do blame a lot of them for knowing how they're acting, yet continuing to act that way, a lot of them can't be blamed--the very nature of policing in America today lends itself to these kinds of behaviors occurring unconsciously.
Not helping the situation are the civilians who have irrational "hero worship" towards the police. They have the same attitude about the police that most of the police have about themselves. They willfully ignore the misconduct and brutality, and call people who highlight such things "anarchists", "thugs", and "criminals", amongst even worse things. The fact police are wasting and robbing and jailing and beating up and harassing innocents is fine with them, because they're The Wonderful, Magical, Can't-Be-Wrong Police!
The sad thing here is that, rather than be mature and realize that his department, like every other department in this country, can work on decreasing profiling, misconduct, and brutality, Garcia is choosing to ignore that issue, and instead wrap himself in the flag with a Bible in his hand. The fact he's doing this speaks epic volumes about his character.
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." - Samuel Johnson
Another thing that speaks to his character is his buying into this canard that there's this "wave" of "anti-police violence", which is, of course...
...
a pants-on-fire lie--one hell of a convenient one to
try to blame and
pin the "terrorist" label on the
#BlackLivesMatter movement.
Police are not a bad thing. We need them to keep order. However, they must no longer be allowed to wantonly oppress the citizenry, and they must also stay secular, if we are to ever be able to call ourselves a "civilized country".
Fri Oct 02, 2015 at 7:31 PM PT: The issue of "In God We Trust" being the national motto, and it being on the currency, was brought up in the comments. Both of those, too, are un-Constitutional, and originate in the "Red Scare" of the 1950s (http://www.nytimes.com/... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...). The same goes for God being in the Pledge of Allegiance.