The Bill of Wrongs: One Nation Under God('s Jackboot)

In 1996, one Miss Laura Schubert Pearson of Cooley, Texas was made the victim of violent abuse while being held captive by an organized group of individuals attempting to promote a ludicrous social agenda. She, being age 17, was held against her will and without the permission or consent of her parents (who were out of town), during which time she was pinned down and restrained by members of the accused group, pummeled and beaten repeatedly, and intimidated by chants and songs which were designed to produce in her feelings of fear, guilt, and submission. During this grotesque ordeal she pleaded to be released. Finally, after two days of this violation, the group wearied of their efforts and released her.

No police charges were pressed and every member of this group not only remains free, but has never suffered any lawful punishment for their actions at all.

In the years following the ordeal, Laura suffered from what can unmistakably be identified as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; she developed agoraphobia and became housebound due to overwhelming feelings of anxiety, dropped out of school, and began mutilating herself, all of this after she had been perfectly healthy prior to her captivity and had shown no signs of any sort of psychological illness. Her parents, in an attempt to seek justice for their little girl, proceeded to sue the perverse and sadistic group that assaulted their daughter, claiming false imprisonment, assault, and physical, emotional, and mental abuse. The case was finally presented to a jury in 2002 and Laura was awarded the meager restitution of $300,000 for damages, pain and suffering, loss of earning capacity, and medical expenses. The 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth later reduced the verdict to $188,000. While this paltry sum can hardly be taken as an adequate extension of justice to these depraved individuals, at that point it could at least be said that Laura's abuse was not to go completely unavenged.

However, this isn't the end of Laura's story. Now, after six years of appeals of the lower courts' verdicts, the Texas Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, has thrown the case out entirely, claiming that any attempt by the courts to punish those that kidnapped, physically assaulted, and emotionally intimidated Laura would violate the First Amendment of our Constitution.

You see, the members of the group that perpetrated these deplorable crimes were part of a church's congregation attempting to perform an exorcism on Laura against her will.

(Source 1, Source 2)

It is in situations such as these, friends, that our Bill of Rights is transformed into the Bill of Wrongs by those who would exploit them through malicious sophistry and intentional misunderstanding. Indeed, if any of the six justices-- whose job it is to interpret our Constitution based on the words written right in front of them-- that voted in favor of sanctioning the depraved zealotry of the vile members of the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God Church has ever so much as given a passing glance to our founding document, they should be immediately removed from their capacity in the courts due to either the inability to perform their duties due to outside bias, or their obvious and disqualifying ignorance and inability to read and understand plain English.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or 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.”

Thus reads our First Amendment. It is composed of a scant, but revolutionary, 45 words, the most important of which, in the case of Laura, is the word “exercise.” As can be deduced by context and through even the most rudimentary understanding of the English language, the word “exercise” in this case can be said to fall under all of the following definitions:

1. to put (one's faculties, rights, etc.) into action, practice, or use. Ex: to exercise freedom of speech.

2. to use or display in one's action or procedure. Ex: to exercise judgment.

3. to make use of (one's privileges, powers, etc.). Ex: to exercise one's constitutional rights.

Now, for those of you that, contrary to the apparent abilities of six Texas Supreme Court justices, have even a tenuous grasp of the form of English as a language, the implication of the above definitions is apparent and unmistakable-- to “exercise” in the sense that the word is used in our First Amendment refers to a singular individual choosing to make use of personal faculties, rights, and beliefs. This is all well and good, and you will find no debate from me or from any other champions of liberty concerning this reading-- the ability to exercise influence and choice over one's own life without outside interference is the very backbone of freedom. However, once an individual's choice to “exercise” any belief or right has infringed upon the the beliefs or rights of a secondary individual (in this case, Laura's right to believe, quite correctly, that exorcism is a sickening relic from the sado-masochistic origins of a foolish system of beliefs built upon the detestable notions of fear, unworthiness, and the contradictory interplay of conceit and self pity), it is the secondary party whom has had their First Amendment rights violated, not the other way around, leaving the primary party's actions unconstitutional and, as a consequence, deserving neither the protection nor the succor of our Bill of Rights. To read this situation in any other manner can only be viewed as intentional distortion of constitutional law or, perhaps worse, gross negligence on the part of men and women too ignorant, servile, and slavish to superstition to hold any public office at all, let alone the office of justice on a state's Supreme Court.

If you are as yet unconvinced, let us simply apply this line of thinking to a similar set of circumstances and see if they hold up any sort of notion concerning liberty and justice. Using this ruling as a basis, it is not at all a reach for one to declare that Timothy McVeigh was well within his constitutional rights by claiming the lives of 168 men, women, and children when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma. He was simply exercising his right to free speech by way of inflicting his beliefs on those he saw as part of the “problem” and not the “solution” as revenge for the government's actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge. The fact that the rights of those innocents were infringed upon is, according to two-thirds of the Texas Supreme Court, irrelevant. By their standard, any attempt to punish McVeigh, whom has since been executed for his crimes, would be an assault on his First Amendment rights.

But then again, we were speaking of freedom of religion, not free speech, weren't we? Well, this is all the better, as we've an even more expansive pool of examples from which to draw. Let us say nothing of the tortures of the Holy Inquisition, the blind and generational bloodletting of The Troubles and the “Long War”, the mass genocides of the Kosovo War, or even the unavoidable parallels to be found in the events of September, 2001. Instead, let's keep our discourse strictly confined to fundamentalist, American protestants. Again, applying the constitutional interpretation of two-thirds of the Texas Supreme Court, to say that the lynchings of black Christians and other ethnicities by the Ku Klux Klan members that chose to follow Christian Reconstructionism as a religious ideology were deplorable and worthy of the swiftest retribution would be out of line. Any call to punish such actions or to even attempt to prevent further instances of them occurring would be to undercut the constitutional protections afford by the First Amendment.

At this point, this horse, if not beaten to the point of death, is at the very least in mortal danger of becoming so. I shall not belabor the point any further.

It remains baffling as to how such easily recognized and understandable situations can have their obvious resolutions so skirted by our judicial system. John F. Kennedy once said, in referencing an event in which forty-nine Nobel Prize winners were invited to the White House:

"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Thomas Jefferson was, of course, the primary and most influential author of our founding documents. Is it so far out of the question for those that are charged with the interpretation of our Constitution to acknowledge that the unconstitutional status and treatment of any “exercising” of rights that in itself infringes upon the rights and protections of other unwilling individuals is the sine qua non on which Jefferson and others built the foundation of our free nation? Is it just barely possible that the reason words such as “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or allowing for the exercise thereof to unduly infringe upon the liberty or physical well being of unwilling participants;” do not appear in full in our First Amendment is because it is a basic requirement so essential that its omission would render the entire document useless, and therefore it need not be written? And, is it marginally plausible that intentional misreadings and misunderstandings of our Constitution have as their motivation the furthering of the agenda of the religious superstition which our lawmakers blindly follow, going so far as to refer to themselves and their peers as “sheep” in a “flock” with pride instead of disgrace? It is in the case of the latter most query and its implications that the true intention of our First Amendment can be found if only one has the strength of intellect and personal character to read and understand plain English, and to shuck off the hobnailed boot that so many would have placed upon our necks in the name of God.