Tag: Religion

God, It’s Me, Matthew, Could You Smite These Motherf%$#ers?

The religious nutjobs setting up a tent hospital in central park are requiring anyone who volunteers for service sign an agreement to discriminate against the LGBT community:

On Tuesday morning, a makeshift tent hospital in Central Park will begin treating overflow patients from Mount Sinai, as the spread of COVID-19 begins to overwhelm local hospitals. Announcing the 68-bed respiratory unit this weekend, Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse, responsible for funding and erecting the facility.

The mayor did not mention that the group is led by Franklin Graham, a notorious anti-LGBTQ and Islamophobic preacher with a track record of using humanitarian missions to proselytize an evangelical agenda.

Graham, the son of prominent minister Billy Graham, has specifically sought to recruit Christian medical staff to the Central Park facility. According to the group’s website, all volunteers, including health care workers, should read and adhere to a statement of faith, in which marriage is defined as “exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female” and the unrighteous are sentenced to “everlasting punishment in hell.”

………

Samaritan’s Purse, which holds a reported $650 million in net assets, has a lengthy history of using disaster aid to spread their agenda. A campaign known as Operation Christmas Child, which delivers gift boxes to children in Muslim countries, has been criticized as a conversion scheme.

Seriously, Hashem, you smote the Israelites for conducting a census in an sloppy manner. 

Smite Franklin Graham.  It’s long overdue.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

It turns out that the bible museum founded by the Hobby Lobby family and largely populated with looted Iraqi artifact, was taken to the cleaners by someone who sold it phony fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I am amused.

Have you ever been to the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.? The museum is funded by the Green family, the very Christian founders of Hobby Lobby, who wished to dedicate an entire building to the Holy Bible. (Though I’m positive I’ve seen a bunch of pointy ones already serving that purpose). Over the past decade, the family has spent $400 million, money they’ve easily saved up by denying their female employees healthcare, on housing the greatest private collection of holy texts this side of Vatican City.

But like any money spent involving Hobby Lobby, that has mostly been netting them low-quality knockoffs. One of the Museum of the Bible’s most coveted collections has been its fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that draft of the Hebrew Bible so ancient it crumbled into thousands of pieces and is now scattered all over the world like an inappropriate Easter egg hunt. But from 2009 to 2014, the Greens managed to obtain sixteen bits of Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments that experts soon after deigned to be fake as hell. In response, the Greens employed the Art Fraud Insight group to put the nasty rumors to bed and confirm that, yup, those are less likely to be a hallowed scripture of the teachings of God and more likely just a bit of old shoe.

………

Confronted with the idea they’ve spent millions on some ancient Huarache’s with doodling on them, the CEO of the museum decried: “We’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.” But nobody should ever feel bad for the Greens or their vanity museum. The family has had a long history of deliberately not looking too closely at where their artifacts originate, something that cost the Greens $3 million in fines and most of their collection when the government uncovered that they had been using shell companies to smuggle looted Iraqi artifacts into the U.S., knowing full well they might be indirectly funding ISIS in their holy quest to build a shrine to Christianity’s fiction section.

In a just world, they should probably have gone to jail for their looting, but being sold sandals as holy texts is nice.

Well, This Has Gone from Concerning to Bat-Sh%$ Insane Quickly

I am talking, of course, about Coronavirus.

In the past 24 hours, after Donald Trump gave the least reassuring political speech since Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer’s resignation speech 1n 1987,* things have gone to hell in a hand-basket.

The NCAA has canceled the collegiate basketball championships, AKA March Madness, because of COVID-19 19 concerns.

This is the most ppopular sporting event in the United States, normally pulling in about 50% more in ad revenue, and even more in eyeballs, than the Superbowl, and it’s canceled.

In addition, the Baseball Spring training has been suspended, the NBS has suspended its season,

Heard on every trading desk for last 10yrs: “Fck Dodd-Frank.”

Heard on every trading desk for the last 10d: “Thank fck for Dodd-Frank”

— Joseph S. Mauro (@jsmauro13) March 10, 2020

And then, for the second time this week, but only the third time in more than 20 years, circuit breakers temporarily halted stock trading after the S&P 500 entered free fall.

I am certain right now that there are a lot of brokers who are VERY happy that Dodd-Frank strengthened these market protections.

Finally, in Maryland, all public schools will be closed for 2 weeks, Catholic Schools in Baltimore are shutting down, Episcopal Churches are suspending services, and both state and federal courts are suspending cases, with most public entertainment events cancelled as well.

This all went pear shaped rather quickly.

* Following his conviction on bribery charges, he blew his brains out at a press converence.
.

Quote of the Day

It’s often wrong to think conservatives are full of shit. They’re just not using words and phrases to mean things that they normally mean. It’s not true that they are big hypocrites or lying about “religious freedom,” it’s that to them, “religious freedom” means the freedom of members of their dominant preferred religion to enact theocracy and oppress everybody else. That is simply what it means to them.

Atrios

This is a very important observation: When the Talibaptist talk, they are using language in a very different way from the mainstream.

Understand that they are not talking to you, they are talking to each other, so when they are refer to, “Compassionate Conservatism, ” they are referring to Marvin Olasky thesis that you have to force people into starvation to really help them, and when they talk about, “Religious Freedom”, they are talking about killing gay people, resegregating society, and establishing a real version of The Handmaid’s Tale on earth.

Not a Single Occurrence of the Word “Genocide”

The New York Times has a blockbuster using leaked documents showing that China is using mass detentions in an attempt to eradicate the culture of its citizens in western China, most notably the Uighurs. (Long read)

Acting on this scale, there are somewhere around a million people in detention, one can only conclude that that this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate the ethnic character of the population that they are likening to a disease.

Why not a single quote from someone who would describe it as a “genocide”?

The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.

The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?

The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.

………

The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:  

  • President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

 ………

  • The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.

    The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.

………

Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.

………

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.

“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

I would note that the CCP already has a policy of aggressive immigration of Han Chinese into non-Han regions, so this is actually stage 2 of a policy that fits the UN definition of Genocide.

At the very least, the reporters could have brought in an export to bring up the genocidal aspects of what Beijing is doing.

Welcome to the Republic of Gilead

Last November, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a candid email to colleagues about pressure from the White House to reroute Middle East aid to religious minorities, particularly Christian groups.

“Sometimes this decision will be made for us by the White House (see… Iraq! And, increasingly, Syria),” said Hallam Ferguson, a senior official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, in an email seen by ProPublica. “We need to stay ahead of this curve everywhere lest our interventions be dictated to us.”

The email underscored what had become a stark reality under the Trump White House. Decisions about U.S. aid are often no longer being governed by career professionals applying a rigorous review of applicants and their capabilities. Over the last two years, political pressure, particularly from the office of Vice President Mike Pence, had seeped into aid deliberations and convinced key decision-makers that unless they fell in line, their jobs could be at stake.

Five months before Ferguson sent the email, his former boss had been ousted following a mandate from Pence’s chief of staff. Pence had grown displeased with USAID’s work in Iraq after Christian groups were turned down for aid.

ProPublica viewed internal emails and conducted interviews with nearly 40 current and former U.S. officials and aid professionals that shed new light on the success of Pence and his allies in influencing the government’s long-standing process for awarding foreign aid. Most people spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration’s efforts to influence USAID funding sparked concern from career officials, who worried the agency risked violating constitutional prohibitions on favoring one religion over another. They also were concerned that being perceived as favoring Christians could worsen Iraq’s sectarian divides.

………

The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed have previously reported Pence’s interest in increasing foreign aid to Christians and his displeasure with USAID’s activities in Iraq.

Please, impeach Pence first.

This is Beyond Horrible

I first heard about this when my RABBI mentioned that there had been a shooting this afternoon:

A heavily armed gunman with a live-streaming head camera tried to storm a synagogue in eastern Germany on Wednesday as congregants observed the holiest day in Judaism. Foiled by a locked door, he killed two people outside and wounded two others in an anti-Semitic spree that smacked of far-right terrorism.

Hours later the police announced the arrest of a suspect in the assault in the city of Halle, one of the most brazen in a string of recent attacks aimed at Jews in Germany. Police officials declined to confirm if the suspect was the gunman or whether he had any accomplices.

The methodology of the assailant bore a striking resemblance to the rampage by a far-right extremist against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, more than six months ago, in which he broadcast his killings live on social media. Fifty-one people died in that attack.

Like the Christchurch killer, the Halle assailant recorded himself, in a 35-minute video of shooting, mayhem and hateful language. In accented English, he identified himself as Anon, denied the Holocaust, denounced feminists and immigrants, then declared: “The root of all these problems is the Jew.”

………

The assailant uploaded his video to Twitch, a live-streaming platform owned by Amazon that has struggled with moderating the real-time content that floods in from millions of active broadcasters. Alerted to the broadcast, Twitch scrambled to remove it and issue an apology, but not before right-wing sites had archived it. Some exalted the killer as a hero.

It could have been worse, but it appears that the gunman was a pretty crappy gunsmith, and his homemade weapons, an automatic weapon and a shotgun, both failed.

Of course he did it on Yom Kippur.

F%$# Nazis.

Morally Indefensible

I’ve been thinking about the white cop (not mentioning her name) who murdered Botham Jean, and was (remarkably) convicted for her act, and specifically the behavior of her brother, Brandt Jean, and the judge presiding over the trial(!), after the sentence was announced.

Specifically they both gave hugs to the murderer cop in the spirit of forgiveness.

My take on this is profoundly different from that most of the (white and smugly) media about this, and not because of the “Magic Negro”* aspect of the whole storage. (Both Mr. Jean and the judge are African American)

It’s not that I do not find this criticism unpersuasive, I find it very persuasive, but as someone who can pass as white without trying, I am so completely removed from the black experience to say anything meaningful.

On the other hand I am a Jew, and from a Jewish perspective, or at least MY perspective, (though not just me) I have found the behavior, particularly from the judge, disturbing, and with Yom Kippur coming up, I felt I need to talk about repentance, (teshuva) and forgiveness.

Forgiveness without teshuva is wrong in normative Judaism, and teshuva in Judaism is not the profoundly different from mere regret, or even guilt. Teshuva is about correcting the wrongs that you have done, and correcting yourself so that the wrongs are not repeated, and the harms are remediated as much as possible.

The murderer cop has done none of this, and forgiveness without teshuvah is more than meaningless, it is harmful.

To quote Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a, “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

The cop didn’t just kill Botham Jean, and hurt his brother, and his mother, and his other loved ones, it is as if she destroyed the whole world.

This sort of throw away forgiveness minimizes the whole concept of repentance and the whole concept of forgiveness.

It makes the world a worse place, and it is completely wrong.

*Specifically, it appears that whenever a white person is finally held to account for brutality against a person of color, there the an expectation that some sort heart-warming expression of forgiveness must be made by the victim, or the victim’s family in order to assuage any potential feelings of guilt from white narcissists.

Your Worst Nightmare: Talibaptist Cops

Two Tennessee Police officers used the threat of arrest to force a woman to be baptized.

When you read this account, you just know that this was not the first time that happened.

My guess is that they get their jollies by seeing a shivering wet woman in their underwear:

A woman in Tennessee said a sheriff’s deputy stripped down to his boxers and forcibly baptized her at a boat ramp late one night in February.

Now she’s suing for more than $10 million, according to court documents.

Shandle Marie Riley accused two sheriff’s deputies and the Hamilton County government of civil rights violations and assault in a lawsuit filed Tuesday, saying she was “horribly violated” when one of the men got partially naked and dunked her in freezing cold water — all reportedly to keep her out of jail after a traffic stop.

“(The deputy) had no lawful basis to coerce (Riley) into obtaining towels, following (him) to a remote location, and participating in a baptism in exchange for not going to jail,” the complaint states. “No reasonable law enforcement officer would have acted in this manner.”

Representatives from the county and the sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to McClatchy news group’s request for comment Wednesday.

………

During the traffic stop, the deputy accused Riley of having meth and ordered her to get out of the car, according to the suit.

“Without any lawful justification, Wilkey then conducted a search of the plaintiff’s person by feeling, through plaintiff’s clothing, her breasts, abdomen, buttocks, inner thighs and her crotch,” the complaint states.

He also reportedly asked her to “reach under her shirt and pull out her bra and shake the bra and the shirt.”

When Riley asked if a female officer should be present, Wilkey told her the law didn’t require it, according to the suit.

………

“Wilkey then told plaintiff that God was talking to him during the vehicle search, and Wilkey felt the lord wanted him to baptize the plaintiff,” the complaint states. “Wilkey further told plaintiff that he felt ‘the spirit.’”

In exchange for the baptism, the deputy told Riley he would not take her to jail but issue a criminal citation for the marijuana, according to the suit.

Per his instructions, Riley said she brought two towels from her friend’s home and followed the deputy to a boat ramp at Soddy Lake, more than 20 miles outside Chattanooga.

“Wilkey did not say where he was taking her,” the complaint states. “At no time did plaintiff feel free to simply ignore Wilkey and not do as he commanded.”

Another deputy, Jacob Goforth, reportedly met them at the boat ramp to serve as a witness and “attest to the ritual.”

Wilkey then stripped down to his boxer shorts and gave Riley the same option, which she declined, according to the suit.

The deputy led Riley waist-deep into “frigid water” and submerged her with one hand on her back and the other on her breasts “for several moments,” she said in court documents.

“(Riley) was shivering uncontrollably, and felt horribly violated,” the complaint states.

After toweling off, Riley said Goforth “smirked” at her but never attempted to intervene or report his colleague.

The New York Times also notes that officer Wilkey also faces an unrelated excessive force lawsuit.

Why are these guys still on the force.

Also, why are they not cooling their heels in jail.

Give Me That Old Time Religion

It turns out that a church known as the Imperial Valley Ministry has been enslaving homeless people to line their own pockets.

This is old school religion, as any Pharaoh would agree:

Inside a beige bungalow in California’s Imperial Valley with a well-trimmed lawn and beds of pink flowers, the 17-year-old girl felt imprisoned. The doors were locked from the inside. The windows were nailed shut.

Like the other homeless and vulnerable people who came to Imperial Valley Ministries seeking shelter, food and rehab, the teenager was not allowed to leave without supervision, was not allowed to contact her family, to “discuss things of the world” or read any book but the Bible, according to federal prosecutors. Those who lived in the church’s group homes had to turn over their money and welfare benefits, their identification and all of their personal belongings, so that even if they wanted to leave, they couldn’t, prosecutors said.

Then, once they settled in, they were allegedly forced to panhandle up to nine hours a day for six days a week in parking lots and on street corners — turning over every penny to the church.

Finally the 17-year-old had enough: She busted through the locked window to escape, bleeding from the shards of glass, and ran to a neighbor to call the police.

Now, after her outcry helped propel an FBI investigation, the girl’s alleged captors — Imperial Valley Ministry’s religious leaders — were charged Tuesday with forced labor for allegedly luring in dozens of victims under false pretenses only to lock them inside group homes and compel them to panhandle for the church’s profit. Prosecutors also say a dozen ministry leaders defrauded taxpayers by taking guests’ welfare benefits. The victims gave the church permission to take up to 40 percent of their benefits to go toward their expenses. Instead, prosecutors say, IVM took everything.

U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer, of the Southern District of California, called it the “most significant labor trafficking prosecution” in his district in years.

“The indictment alleges an appalling abuse of power by church officials who preyed on vulnerable homeless people with false promises of a warm bed and meals,” Brewer said at a news conference Tuesday. “Instead these victims were held captive, stripped of their humble financial means, stripped of their identification, their freedom and their dignity.”

………

Victor Gonzalez, a former pastor who allegedly directed much of the conspiracy, denied he’d done anything wrong last year when the FBI raided the group homes and the main church office in El Centro, Calif., a small city in the arid Colorado Desert, just north of the Mexican border.

………

With the proceeds the church earned largely on the backs of the homeless, prosecutors said, church leaders opened 30 affiliate churches throughout the United States and Mexico, although the criminal conspiracy focuses on five group homes based in El Centro, Chula Vista and Calexico, Calif., from 2013 to 2018, when Victor Gonzalez was in charge.

………

The participants would immediately be forced to turn over all of their documents, money and belongings to the home supervisors, he said. They would then sign an agreement that laid out a strict set of rules and expectations, all designed to isolate them from the rest of the world. “There will be no use of the telephone,” Rule No. 3 said. “You have two meals daily except on Sundays,” sometimes a day of mandatory fasting, Rule 25 said. “If any of the above rules are broken there will be discipline,” Rule No. 28 said.

………

If convicted of the forced labor conspiracy, benefits fraud and document servitude, Gonzalez and the 11 others could face up to 20 years in prison. Most will be arraigned Wednesday afternoon.

Not long enough.

The Stupid, It Burns!

No, it’s not a joke:

A private Catholic school in Nashville has removed the Harry Potter books from its library, saying they include “actual curses and spells, which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits”.

Local paper the Tennessean reported that the pastor at St Edward Catholic school, which teaches children of pre-kindergarten age through to 8th grade, had emailed parents about JK Rowling’s series to tell them that he had been in contact with “several” exorcists who had recommended removing the books from the library.

“These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception,” Rev Dan Reehil wrote. “The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text.”

Curses and spells included in the bestselling books, which were published between 1997 and 2007, include “avada kedavra”, the “killing” curse; “crucio”, the torture curse; and “imperio”, which allows the wizards to control others’ actions.

Rebecca Hammel, superintendent of schools for the Catholic diocese of Nashville, told the Tennessean that Reehil had sent the email after an inquiry from a parent. She added that “he’s well within his authority to act in that manner”, because “each pastor has canonical authority to make such decisions for his parish school”.

 I weep for humanity.

Sadism Works as an Explanation

Specifically, they derive pleasure from the misery of “the other” that they have deemed unworthy:

I understand why it’s hard for normal people to believe that white evangelical Christians are sadists. Normal people have never been, as I was a long time ago, on the inside of that shadowy religious world. But the sooner they understand this, the sooner normal people will see that white evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump isn’t rooted in hypocrisy, contradiction or merely straying from the straight and narrow. The reason they support a fascist president is simple: They’re sadists.

The word “sadist” is off-putting. I get that. But if you’re thinking of sex, you’re thinking in the wrong way. If you’re thinking of “pleasure,” as in sexual pleasure, you’re thinking the wrong way. The pleasure white evangelical Christians derive from the suffering of human beings deemed less human than they are is not about sex. It’s about the pain, humiliation or even violence out-groups deserve by dint of being out-groups. Gay men, for instance, deserve their punishment because they are gay. Punishment for being gay is “divine justice.” From such “justice” comes pleasure—which is sadism.

I didn’t come up with the term. Richard Rorty did. I’m only pushing it as far to the fore as I can, because I don’t think normal people understand what they are facing, and if they don’t understand, they will keep treating sadists as if they have a legitimate place in a liberal democracy. Cruelty is the point, as Adam Serwer powerfully and famously put it in The Atlantic. But normal people must understand the animating force behind that cruelty. Sadists are sadistic not because they are cruel. It’s much simpler than that. They are cruel because being cruel to people deserving cruelty feels good.

I’m still considering the arguments, but the thesis is consistent with the actual observed events, and appears to have a significant predictive properties, which puts it a step above string theory.

Talibaptist

Seriously, these people are indistinguishable from ISIS:

A week before his re-election last year, state Rep. Matt Shea denied that a leaked manifesto he wrote was a road map for a holy war, one that would pit conservative Christian “patriots” against Muslim and Marxist “terrorists.”

Rather, Shea insisted, the document titled “Biblical Basis for War” contained notes for a scholarly sermon on war in the Old Testament.

But newly leaked emails, first reported by The Guardian on Wednesday, as well as a video on Shea’s public Facebook page, show the Spokane Valley Republican has had close ties with a group called Team Rugged that trained children, teens and men in their early 20s for religious combat.

“The entire purpose behind Team Rugged is to provide patriotic and biblical training on war for young men,” a man identified as the group’s leader, Patrick Caughran, wrote in a July 2016 email to Shea. “Everything about it is both politically incorrect and what would be considered shocking truth to most modern christians. There will be scenarios where every participant will have to fight against one of the most barbaric enemies that are invading our country, Muslims terrorists.”

Props to the Spokane county sheriff though:

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, who has urged fellow Republicans to denounce Shea as an extremist, compared Team Rugged to the Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany.

“Any radicalization of youth in such a manner would be very comparable,” Knezovich said in a text message Wednesday.

I did Nazi that coming.

H/t EC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Truly Elegant Troll

Because they have way too much free time, and because they want to force their views on others, the Kentucky legislature pass a law requiring schools to prominently display the national motto, “In God we trust.”

In response, Fayette County Public Schools is hanging framed dollar bills.

Well played:

When Brittany Pike saw the back of a dollar bill framed at Lexington’s Athens Chilesburg Elementary School last week, she couldn’t have been more pleased.

Pike took a photo and posted it on Facebook Wednesday along with this message about Fayette County Public Schools’ response to Kentucky’s new law that requires the national “In God We Trust” motto to be displayed prominently at schools:

“This school year Kentucky began requiring schools to place “In God We Trust” in the building. I absolutely love living in a school district that wants to follow the law while also ensuring EVERY student feels welcomed back regardless of religious beliefs. Thank you so very much Fayette County Public Schools for simply posting a dollar with ‘In God We Trust.’ My kids don’t feel awkward or excluded for not believing in any God.”

Fayette Superintendent Manny Caulk said Wednesday afternoon that in complying with the new law, “all schools in our district have been provided a framed version of an enlarged copy of a $1 dollar bill to display in a prominent location.”

This is beautiful.