Category: Arkansas

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Murder and Racist Idiots

Park Plaza Mall
Park Plaza – Inside

There was a murder near my neighborhood a couple of days ago. Over at the mall about 3 miles from my house. It’s the nicest mall in the area, if malls can be considered nice. It has a glass ceiling and upscale stores along with the usual franchises that litter every mall in America. I only go there when I have no other choice. I hate malls. I am a mall bigot.

The murder happened right about closing time, down at the food court on the lowest level. A Sbarro’s employee, aided somehow by a compatriot, walked down a back hallway and shot two of his co-workers. One died; the other, a teenage girl, is in critical condition.

Two suspects have been arrested. According to some, they fit the expected demographic: one is 18, the other is 20, and both appear to have dark skin. Pitchforks and torches are at the ready.

This mob is not racist. It hates crime, not skin color.
Multi-racial Angry Mob: Together for a Reason

My favorite comment on this incident may be from Jen, who frequents the Forbidden Hillcrest Facebook page, and who said,

If you are going to rob your employer and shoot your coworkers, wouldn’t it be more lucrative if you worked at Bailey Banks and Biddle instead of a greasy pizza joint in the mall? How stupid would that person feel in jail in with the population: “I, uh, stole a bunch of ones and some of those Parmesan packets and shot the mfers that wouldn’t hand over the pepperoni.”

We laughed, despite the seriousness of the situation, because sometimes laughter helps ease the ache. This crime was so senseless, and four lives – as well as the lives of their loved ones – are forever changed. But what crime is sensible? Criminals are not exactly known for their intelligence. Witness: their chosen profession.

Not the current profile image, but definitely my favorite one

Forbidden Hillcrest, on whose page Jen posted that comment, reports on crime in and around my neighborhood, spreads rumors about creeks that run red with zombie blood, posts cool photos of how my Hillcrest neighborhood used to look back in its early days, explores the mysteries of Hillcrest today, and makes up stuff about pug stranglers and roving gangs of women vigilantes. Sometimes we wish some of those roving vigilantes were real. Especially when the target of local crime is, well, us.

A couple of weeks ago national crime statistics released for 2012 positioned Little Rock as the 8th worst city in the country in crime. Detroit Michigan is #1, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, less than an hour down the freeway from here, is #2. Flint, Michigan was third, followed by Memphis, Tennessee, whose metro area includes the area across the Mississippi River in Arkansas.  Arkansas boasts three urban areas in the top ten, with an average score 103.87. Now, Michigan’s average scores (150.23) are much worse, with Detroit and Flint at #1 and #3, but the average scores for the two cities in Tennessee that make the top ten – one of which is the Memphis metro area, of course, and the other is Jackson – make it a definite third (86.85).

Why all the crime? That’s something I don’t pretend to know all the answers to. There’s a fellow who chose to comment confidently on the Arkansas Blog as to the nature of the people who committed the crime.

They must have had no opportunities in life and come from a broken home without a father. But I bet you $100.00 that they have the latest cell phones and have some 24 inch chrome rims for day rides main.

I could have ignored that but for the fact that… okay, fine: There’s no way I could ignore that racist crack.

I didn’t get there first, though. Others who are regulars on that blog, like me, jumped in with both feet. The original commenter, who went by the handle “larock72,” responded:

Unfortunately I have worked in a outreach organization for Central Arkansas for many years and have worked with the LRPD. Black America has some major problems that are brought on by the dependence on government. It has created a lazy black nation that lacks in morality. Go bother someone else…..my comments while sarcastic and rude are the truth.

My, What a wide brush you have, larock72! The better to stereotype with, I suppose?

But he wasn’t done. He responded to another commenter who called him out on his racist bigotry:

Listen I am the definition of smart and intuitive. I have worked with many poor and down and out black families. They are the ones who are ashamed of their people. I have nothing against any person! … I am tired of the typical initial liberal response to my insightful posts on this blog…. Oh and – Have a nice day in liberal fantasy camp.

That post sent me back to what he had already written, looking for something insightful. I came up totally empty.

The extreme over-generalization of an entire race (“black America”), not to mention an entire class (“no opportunities” and “dependent on the government”) and an huge segment of society that crosses the lines of race, class, and educational levels (“broken home without a father”) astounded and offended me.

In which a Wolverine steals a loaf of bread and shit goes down

For a little context, let me say that very recently I was the victim of crime perpetuated by four men who happened to have been born black. Every black person I have told about this crime has been horrified at what those thugs did to me – as has every white person and every brown, red, and yellow person – and every other person whose skin falls into a shade somewhere among those hues. The truth is, the vast majority of people, no matter what their social or economic circumstances may be, are law-abiding and contribute to society in a positive way.

I seriously doubt that their race had anything to do with the decision of either group of thugs – these murders or the robbers who assaulted me – to commit a crime. Their antisocial behavior may – may – have been a result of their involvement in a gang subculture. (Young people of white, Latino, and interracial descent in this city are also involved in gangs.) It may have been a result of bad parenting. (There are crappy parents of all colors.) It may have been chronic unemployment and a Jean Valjean-level of desperation. (A lack of jobs disproportionately affects younger people.) It may be attributable to an entertainment industry that glorifies violence, especially violence with guns, especially by young males, regardless of race.

More likely, it possibly could be attributed to the fact that their antisocial personalities didn’t care that they would be spending quality time in prison, because they intended to have a grand time robbing someone of stuff they could sell fast for some quick money.

If race had anything to do with their decision to commit a crime, I submit for consideration the possibility that racist comments by narrow-minded bigots who over-generalize and do not see individuals, but instead see color and stereotype accordingly, contributed to their sense of hopelessness and created an environment in which they might have decided that if that’s what the dominant people in their society thought of them, then they might as well go ahead and do it and get it over with.

I beg larock72 and anyone who agrees with him to please back off the stereotyping and racist bigotry and look into the actual person’s situation. You may not sympathize with this particular criminal, but it may enable you to see beyond the next young black person’s race and socioeconomic status long enough to realize that they are people, too – with the same hopes, dreams, ambitions, desires, and plans for a good future that you and “your kind” have.

“No opportunities,” “broken home without a father,” “24 inch chrome rims,” and “dependent on the government” – these phrases assume an awful lot about the people who committed this crime. At this point, the only thing we know for sure about them is the color of their skin and their ages.

Mae Jemison NASA Astronaut
Mae Jemison: engineer, physician, and astronaut, and the first black woman in space

Larock72 condemned an entire race by painting it with the same wide brush. This is the race claimed by outstanding public servants and policymakers such as Barack Obama, Patricia Roberts Harris, Eric Holder, Joycelyn Elders, Andrew Young, Ron Brown, Ralph Bunche, Booker T. Washington, David Dinkins, Harold Washington, Clarence Thomas, and Thurgood Marshall.  This attitude tells Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks that they did not earn their awards and prizes for their amazing contributions to literature on their own merit. Larock72’s comments exemplify the environment that made the civil rights work and sacrifices of Marian Wright Edelman, Harriet Tubman, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and W.E.B. Du Bois so much more difficult and costly than they had to be. Such a sweeping condemnation of an entire race completely disregards the important scientific contributions and inventions by George Washington Carver, James West, Garrett Morgan, and Emmett Chappelle. It ignores the groundbreaking medical research and procedures pioneered by Charles Drew and Daniel Hale Williams. It is the attitude that would have us believe that Mae Jemison never should have been a doctor, much less an astronaut.

This list could go on and on. The people I have listed are only a few of the black Americans who have made significant contributions to our culture and society in the last hundred and fifty years.

How could there possibly be anything racist about this racially offensive image? Don't give me that shit about how it was "just the times." It was racist. Period.
Al Jolson in Blackface, ~1914

If larock72’s position is correct, we should think that the only reason we have black admirals and generals like Colin Powell and Lloyd Austin in our military is because they love violence and killing – never mind their proven leadership and judgment. We should also minimize the gifted performances of Paul Robeson, Morgan Freeman, Sidney Poitier, Will Smith, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Denzel Washington, and Halle Berry, who clearly were only given their acting roles because blackface went out of style with Al Jolson.

Stereotypes may lead people like Larock72 to think that musicians like Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Ellis Marsalis and his famous sons, the Neville Brothers, Louis Armstrong, and the many, many other black musicians who have shaped the American music landscape were doing the only thing they were culturally suited for: making noise. And what about Muhammed Ali, Arthur Ashe, Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson, and Michael Jordan? Oh, right – there’s that thing about the extra leg muscle that makes them a different species, but better athletes. It’s only to be expected.

The 2010 Census figures show list the entire population of the United States at roughly 309 million people. Of those, 223 million people, or 72% of all people living in the United States reported their race as white. The black or African-American population totaled 39 million and represented 13% of the total population. These numbers reflect only those people reporting themselves as one race only. In Arkansas, close to 4500,00 people – less than 16% of our state’s total population – are black. So Arkansas has a slightly higher percentage of black citizens than the average state’s black population.

The National Poverty Center compiled the statistics with respect to income gathered by the Census Bureau in 2010, and reports that nearly 15 million – about 38% – of black children live in poverty while roughly 27 million – only 12% – of white children do. Fewer black children live in poverty, but because the black population is so much lower than the white population, a larger proportion of black children are poor.

But even if we look at the disproportionate number of poor black kids, we still see that not only are there fewer of them living below the poverty line, the 38% that do don’t make up “a vast majority,” no matter how we do the math.

So let’s look at who actually receives government assistance. Again, according to the Census Bureau, about 3% of the total population of the United States received public assistance in 2010. Arkansas, despite its greater relative numbers living below poverty level, has a lower participation rate in government assistance programs than the national average. In 2010 only around 20,000 – that’s twenty thousand – Arkansans received welfare benefits, which is less than two percent of our state’s population.

So, 16% of our citizens are black, but only 2% of our citizens receive public assistance. Even if every recipient of public assistance in the state of Arkansas were black, those 20,000 recipients aren’t even close to 50% of the 450,000 black Arkansans.

Larock72 said his comments were sarcastic and rude. I missed the sarcasm, but I definitely caught the rude. To that, I will add: uncalled for, terrifically racist, bigoted, narrow-minded, and dead wrong.

This bigoted jerk claims to have worked in a community outreach position. Given his shockingly negative attitude toward an entire race, I have to question how effective he could possibly be in such a position. His overt racism coupled with his lack of sympathy, insight, and empathy cause me to wonder whether he did more damage than good in such a position. I see absolutely no evidence of truth in his assertions that he is intelligent and intuitive given the overtly racist, shallow and erroneous statements he made, not to mention his complete disregard for statistics.

The government’s own statistics give lie to larock72’s belief that “a large majority of blacks” fall into a cycle of failure.  While a disproportionate number of the people who fall into the cycle of failure he recounts may be black, that’s a completely different statement, and one we all would be well-advised to observe.

The reasons people fall into the system and cannot extract themselves has much more to do with the system as a whole – how it helps people, when it helps people, when it declares people ineligible for help even though they still desperately need it, what educational opportunities it offers, what type of jobs it trains people for. One of the biggest problems I have seen is the attitudes of the people who work for the system. They have no clue what their clients’ lives are like on a day-to-day basis, and condemn them for failures. They condemn people for being mentally ill or stressed to the point of not being able to function. Government aid workers and social services case workers alike condemn them for being so overwhelmed by their circumstances that they are grasping at anything that looks like a solution, no matter how tentative.

Racist Jackassery Affects Real People.

White people do indeed oppress black people. We oppress them when we paint them with wide brushes that condemn them not for their actions but based on the color of their skin. We oppress them when we shift our eyes away from them and cross the street rather than pass them on a sidewalk with the same smile and nod we would give a white person. We oppress them when we expect them to fail. We oppress them when we assume that they are on welfare, that they are criminals, and that they are irresponsible.

I hope that a day will come in my lifetime when black people do not have to walk into a room of white people and wonder whether they will be received on equal terms. Until that day comes, and as long as black people have a harder time being accepted for the individuals they are rather than a stereotype, they will be oppressed.

Statements like larock72’s contribute to that oppression.

Don't be a racist

Fight racism.

We owe it to one another as human beings.

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Robbery with Ray, Pookie, Luke, and Champ

You’d have thought they were the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the way they crashed through my front door about 10:15 pm on December 6.

I had already gone to bed. I had my laptop open to make sure I hadn’t missed anything on Reddit, and was brushing one of my geriatric cats, George, when I heard the pounding on the door. The doorbell rang almost simultaneously. Obviously, something was wrong, so I got out of bed to grab my robe. Did one of my neighbors have an emergency? There’s a young family that lives on one side of me with a toddler. My friend Jean, another single woman, lives across the street. On the other side of me are a quiet couple about my age. What could be wrong?

I hadn’t yet crossed the room when I realized that there were people in my house. Multiple people. The only time multiple people come into my house at that time of night without me letting them in is when my son and nephews are home from college, and they were all … away at college. But sometimes my son and his friends dropped by after his roommate performed with the Improv troupe in North Little Rock. I called out, “Jack?” There was no answer. I walked out into the dark hallway. Whoever had come in had not turned on lights. Whoever had come in was on the stairs, almost to the lower floor where my bedroom was. Whoever had come in had a gun, and in the light from my bedroom I could see that it was pointed at me.

I dashed back into the bedroom. My phone was across the room, on the bedside table next to the bed I had just left. Before I could get to it, the intruders were standing in my bedroom pointing a sawed-off shotgun at my face.

Double-Barrel Sawed-Off Shotgun
Sort of like this, only bigger and realer. (source)

A few days later I would learn that the gunman’s name was Robert Morgan Perry. His buddies had referred to him as “Ray” throughout their visit. He called them “Pookie” and “Luke.”

Yes, they were stupid enough to call each other by name. Clearly, these gangstas did not spend their spare time watching CSI. As the twenty minutes or so that they spent in my house dragged by, it became clear to me that they had never paid much attention to true crime shows like Forensic Files or The First 48, either.

After pocketing my iPhone, the man grabbed my laptop computer from where it sat on my bed. He was not wearing gloves. Then he started yanking cords out of the electronics beside my bed. My clock radio, my iPod dock. He looked around and saw a quilt. He dumped the items onto the quilt, which apparently would serve as a way for him to carry those things out, then looked around my bedroom for more stuff to take. The whole time he carelessly waved his gun toward me.

It was a big gun, about a foot long, and it looked like it meant business. I wasn’t sure whether the guy himself was all that strong, but given the artillery he had, I decided not to find out.

dresser drawer
Broken dresser drawer

He grabbed the jewelry I had left on top of my dresser. Three of my favorites. A pair of antique Victorian chandelier ruby earrings, an antique gold ring I wore all the time, and my Goddess. My heart cried out when he took my Goddess. The he started yanking drawers out of the dresser and dumping their contents. He dropped one of the smaller drawers and kicked it. It shattered. He kicked the pieces out of the way and jerked open the next drawer. He sifted through my underwear, holding up items he found interesting. My stomach churned with disgust.

“Is there anybody else in this house?” he yelled at me. “If there’s anybody else in this house I’m going to blow his ass away!” Ray repeated this threat several times throughout his visit. No, no one else was home. I was glad Jack was at college. I was glad the dogs were at Skip’s. Had Missy or Frogger attacked armed intruders, they might both be dead.

I knew I had to look at him to be able to remember a good description. I stared at his face whenever he turned toward me. I estimated him to be about 5’6, with a slim build – maybe about 150 pounds – and medium skin. I had to remember. I hated looking at his face, especially as he fingered my lingerie.

“Where’s the rest of your jewelry?” he demanded. I said nothing. He waved the gun in my direction. “I know you got more jewelry,” he said.

“That’s it. You’ve got it. That’s what I wear every day,” I answered. That much was two-thirds true. I wear the ring every day. I wear the Goddess most days. The earrings, though, I tend to wear just during the holidays, because they remind me of Christmas ornaments.

earrings

He looked around the room. I could hear his future co-defendants moving around upstairs. My bedroom is one level down from the front entrance to my house. He waved the gun again. “Where’s your damn jewelry?” he demanded.

Goddess
Not my cleavage.

Now, here’s where I confess that I am a jewelry whore. I don’t wear makeup very often, and I usually just pull my otherwise unkempt hair into a ponytail, but otherwise, I’m very much a dragon. I love sparkly things. I love gold. I love shiny stones. I love silver. I like big jewelry. I am quite content when I am surrounded by pretty baubles. My hoard of shiny, sparkly things makes me happy. I’ve collected antique jewelry for years. And I was damned if I was going to tell him where it was.

But he kept yelling at me and waving that gun in my face. Finally, I told him I had a safe in my closet. It was sitting on the floor. He grinned as he carried it out, smug in his conquest. He called for Pookie to keep an eye on me while he carried the safe out. One of the other two men obliged, but unlike Ray, his face was covered. He was wearing my son’s Guy Fawkes mask.

He was about the same size as Ray, though, with hair either braided or in tight dreadlocks, pulled back into a short ponytail. I might not be able to see his face, but I could tell what his build was.

At some point during all this, I heard a terrific crash from upstairs. I couldn’t tell where it came from, just that it was really, really loud. Something big had fallen.

Those fuckers were breaking my stuff.

Evidently, since they hadn’t worked to earn the money to pay for it, they couldn’t care less whether they damaged it. I had visions of antique French furniture being smashed into kindling. I worried that my grandmother’s Italian crystal chandelier had been ripped from the dining room ceiling. I expected them to take all the electronics they could carry. I just hoped they’d leave the antiques and art alone. With any luck, they didn’t know what those things were worth, and couldn’t tell about the value of my other shiny baubles, set about my home and in cases and on shelves. I hoped all they wanted were things they could sell quickly and easily, but because that horrible man grinned as he pocketed three pieces of unique and easily identifiable jewelry, I was worried.

Ray soon returned to the bedroom, and a third guy also came downstairs where we were. I saw three men during that incident, but I thought perhaps I heard someone else still upstairs when the three I saw were downstairs. They systematically yanked the TV and other electronics out of the wall sockets and carried them out. I have a sewing room next to my bedroom, and they took the TV from there, too.

Then one of the thugs noticed my collection of antique sterling silver and mother of pearl sewing tools. More shiny baubles. He emptied the display case and my heart sank. Most of those belonged to two of my great-grandmothers, and they are irreplaceable. The price they will bring at a pawn shop pales in comparison to what they are worth, and what they mean to me.

thimble
They dropped one thimble similar to this. I had bought it in Taxco, Mexico, when I was a teenager. All the others were taken.

Two of them returned upstairs, leaving only Ray downstairs. He rummaged through my closets, digging through bags and boxes. Unwrapped Christmas gifts sat in one closet. After dumping the box they were in, Ray apparently saw nothing worth stealing so moved on.

Then he yelled to ask if Pookie had his gun. Startled, I saw that Ray was no longer holding the gun. A wild hope of escape crossed my mind, but with Ray between me and the back door, and at least two more men upstairs, I was frozen with indecision. Could I make it across the street to Jean’s? Not if I had to run past them. Could I get out the back door? Probably not before Ray caught up with me. Would he just let me run? Probably not. If I ran, where could I go? To get to Jean’s I’d have to cross the street in front of my house, where Ray’s buddies were probably loading things into their vehicle. And one of them – I didn’t know which – probably had that gun. I felt like a deer in headlights. I didn’t run.

Photo by Paul Carr

He moved to the laundry room across from my bedroom, demanding that I come with him. He had found a clear plastic bag someplace, and began stuffing smaller things into it. “What the hell? That’s my travel iron!” I couldn’t help myself. These idiots were risking a prison sentence of 20-40 years or life for a miniature iron that probably cost less than $20 and was at least 15 years old? Seriously? Ray just looked at me and grinned. Maybe he was in this for the excitement, not the money.

Some of the things they took and some of the things they left were puzzling. The drawer holding my sterling silver flatware was open, but nothing was missing. They took the Rock Band video game components – then abandoned them just outside the basement door – but didn’t even knock Jack’s 50th Anniversary Fender Stratocaster off its stand.

Ray ordered me up the stairs. I hoped they wouldn’t kidnap me. The hope of being able to run past them, out the front door and across the street to Jean’s, beat wildly in my chest. On the way upstairs, I noticed blood dripped on the wall and on the landing. Satisfaction mingled with my faint hope. One of them was bleeding, and that meant better forensic evidence than smudged fingerprints and half-remembered descriptions from a terrified victim. I looked away from the blood. I hoped the thugs wouldn’t notice it. They stopped me at the top of the stairs. I couldn’t see out the front door, and I couldn’t see whether there were other people.

I wondered if I dared to try to push past them to get across the street to Jean’s house before they found the gun, but someone yelled that he had it. I wondered if these thugs really had the courage, or were psychopathic enough, to really use it. I decided that trial and error was not a good way to find out.

Finally one of them said he had the gun. I couldn’t tell which. All those potential escape scenarios committed seppuku in my brain.

When they decided they had been at my house long enough, the one in the Guy Fawkes mask led me down to the basement and told me to wait 60 seconds after they left to leave the room. Then he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re just trying to feed our families.”

I wondered who they thought would feed their families while they were in prison. Bringing that gun along had added at least ten years to their sentences, and none of them was wearing gloves. I had seen Ray’s face and studied it well. I had desperately noted every detail I could about the other two, from their hairstyles to their body types.

He left the room, and a few moments later I heard the squeal of tires. I bolted upstairs. They hadn’t found my kitchen phone. I shook as I dialed 911. I blurted out what had happened, and then I started to really panic. What if they came back? Should I stay, or leave? I begged the 911 operator to call my sister. She tried, but my sister was out of town. I didn’t want to bother my brother, Jay, who I knew had been up for nearly 48 hours already because of a huge project at work. I asked her to call my son’s father. He didn’t answer his phone. I started to cry. She called him again. Still no answer. But by this time the police arrived.

I was telling the police what had happened when my phone rang. It was my ex. I begged him to come over.

I love Skip – he’s still one of my very best friends, even though we’ve been divorced nearly eight years. I am really sorry for ruining his evening – he said he had left a very promising date to come see about me. I don’t know who the woman was, but I sure hope she accepts that his decision was a sign of his strength of character, and not a competition where she came in second. (She’s welcome to him. Take my ex-husband. Please. All I ask is that she allow him to remain my friend when it comes to Jack. And in the occasional emergency.)

A few minutes later the doorbell rang again. My sister had called Jay, who immediately had come wide awake despite his exhaustion and broken land speed records over the ten miles to my house. I love that man, too. He thought to turn on the “Track my Phone” feature and found that the thugs and my phone were at the hospital less than half a mile away. He put my phone in lost mode.

Jack came home that night, too. Jay had texted him and told him not to break speed records getting here, but I don’t think Jack paid much attention. He walked into the house and hugged me tighter than he has since he was a very little guy. Even if he’s grown, I guess he still loves his mom.

Jack helped me clean up the wreckage in my bedroom after the police, Skip, and Jay left. Neither one of us expected to sleep. About 5 a.m., I picked up one of the quilts and was surprised that it was heavy. I put it back down and unfolded it. Hidden within were my laptop, my bedside clock radio, my iPod, and my iPod dock. Ray had apparently forgotten them in the excitement of carrying out a heavy safe full of jewelry, I guess. Jack and I laughed.

Pookie left a lot of blood all over my house. He cut himself either taking my big TV off the wall over my living room fireplace or ripping cords out of the desktop computer he didn’t take the time to unhook. His thug buddies apparently took Pookie from my house straight to the ER to get him stitched up. They turned my phone on and off several times over the next several days – at Pookie’s house, at the barber college where Luke apparently works, and a few other places. The detectives were able to round up Pookie and Luke pretty quickly, and they confessed and implicated a fourth man, a guy named Wilbert Champ. I never saw Champ. Maybe he was the one I heard walking around upstairs while Pookie, Luke, and Ray were all downstairs. Ray told me there were five of them altogether.

A friend of mine runs the Forbidden Hillcrest site. I’ve followed his blog for several years since it’s all about my neighborhood. It’s fun to read – it has the history of Hillcrest, fictional neighborhood drama, and real neighborhood drama. On the Facebook page for Forbidden Hillcrest, there are lots of crime reports and commentary from my neighbors. When Pookie, Luke and Champ were arrested, the arrest reports were posted to the Forbidden Hillcrest page. Within minutes, my intrepid neighbors had found the Facebook pages for Pookie and Luke.

The “gangsta” talk on those two pages is almost unintelligible. It appears from Pookie’s post the day after the robbery that they did this as part of his birthday celebration. He said, “thanx to erbodi who wished me a happy bday~A0~”  What a way to celebrate – scare the shit out of some woman you’ve never seen before, forcibly deprive her of her things, wreck her house, and get arrested. Whooo-eeee, we’re having some fun, now.

Most disheartening, though was a photo posted on Luke’s page of himself and a small child. “Me and my lil g” is what he calls it. The child’s lower face is covered with a bandana, and both of them are throwing gang signs.

Lil G
Me an my lil g (source)

He’s proud of teaching a child to live a life of crime. After 20 years of practicing juvenile law, this disgusts me so completely there are barely words to describe how I feel. Talk about a kid having a lot to overcome – if crime is glorified to this child, then he’s going to end up in prison right along with Luke.

Luke appears to have at least some remorse for what he did. When he bonded out of jail after the arrest, he posted “Js wanna say srry 2 all da people I let down I’m finna get my life together from now on” on his Facebook status. He’s at least sorry for getting caught, which is a start. He’d have more credibility with me if he returned my jewelry and antique sewing tools, though. Who knows – he might get a lighter sentence than his co-defendants for his efforts. And he might actually straighten his life out. He’ll take a step toward transforming himself from a shitty human being to a human being who did something shitty once.

Robert Morgan “Ray” Perry

Ray is still at large, but there’s a warrant out for his arrest. When I received word of that and learned what his name was, I looked him up on the Pulaski County Clerk’s website. Piecing it together from docket entries on the website, it looks like he drew a battery charge in May 2006. Apparently, he didn’t show up for court, so in 2008 a warrant was finally issued for his arrest again.  Eventually, he got probation for the battery charge.

Then in April 2008, he was charged with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. He entered a negotiated plea – a plea bargain – to the lesser offense of sexual assault, and was sentenced to ten years, with 5 suspended, and sent to ADC in November 2008. He apparently got out on parole and did something else to get the suspended sentence imposed. The revocation petition mentions that he was in possession of firearms, which felons are not to have. There was a revocation hearing in October 2011 and he went to ADC again. Then in March 2012, he was sentenced to another 5 years on the sexual assault charge – essentially the suspended 5 years of the original sentence was imposed. I don’t know why he was already out in time to rob me at gunpoint by December 6. I have a feeling, though, that he’s going to spend a little longer in prison this time.

I don’t have any of my things back, and given the crash I heard from upstairs, I doubt the one television the police recovered will still work. It was covered in Pookie’s blood when they found it, anyway, so I’m not really sure I even want it back. They also recovered Jack’s Guy Fawkes mask. When I showed him the arrest report that said the mask had been found, Jack grimaced and said they could keep it.

Two nights later, about the same time, there was another armed home invasion robbery in my neighborhood. I wonder if the same thugs were responsible.

My friends keep asking me how I’m doing.

I do fine until it’s time to go to bed. Then I replay that twenty minutes in my mind, second-guessing myself, wondering what I could have done differently. Then I get up and take a Xanax, and after another twenty minutes of replaying the robbery, I finally fall asleep.

I could have locked up my jewelry before I went to bed. They wouldn’t have gotten my Goddess, then. I’m lucky that all they got were those three pieces of jewelry.

Oh, the safe I mentioned? The one I told Ray to get out of the closet? Yeah, it didn’t have jewelry in it. There was nothing of significant value in it at all. I hadn’t even opened it in ages. My best friend was under strict instructions to get that safe out of my house stat if anything ever happened to me because my mom and my son should never see its contents.

I almost wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Ray and Pookie and Luke drilled into it expecting to find my dragon’s hoard of jewels and learned that most of what was in it no doubt needed new batteries.

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Activism: How to Address Those Nativity Scenes

Reader Question:

I live in a small village in Ohio just outside of Cincinnati and there is the usual awful nativity scene on what I think is public land (a small park beside main street). As far as I can tell, nobody has ever challenged the Christian monopoly in a place like this, but I’d like to know what you think the best options / available courses of action are.

I’m from England originally, so I’m not always sure what the best course of action is in this country, and people aren’t always exactly willing to help, so any assistance would be appreciated. I’d like to know if what they are doing is legal and what my options are to challenge the hegemony.

Thanks,

Andy

For instance, Lewis County, Tennessee is proudly displaying a Non-Christians-Need-Not-Apply message this season. Does anyone out there want to get in on this one?

Answer:

There are a couple of different ways to go on this.

First, there’s the “Public Property Should Never be Used for Religious Displays Because That Promotes Religion” approach, in which we ask the public entity to remove its religious displays of suffer a lawsuit, and that works and makes a lot of people angry at us. We sue, the court says that by only displaying religious symbols from one religion the government entity is establishing religion, our attorney gets paid by the government entity, and the mission is accomplished.

Then, there’s the “Include My Display in the Public Forum” approach, which means that public property gets littered with a confusing mélange of tacky seasonal displays from many different religions, and hopefully from secular groups as well. Eventually the number of displays becomes burdensome, so they all get nixed. Or, there’s some other controversy, like we saw recently in Santa Monica, California, and the displays get nixed or moved to private property. (There’s no problem at all with moving them to private property. That’s where religious displays belong.)

So first, let’s define the parameters of what we want to accomplish. What are the goals?

  1. The goal of separation of church and state, of non-establishment, of the First Amendment,  is to prevent religious favoritism, but without denying anyone the right to practice their preferred flavor of religion.
  2. The goal of good taste is to rid public forums of seriously tacky seasonal displays.

And sometimes we have to jump on the tackiness train – sinking to the level of the worthy opposition – to get our point across and to let good taste prevail.

Once it looks like this at City Hall, people tend to call a halt to things.
But how to get to this point?

The local public square, city hall, city park, courthouse lawn, or whatever has its nativity scene. That’s typically the only thing that is displayed, because churches are more organized and wealthier than anyone else and can afford those life-size graven images of their baby god and his family.

The Nativity Scene at the Arkansas State Capitol is graven of wood. Good thing no one worships any of those images or considers them sacred.

 

Once the governing entity – city, county, or state – allows one private person to exercise his First Amendments rights in a public area, that area becomes a public forum for anyone to speak. That includes us. It riles the hardcore Christians to allow someone without religion to display something secular next theirs. Oh, they don’t mind the menorahs, usually, because Hanukkah is close to Christmas. But add atheists to the mix and they get testy.

Atheists need to ask to be added to the mix more often. Seriously. The Christians stole this holiday from earlier traditions and even from traditions that competed with them over a thousand years later. They do not “own” Christmas, no matter what this big winter holiday season is called. And if they get to erect gaudy, tacky displays, so do we.

It can be fun, like Santa and reindeer or a maze of giant illuminated candy canes. Personally, I’m fond of the educational displays, which explain the solstice and axial tilt as the reason for the season. How about a display telling about the non-Christian roots of things like garlands, mistletoe, decorated trees, wassailing, and Yule?

We atheists don’t necessarily have to go it alone, either. Even in your small community, you may have local families who aren’t Christian and who celebrate during the Christmas season for other reasons. One way I think to make a great point is to get a group of different kinds of non-Christians together to come up with something appropriately seasonal.

  • Iranians in your community probably observe Yalda, which is what the original Persian celebration of Mithra’s birth has become. The multi-day celebration is celebrated with feasting and fires.
  • Is there a Buddhist center nearby? They might never have thought of participating, but they have something to offer, too. Bodhi Day, the day the Buddha achieved enlightenment, is December 8. It is observed in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
  • Do you know any Wiccans? Those are some creative folks, and their traditions are well-represented in the Christian season.
  • How big is your local Asian community? Dong Zhi is the Chinese festival celebrating the winter solstice. Add Chinese lanterns to winter holiday displays!
  • Find out who organizes Kwanzaa celebrations in your community, and get them involved, too.  It can be something as simple as a sign.
  • Modern Hindus have a five-day celebration from December 21-25 called Pancha Ganapati, during which shrines to Lord Ganesha, the god that takes elephant form, are erected.
  • Obviously, Hanukkah is celebrated this time of the year, too. Ask Jewish neighbors to erect a menorah and break out the dreidels.

Pretty soon that lawn at City Hall will be so crowded with alternate seasonal displays that the people visiting it will end up getting educated in spite of themselves. They will realize that there are, indeed, many reasons for the holiday season. When they do, their minds are opened to differing viewpoints. And since we won’t have taken away their graven images, so they won’t be quite as mad at us.

Now, in all honesty, you might have to sue to enforce your rights in this regard. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a whole group of plaintiffs representing multiple traditions? Talk about giving power to alternate voices!

You’ll win that lawsuit, too. And when you win, you’ve won forever. Plus, your lawyer will get paid by the government that denied you your constitutional rights.

Winter Solstice Display erected on the State Capitol grounds by the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers. This outhouse model even comes with reading material already on the walls. See what it says on side 1, side 2, side 3, and side 4.

 

Yes, Virginia, you DO have a right to erect secular seasonal displays next to the Christians’ graven images.

(This post originally appeared on WWJTD.)

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Charlie Brown Christmas Field Trip Cancelled

The field trip by the local elementary school to a church to see the Charlie Brown Christmas play, complete with Bible soliloquy, has been cancelled.

This is not a win for the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers.

Why not? Because the church, and not the school, is the entity that blinked. And that’s too bad. We still have a school district that thinks it’s okay to violate the constitutional rights of children, and was ready and willing to defend a religious field trip in court.

In a statement to the press about the cancellation, the church said,

In the wake of some controversy over our Christmas production offered to schools, Agape Church wishes to salute the courageous stand that the Terry Elementary Principal made in not succumbing to the pressure of one complaint voiced to the Arkansas Society of Free Thinkers and media.  We applaud the support that the Little Rock School District has shown to Mrs. Register, and agree with their position that attending the matinees was not a constitutional issue.  Christmas is a Christian holiday, hence its name, Christmas. Our program addresses its origins with light-hearted songs and theatre.  The context of the birth of Christ is broadly described in both Old & New Testament texts.

But because of what this issue has become, as a church, it is not our desire to put hard working, sacrificial teachers and cast members in harm’s way. What we want said is that we love our city, our schools, parents and families.  People are at the heart of the matter to us.  While we regret the loss of students who will not get this particular opportunity right now, we have taken the school matinees off the table, and welcome parents to bring their children to our public performance schedule, Saturday, December 15 @ 2pm and 6pm, and Sunday, Dec. 16 @ 6pm.

To quote bible verses and song lyrics that apply, they reflect our heart toward the Little Rock School District and everyone involved – Peace on Earth, Good will toward men.

Pastor Happy Caldwell, Agape Church

“Sacrificial teachers”? Please. That is just insulting. And who was in harm’s way? ASF had threatened nothing beyond a possible lawsuit. The hate and threats came from the religious people toward us, not the other way around – unless I just happened to miss the Meetup announcement as to when all my fellow Freethinkers would be out there naked at the church with their picket signs and their evolution and their gay marriage and their roasted babies in covered dishes, all plump and juicy and waiting for the potluck after the looting and pillaging and stuff.

And apparently Pastor Caldwell does not know where the traditions of Christmas, including Charlie Brown’s tree, actually came from.

 

With the additional performances over the weekend, any family that wants to take their kids can do so. The church may even get an overflow crowd because of all the free publicity we’ve generated for them. We wish them well.

This post originally appeared on WWJTD.)

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Public School Field Trips, Religion, and the Law

Question:

What’s the big deal? Why can’t public school children go see that Charlie Brown Christmas play?

Answer:

The law of separation of church and state, as it applies to public school field trips, as explained by the Appignani Humanist Legal Center’s Bill Burgess in a letter sent Monday:

November 26, 2012

Sandra Register
Principal
Terry Elementary School
10800 Mara Lynn Drive
Little Rock, Arkansas 72211

Dr. Morris Holmes
Little Rock School District
810 West Markham Street
Little Rock, Arkansas 72201

cc: Little Rock School District Board of Education

Re: Public Elementary School Field Trip to Church to See Christian Play

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am writing to alert you to a serious separation of church and state concern.  We have recently received a request for legal assistance from the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers and the Central Arkansas Coalition of Reason on behalf of the parents of a student at Terry Elementary School. They informed us that the school has scheduled a field trip for students to view a production of “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!,” a Christmas play with a sectarian theme, staged at and by Agape Church, a local evangelical Christian church,[1] the week of December 14.

The American Humanist Association is a national nonprofit organization with over 10,000 members and 20,000 supporters across the country, including in Arkansas.  The purpose of AHA’s legal center is to protect one of the most fundamental legal principles of our democracy: the constitutional mandate requiring separation of church and state, embodied in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.[2]

As you must know, the Supreme Court has made clear that the “First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state” and that this “wall must be kept high and impregnable.”  Everson v. Bd. of Ed. of Ewing Twp., 330 U.S. 1, 18 (1947).  To do so, “the Constitution mandates that the government remain secular.”  County of Allegheny v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573, 610 (1989).  In order to secure this freedom from state-backed religion, the Constitution requires that any governmental “practice which touches upon religion, if it is to be permissible under the Establishment Clause,” must have a “secular purpose” and not “advance . . . religion.”  Id. at 590.  Specifically, the government “may not promote or affiliate itself with any religious doctrine or organization.”  Id.  Courts “pay particularly close attention to whether the challenged governmental practice either has the purpose or effect of [unconstitutionally] ‘endorsing’ religion.”  Id. at 591.  Endorsement includes “conveying or attempting to convey a message that religion or a particular religious belief is favored or preferred.”  Id. at 593.

In short, “religion must be a private matter for the individual, the family, and the institutions of private choice,” not the state.  Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 625 (1971).  In addition, the Supreme Court has in particular expressed especially “heightened concern” about preventing any sort of public school involvement with religion because of the risk of “subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools” environment.  Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 592 (1992).

Applying these general constitutional rules to the issue at hand, we have reason to believe that the school’s actions are in violation of the Establishment Clause.  The school is encouraging impressionable young students to attend an event in a Christian venue with a Christian message.  The effect is to affiliate the school with that message, encouraging its adoption by the students by means of this endorsement.

In the play, following a raucous and disjointed attempt to put on a Christmas pageant, Charlie Brown expresses frustration.  Linus says he can tell Charlie Brown “what Christmas is all about.”  He then quotes verbatim the New Testament of the Bible, Luke 2:8-14:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.  And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

The characters then cease bickering, adopt this religious view (rejecting the supposed “commercialism” of a secular Christmas celebration), and, in the immediately following final scenes, sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”:

Hark the herald angels sing
“Glory to the newborn King!”
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled
Joyful, all ye nations rise
Join the triumph of the skies
With the angelic host proclaim:
“Christ is born in Bethlehem.”
Hark! The herald angels sing
“Glory to the newborn King!”

The message of the play is clear: Jesus Christ is the son of God and the messiah, and the real meaning of Christmas is to celebrate the anniversary of his birth.  It is completely sectarian in nature and expressly rejects any secular version of Christmas.

A church is of course free to spread this religious message.  Our public schools, however, are not free to take part in the effort.  They may not choose to promote it by encouraging students to attend, let alone by organizing and funding attendance by means of an official field trip.  Although objecting students may decline to attend, they will face the subtly coercive pressure of their peers to do so (in addition of course to the explicit encouragement of the school).  Because of this, the Supreme Court has made clear that an Establishment Clause violation is not “mitigated by the fact that individual students may absent themselves upon parental request.”  Abington School Dist. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 224-25 (1963). 

The Establishment Clause forbids our schools from promoting a religious message in this way.  This trip must therefore be canceled.  In the alternative, it may be modified to be instead a visit to a secular Christmas-themed theatrical performance, such as the Nutcracker, would of course present no issue.

Please notify us in writing about the steps you are taking to avoid this constitutional violation so that we may avoid any potential litigation.  Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

 

Sincerely,

William J. Burgess
Appignani Humanist Legal Center
American Humanist Association
________________________

[1]   https://www.agape-church.org/.

[2]  The very first sentence of the Bill of Rights mandates that the state be secular: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  This provision, known as the Establishment Clause, “build[s] a wall of separation between church and State.”  See Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 164 (1878).  The Supreme Court “has given the [Establishment Clause] a ‘broad interpretation . . . in the light of its history and the evils it was designed forever to suppress. . . .’  [finding that it] afford[s] protection against religious establishment far more extensive than merely to forbid a national or state church.”  McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U. S. 420, 442 (1961).

This post originally appeared on WWJTD.)

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The Grinch Who Stole Charlie Brown’s Christmas

Since I’ve been all over national – and international – news the last week or two because of my insidious hatred for Charlie Brown and my determination not to let kids have any holiday fun at all, I’ve gotten some hate mail.

The email below came from a woman I have known personally for several years. I have served with her on a national board, and she and I shared a flight back from a meeting in Washington DC a couple of years ago. We enjoyed each other’s company. She didn’t realize that she was having a pleasant conversation with the poster girl for the Atheist Taliban, and when Faux News informed her of such, she became somewhat irate. She sent me an email that most people would not send except to a stranger. I couldn’t let this one go. I haven’t responded to any of the other nasty emails, but I know this woman. I have enjoyed her company.

And the tone of her email lets me know in a critically wounding way that I have not gotten the message out that I need to get out. I need to explain why the <a href=”http://unitedcor.org/central-arkansas/news” rel=”external>Arkansas Society of Freethinkers, on behalf of – and at the request of – our members who have children at that school, object to a public school taking young elementary children out of class to bus them to an evangelical Christian church to see a Christmas play, the main point of which is to tell them that if their families aren’t celebrating Christmas because of the Sweet Little Baby Jesus, they are not doing it right. So, verbatim, here’s what she wrote, and here is my answer:

Dear Anne, 

I am “outraged” that atheists are denying children the right to see “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in Little Rock. Let 6 and 7 yr. olds be “Freethinkers.” Let them decide. Unbeliever’s children are not allowing freethinking. Ironic..Atheists are deciding for their children AND for the Christian children. It is “awkward” and “unacceptable” to deny Christians the field trip. Good Grief!! Unbelievers’ children can sit in another classroom. Their parents are out of step.

Atheists have their own holiday April 1st when they celebrate April Fool’s Day. I am sad to have read this national news being made by a fellow [member of our organization]. 

You may be The Grinch who TRIED to steal Christmas. But, Christmas is celebrated in our hearts. So atheists continue to lose. 

Are you on [the board]’s Education Committee?? 

Louise

 

Dear Louise:

No one is denying children the “right” to see anything. These children are certainly free to go with their parents or friends to see the play, which is being offered at other times outside of school hours. If their parents want them to see the play, we think it would be a fun family outing. We would encourage them to go – just not as a public school field trip.

We hope that Agape Church has a great crowd for their play and we wish them well. We have no problem with the church offering this play to the community. Our concern is that a public school should not waste its limited resources on a field trip to a church where the children will learn that there is only one “right” way to celebrate this holiday season, regardless of their family’s religion.

The problem is not that Christian children shouldn’t see the play. The problem is that the public school is part of the government, and the government is prohibited by law from supporting any particular religion. Public schools may not take children away from instructional time to transport them to a church to see a play with a religious message. It’s illegal.

This particular play bemoans the commercialization of Christmas. It climaxes when a character recites a lengthy passage from the Bible, then declares that the biblical passage is the “real” reason for Christmas. That scene is the whole point of the story. That makes the play one with not only a religious theme, but a sectarian one. By taking the children to see this play, the public school is telling them that any other reason for celebrating this holiday – as well as not celebrating the holiday at all – is wrong.

There are students in that school who are Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. There are Buddhist children and Hindu children there. There are also children with no religious affiliation. People of many faiths celebrate for different reasons during the winter holiday season. People with no religious affiliation also celebrate. For instance, my atheist household celebrates Christmas eve and Christmas day as a time of love, of family closeness, of sharing, and of joyful and compassionate giving to each other and service to our community. We celebrate the things of the holiday that are important to us. We also celebrate with our Christian family members and friends, but perhaps not for the same reason that they do.

Children in elementary school are not in a position to decide about religion for themselves. They are indoctrinated into the religion of their parents. A public school may not legally instruct a child as to what religion or religious customs the child should observe. It is illegal for a public school to tell a child that his or his family’s way of celebrating a holiday is wrong. “Your family does it wrong” is the emphatic message that this field trip will send to non-Christian children as well as to Christian children  (like those whose families are Jehovah’s Witnesses) who celebrate Christmas differently or not at all.

Because children in our school district are limited to only two or three field trips a year, we think that those field trips should be educational for all of the children, not religious reinforcement for the Christian children, and not religious marginalization of non-Christian children. This would not have been an issue had this field trip been to see the Nutcracker, which is a seasonal story without religious themes, and which has the additional qualities of exposing its audience to classical music and ballet in a theatrical setting.

Bullying is rampant in public schools. A child who is singled out as “different” is always going to be at higher risk for bullying. Atheist children are already bullied in public schools. By reinforcing the mindset that there is only one “right” way to celebrate the holidays, children who are singled out as having families that do things differently will be at higher risk of being bullied. It is not acceptable for the school to put these high-risk children at an even greater risk.

I have received a lot of angry and hateful emails like yours – some of which have included actual threats – as a result of the media coverage of this incident. They underscore why the parents of this child did not want to identify themselves and their child publicly. It would be dangerous for them to do so.  Simply because I spoke out for them, and simply because my organization ensures that the law of separation between church and state is enforced, my group and I have been characterized as having declared war on Christmas.

I like Christmas. I don’t want it to go away. But I don’t think our public schools have any business sending kids a message that their families aren’t doing Christmas right.

Anne

So, that’s what I wrote back to Louise. I should have said more to her.

I should have said that, yes, I was on the education committee at one time, and that because I care about education, I care that indoctrination is not a part of it. I strongly believe that even young children should be taught critical thinking skills. Unless they have been taught critical thinking skills, a six or seven-year-old who is naturally skeptical enough to see the mythology of the Christmas story is rare, indeed. We know that. Children of this age are told that if they do not behave well then Santa won’t visit them, and their parents tend to be rewarded with better behavior. Children this age believe in a tooth fairy that leaves money under their pillows for those first lost teeth. Children this age are sure that an Easter bunny leaves them eggs and candy.  In other words, children this age are usually not capable of the critical thinking processes that distinguish fact from fiction.

I should have pointed out that not even all Christians celebrate Christmas and those who do celebrate it in lots of different ways. I should have reminded the people I’ve been talking with that Christmas traditions were co-opted by Christianity from many other, non-Christian traditions.

I should have borrowed Hemant Mehta’s words. (Hemant, if you read this, thank you for your support.) Hemant reminded me that not only does this play expose children to Christianity, it promotes it. He emphasized the dilemma facing the parents we are attempting to help: “It’s tough to speak up against something like this because you’re going up against the majority as well as a tradition. It’s even tougher when you’re putting your child at risk of being ostracized instead of just yourself…Christians just assume everyone agrees with them and it’s downright dangerous in some areas to disagree. You risk losing friends, social status, and respect.” He is dead right, and that’s exactly why the parents came to the Freethinkers, and why they are definitely not willing to be unmasked now that the uproar has become a national outcry. These parents want to protect their own family’s beliefs, and the school has absolutely no business treading on religious ground.

I should have pointed out that atheists don’t see themselves as losers at all. We are, in fact, much freer than someone shackled to an outdated religious code of conduct. We are not burdened with the guilt or fear imposed by dire promises of a vengeful god, and we are moral and law-abiding because that’s what we think we ought to be – not because someone threatens to make us miserable for an eternity if we aren’t. We know that this life is the only one we have, so we make the most of it, as best we can. We are compassionate and charitable not because some Bronze Age book of fairy tales tells us to be, but because being compassionate and charitable makes us feel good, and makes our world a better place and our relationships deeper and fuller.

I should have said that a play promoted by a memo to parents that admits candidly, “This production does expose your child to Christianity through some of the songs and scenes” is a play to which no school should take children. The fact that the school had to put a label on the letter home that said, in effect, “Warning: Religious Content” should have been a huge red flag to the school that they had no business planning this field trip. How is it fair, or reasonable, to warehouse first and second graders in an unfamiliar classroom to protect them from someone else’s idea of religion?

A lot of objections have come to my attention. Even other non-theists have questioned whether this is a battle we really want to fight. I firmly believe that it is. Children have a right not to be ostracized at school for not practicing their teacher’s religion. It is our understanding that these children might not have been invited to the church but for the fact that their teacher was in the play. Talk about coercive pressure! I want to thank Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times, too. He reminded me that I should have said that this field trip to see a teacher in a religiously-themed play is nothing less than proselytizing. The situation is completely insensitive to the potential feelings of these young children and their families. The tyranny of the majority marginalizes a known minority population within the school, and apparently, the school administrators do not care. They should be ashamed.

I wish I had said outright what JT said when he reported on this situation initially:that younger atheist kids in elementary school are closeted for a number of reasons, and sometimes on the strict instruction of their parents: for fear of bullying, ostracism, and of being singled out for any reason. And there are lots of times when I wish I had the nerve to say publicly what I have no problem saying privately: that people who think it’s okay to violate someone’s constitutional rights are full of… well, they’re just wrong.  (I still can’t bring myself to say it publicly.)

I should have thought to say what my friend Lainey said: “I would be pissed if I were one of the parents. Not so much because of my child being exposed to the religious content in Charlie Brown as much as the fact that the school administrators clearly don’t take keeping religion out of the classroom, which is part of their jobs, as seriously as they should. It’s really not about Charlie Brown! It’s about separation of church and state which is very important to non-Christians because we’re in the minority, and they’re demonstrating that they don’t care about even showing us that consideration. It’s very important to speak out and stand up for your rights the very moment they start getting infringed upon. Protecting separation of church and state is far more important than the needs/desires of these children to see this performance. And simply saying it’s not mandatory isn’t fair to the kids — why not simply take them to an event that ALL of the kids can enjoy?”

“Now, come on, really. What’s the harm?” I’ve been asked. The expression on my face probably mirrors Dave Silverman’s, when he was on Bill O’Reilly’s show, being told that the tides come in, the tides go out…

I appreciate the statement that another supporter, Randy, added to the conversation: “I can remember how being different in school is like throwing a bleeding person overboard into shark-infested waters. Children can be very cruel.  Every time I hear of another child or teenager committing suicide, I wonder what the cause was. The religious community continues its attack on the wall of separation between church and state, and we need to patch these breaches when we find them.” So many of the comments I have received tell me that I am exaggerating how atheist kids can be bullied. Since I’ve been bullied plenty for my atheism, even by members of my own family, I call bullshit on those comments.

“This is the dominant culture of this country!” I’ve been told. “Children should know it, and know it well!” Again, I have that Dave Silverman expression of incredulity. Do they really think that children aren’t going to know the Christmas myth if they don’t get to see Charlie Brown? Really? Why not actually expose children to something they might not otherwise be exposed to? The Nutcracker is a beautiful fantasy story that happens to take place on Christmas, but it has no religious theme at all. It exposes children to the beauty of ballet and the glorious music of a full classical orchestra. There are a lot of children who will never see a live ballet or hear a live orchestra in their lives. Wouldn’t that be more appropriate than a rehash of a cartoon they can see any number of times for a solid month each year?

Like my friend Lisa, who is a public school teacher herself, I am annoyed as a taxpayer in this school district that the school is not using the fuel, money, and time on a bona fide learning adventure. Instead, the school wants a rehash of a cartoon that is shown yearly on network television.

“Humbling” does not even begin to describe how I feel, sitting in the crosshairs of those who would hunt down the “Atheist Taliban.” (Yes, someone said that – although, fortunately, he was kidding.) I worry that the message I need send is not getting delivered.

What really stings, though, is that I am being personally attacked because I stood up for a child.

(This post originally appeared on WWJTD.)

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Mike Huckabee Displays Idiotic Christian Arrogance Again

Mike Huckabee was on the Daily Show again last night. He’s hawking his new book, but naturally he didn’t much talk about his book.
“Why does anybody have to be automatically anything other than what they truly believe?” Huckabee asked Stewart in the first part of the interview (6:14). At that point, he was talking about letting black conservatives be conservative without calling them “pawns,” or worse. A good question, which begs the question put to him in the second segment of the interview: why do Christians who don’t believe what their fundamentalist preachers tell them to believe have to be consigned to the fires of hell?

Yes, the second segment of the interview is what’s really important.

Stewart started the second segment by asking, “When [conservatives] keep demonizing these groups, whether it be single women, black people, illegal immigrants, it makes it impossible to work with them as a collaboration. Why would you collaborate with evil people? And when you convince them that they’re evil, why work with them?”

Unfortunately, this question never got answered. Huckabee denied demonizing these people, and truthfully, he probably has not demonized most of them himself. His network and his party certainly have, though he won’t speak for either of those entities. Now, Huckabee has demonized the natures of gay people, but Stewart did not take him to task for that.

Instead, Stewart segued into an abbreviated version of the despicable two-minute commercial Huckabee narrated for the Christian Right just before the election. You know the one.

In it, Huckabee quotes Psalm 127:1 and says that “unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” He then calls certain things “not negotiable:”

  • The right to life from conception to natural death
  • Marriage should be reinforced, not be defined
  • It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life

Against a backdrop of flames, Rev. Huckabee goes on to say that “Your vote will be recorded for eternity.” He asks, “Will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire?”

This commercial is so incredibly offensive on so many levels my stomach still churns with anger to watch it, and the election is over and done with.

Huckabee actually claimed that this commercial did not attempt to send the message that if Christians voted for the Democrats they would go to hell – unless they were biblically illiterate. I really cannot imagine how that wasn’t the message, since I don’t even believe in hell and that’s the clear message I got from it – and I’ve read and studied the Bible extensively. “Oh, no!” exclaims Huckabee. “If they know 1 Corinthians 10, they will know!” Then he claimed that 1 Corinthians 10 was about being tested in the fires of a forge, and coming out stronger or some such.

For the biblically illiterate, let me explain 1 Corinthians 10. There is not one word about forges or fire. It’s all about not worshipping false gods and not participating in idolatry. We all know that since there is only one true god, so there can’t be any other gods, no matter how true their own believers believe them to be, and no matter how false those idolaters believe the one true god to be. Frankly, the arrogance of the “one true god” thing just staggers me, especially when one considers that the adherents of the Abrahamic religions have no better proof of their god than the adherents of any other religion.

But let’s look at 1 Corinthians 10:29, which asks, “Why should my liberty be judged by someone else’s conscience?”

Why, indeed, Reverend Huckabee? Why should my freedom be judged by your conscience? You arrogant twit, I can cherry-pick Bible verses just as well as you can.

I think the Good Reverend Huckabee was actually referring to 1 Corinthians 3:13, which more or less says what Huckabee claimed this commercial meant to say, just without the forge part. Because that’s totally not in there. And the part about judgement day, and therefore hell, definitely is in that particular passage.

Again, this is what pisses me off about Christians. They want to spew their Bible at me, but then I have to correct them – even the supposedly learned ones – because they don’t get it right. If they want to beat me up with their scripture, they should at least know their stupid scripture.

Of course, maybe he really meant 1 Peter 1:7, or 2 Peter 3:7, or some other passage that refers to fire but not hell, even though most of the passages I find pretty much equate testing by fire with the Judgment Day and hell. So Huckabee’s protests that the reference to fire doesn’t also refer to Hell or Judgment hold about as much water as that colander I used to strain my spaghetti last night.

Let’s examine the the three points of that disgusting commercial.

The right to life from conception to natural death

Nowhere in the Bible does any religious authority, real or imagined, claim that life begins at the moment of conception. I’d cite verses where it says so, but there aren’t any.

Let’s face it: The Biblical God is not pro-life. He advocates and permits child murder, infanticide, child abuse, and, yes, abortion.  Fundamentalist Christians rely on such passages as “thou shall not kill” Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17 (one of the commandments), and  “If men strive and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no misfortune follow, he shall be surely punished according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.And if any misfortune follow, then thou shalt give life for life,eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Exodus 21:22-24. Although the Exodus passage seems to be a favorite among the anti-choice crowd, I would point out that the harm mentioned in it is harm to the woman, not to the aborted or miscarried fetus.

God’s favored prophets prayed for abortions. Don’t believe me? Read Hosea 9:11-16. This same favored prophet also advocated ripping the fetuses out of the wombs of pregnant women in Hosea 13:16, something the God-favored King Menahem of the Israelites proudly did in 2 Kings 15:16, too. There’s even a ritual to induce an abortion in a faithless wife in Numbers 5:21 (presumably done instead of stoning her, although when stoning and when abortion is the proper course of action, the Bible doesn’t say).

So God is definitely not pro-life, at least for fetuses. But what about hastening death? Apparently the fundamentalist Christians also don’t like euthanasia, mercy-killing, or assisted suicide, either. They want people to suffer. This is where compassion gets thrown to the wind by these Christians. Suicide is tantamount to murder, in their eyes.

The Bible reports several suicides (Ahithophel; Saul and his armor-bearer; Samson; Zimri, who was king of Israel for only seven days; and Judas Iscariot) and men who want to be stricken dead (Moses, the prophet Elijah, and Jonah – twice) but nowhere in the Bible does it condemn them for that. The Bible also reports mercy killings, without reference to judgment, except in the case of the Amalekite who lied to David about killing Saul. Saul himself was not condemned for asking to die. Abimelech begged his armor-carrying servant to kill him in Judges 9:52-54, because he lost a battle and could not bear the indignity of his inevitable murder at the hands of (gasp!) women. There was no judgment attached to Abimelech’s death.

So, there does not seem to be a problem with euthanasia, either. Huckabee’s first point fails, on both counts.

Marriage should be reinforced, not be defined

This one is so easy it’s almost a no-brainer. I cannot grasp why these wackjob Christians think that the Bible defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Jon Stewart jumped on this pretty fast, pointing out that the biblical definition of marriage is polygamy. Although Huckabee tried to say it isn’t, he cited no biblical authority for his position other than the Adam and Eve story. Lots of biblical marriages came after that one. Furthermore, it’s not real clear that Adam and Eve ever actually tied the knot. They sort of hooked up because of the dearth of others of their same species to choose from, and apparently shacked up, never going that extra step of committing to each other monogamously. They had no other options but bestiality.

So it stands to reason that yes, marriage could stand to be defined. But to say it’s biblical marriage really leaves the door wide open.

Because if you let your servant get married, and he leaves your employment, his wife and children are yours unless the servant agrees to stay and have his ear bored through with an awl. (Exodus 21:6) I’m not clear whether this means the servant’s earlobe gets pierced, or if his eardrum gets pierced. Either way, it’s pretty barbaric. But, that’s one definition of Biblical marriage.

Exodus 21:10 reminds men who take second wives that they can’t neglect the first one. Oops, Mr. Huckabee. Guess there’s a new definition of biblical marriage implied here.

Deuteronomy 22 is a great place to look for definitions of marriage. I like the one where the guy marries the woman and decides he doesn’t like her. If her father can’t then produce bloody sheets proving that she was a virgin at the time of the wedding, well, she gets stoned to death. What a sweet marriage that makes.

One of my favorite definitions of marriage is the rapist and his virgin victim. Yeah, Deuteronomy 22:28-30 is all about that.

Now, Paul is not real keen on marriage at all. Despite the fact that the species will disappear without it, sex is gross, and women are … well, Paul’s misogyny is another issue altogether. Paul thought everyone ought to have a spouse, though, if they really want sex, whether or not he could fathom why they’d want it. My guess is that Paul was so undesirable he never got laid, and therefore had no idea what he was missing.

And that doesn’t count all the various marriages in the Bible that involved multiple wives, concubines, and slaves. Heck, Abraham had a wife (Sarah), his wife’s slave (Hagar), another wife (Keturah), and an unknown number of secondary wives.

Then his grandson Jacob had two sister-wives (Rachel and Leah), and two servants of his wives (Zilpah and Bilhah).

Solomon had 700 wives and 300 secondary wives, in addition to the Queen of Sheba. That’s 1001, for those of you who aren’t good with math.

And the list goes on.

It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life.

Right.  Do I really have to explain this?

Most people in the United States who are lucky enough to have health insurance coverage have it because their employer provides it. If their employer did not provide it, health insurance would be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, people are generally forced to accept whatever health insurance is offered through work, unless they are wealthy enough to afford it on their own – which most people are not.

Limiting your employee’s health insurance options based on your own religious beliefs, whether or not your employee shares your religious beliefs, is totally not forcing your religion on them. (/Sarcasm)

Until there is a single-payer system, or until health insurance is decoupled from employment and made affordable, employers are in a position to unfairly force their religious beliefs on their employees.

It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for anyone to limit our access to health care based on religious beliefs we do not hold. If the government permits this, the government is complicit in the establishment of religion.

Therefore…

Stewart nailed him on the thinly disguised guilt trip the Huckster attempted to foist on good believing Christians. The commercial was pro-life and homophobic, and it essentially told Christian voters, with the appropriate imagery of their religion of intimidation and threat, that if they were not also pro-life and homophobic, they would burn for all eternity. Sweet message, that.

Among the most disturbing things about these Christians who want to impose their Bible on the rest of us are:

  1. For a number of reasons, foremost among them its bizarre contradictions, we don’t believe their Bible to be reliable, and therefore object to basing our laws on it;
  2. Their Bible contravenes proven science;
  3. We do not agree that some of the crazy shit they think is good is actually, well, good;
  4. As a foundational document, their Bible is inconsistent, violent, bigoted, misogynistic, and homicidal, and none of those things are acceptable in modern society;
  5. If they cherry-pick only the “good parts” of the Bible to apply to modern life, we have to question why, if so much of it is dispensable, they consider it to be a legitimate authority;
  6. Why they think it is acceptable to force their dogma on people who do not accept their dogma.

Dissenting minorities and minorities representing different demographics will always need protection from the will of the majority. And right now the majority seem to be batshit Christians, who want to impose their will on the rest of us.

 

Posted on

Lesson One: Become an Atheist Activist Today

It’s election time again, which means that now is the perfect time for atheist activism. I know a way for you to become an effective atheist activist without ever leaving the safety of your keyboard, and I’m going to share it with you.

Come on – let me see a show of hands – how many of you reading WWJTD know of a church or other religious organization in your community that tells its members how to vote on issues? Raise those hands higher. I can’t see you. Okay, now look around. See all the hands waving in the air? There are lots of them.

It’s time to do something about this.

Did you know that most nonprofit organizations – including churches – cannot endorse candidates, tell their members how to vote, publicly support one side of an issue, or lobby? I know. It’s stunning. You’d never know it from the way so many of them behave. But if they lobby, electioneer, or outright tell their congregation how to vote, they’re supposed to lose their coveted tax-exempt status.

Because it’s illegal for them to engage in politics. Not illegal in the criminal sense, but in the sense that they enjoy a favored status in exchange for a promise that they will not engage in politics. So, when they break that promise, they should lose their favored status. The problem is, they tend not to. The IRS just doesn’t have enough proof against most of these churches.

I want to do something about that. I want you to do something about that. And I can tell you how to do it in a legal, above-board, non-confrontational way.

We can make these particular churches pay taxes just like everyone else – because if they blur the line between church and state, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status. At the very least, getting a letter from the IRS warning them that their political activity is dangerously close to the line may inspire them to cut it out.

 

Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code gives most nonprofit organizations, including churches, their tax-exempt status. Almost all churches are organized as non-profits and approved under 501(c)(3). That’s how tithes and offerings and other donations to them are tax-deductible. But, that special status comes at a cost: no 501(c)(3) organization may endorse, support, or oppose any candidate for public office. They cannot make contributions to political campaigns, and they cannot make any public statements for or against a candidate. They cannot take sides on any issue. Violation of this requirement will cause the IRS to strip the organization of its tax-exempt status.

Now, some minor politicking is permitted, but strict rules apply. No fundraising can happen at the event where the church or other 501(c)(3) organization does its politicking. If one candidate is invited, then all of the candidates running for that position – not just the one favored by the organization – must have an equal opportunity to be heard at the event. And most importantly, the organization cannot give even a hint as to which candidate it supports.

These rules also apply to ballot initiatives, referendums, and other matters voted on by the public. They apply to laws and constitutional amendments presented to the people for their vote. Gay marriage, abortion rights, gambling – all of these are issues churches like to weigh in on, and their publicly stated positions are grounds for them to lose their tax-exemption.

Why doesn’t the IRS do something? Because the IRS doesn’t have the time or the manpower to go around the country looking for these kinds of violations. It takes effort, proof, and a complaint to get them going. The only thing they routinely investigate without a complaint being filed are income tax returns, randomly selected for audit.

The IRS will investigate a church or other nonprofit organization if one of its higher-ranking agents has a “reasonable belief” that the organization’s activity violates its 501(c)(3) restrictions. It’s up to us to provide a basis for that reasonable belief, because the IRS won’t police each and every church. Thank the FSM, we are perfectly capable of recognizing and supplying concrete proof of these violations, so as to create that “reasonable belief” in the minds of the upper echelon of the Internal Revenue Service. We non-theists are all about reasonable beliefs!

Revocations of these tax-exemptions actually can happen. They don’t happen as often as we might like, but it’s up to us to help change that. As far as I know, the tax-exempt status of only one church was ever revoked, although the tax-exempt status of other nonprofits violating this rule have been revoked over 40 times.

The notorious case of the IRS pulling the tax-exempt plug on a church is Branch Ministries v. Rossotti. Branch Ministries and its church bought a full-page ad in the Washington Post and USA Today opposing Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. The advertisement clearly said that the church had placed the ad, and it solicited tax-deductible contributions to help pay for the ad to be run in additional newspapers in large markets. The ad claimed that Clinton supported abortion on demand, homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. It cited various Biblical passages and said, “Bill Clinton is promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws … How then can we vote for Bill Clinton?”

The bigger question for Branch Ministries became, “Since we’re overtly supporting a particular candidate and letting the world know about it, how can we maintain our status as a 501(c)(3) organization?” Answer: It could not.

How do we make sure that more churches are investigated, and that more churches pay taxes? Not every church will do us the favor of being so blatant about its political activities. Therefore, we must report what we see. We have to give the IRS proof to support that reasonable belief that a church or nonprofit group engages in political activities. They won’t self-report these violations any more than an illegal immigrant will self deport. It’s up to us to do it through the available legal channels.

The IRS needs documentation. It can get that documentation from any number of sources, but the most reliable are:

  • Newspaper or magazine articles or ads
  • Television and radio reports
  • Internet (yes, the IRS apparently believes everything it reads there)
  • Voters guides created and/or distributed by the church
  • Documents on file with the IRS (e.g. a Form 990-T filed by the church)
  • Church records in the possession of third parties or informants

That last bit is where we come in. The IRS says that information obtained from informants must be reliable, so we need to do more than just send an email to complain. Proof will get the church’s tax-exempt status revoked. Send photos, audio recordings, video recordings, news articles – anything that provides independent proof that the activity has happened. Heck, if you can tolerate sitting through a religious service close to election day, go to church and record the pastor or priest’s political rants. You know they’re giving them in pulpits across the nation.

Here’s an example of how it’s done.

Actual Church Sign at 702 Church St., Benton, AR
Photo taken October 23, 2012

There’s a church near where I live that is also a polling place. Churches as polling places are an issue for another day, so let’s leave that for now and focus on something even more in-your-face egregious.

One of the ballot initiatives in our area has to do with medical marijuana. This particular church has taken it upon itself to say that legalization of marijuana for medical purposes is a moral issue. There are reasons for and against legalization of marijuana that I won’t get into here – whether or not the ballot initiative should pass isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about whether someone’s church should be allowed to tell them how to vote on the issue.

This church was featured on my local news a few days ago. I have a link to the news report, and I have IRS Form 13909, which can be downloaded as a PDF file or completed online. This is the complaint form to use when you see nonprofit organizations engaged in the political process. If you bookmark no other IRS form, bookmark this one.

The form asks for the basic information about the church. Its name and address are easy enough to find with Google, but the form also needs the church’s EIN, or tax identification number. You can usually find that number on the website of the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Now, this particular church doesn’t appear in that list. This probably means that it is simply holding itself out to be a church under Section 508 of the Internal Revenue Code, without ever going through the 501(c)(3) approval process. No matter – the same rules apply. If it’s going to go around telling folks how to vote, it’s going to lose its tax-exempt status.

The rest of the form is fairly self-explanatory, but the instructions are attached to the form at the link I’ve provided. Once you’ve completed the form, it can be emailed to the IRS at eoclass@irs.gov; mailed to IRS EO Classification, Mail Code 4910DAL, 1100 Commerce Street Dallas, TX 75242-1198; or faxed to 214-413-5415.

Easy, peasy.

Do this, and become a law-motivated atheist activist today.

(This post originally appeared at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2012/11/lesson-one-become-an-atheist-activist-today/ )

Posted on

Amicable and Neighborly

I’ve been busy lately. Reason in the Rock is fast approaching, and the last minute details are time-consuming. I’m doing some research and reading to aid those involved in various aspects of the West Memphis Three matters, and there is a lot of stuff there. On top of that, my family is in the process of selling the family farm. After 100 years of deeds being swapped among four generations and various family-owned entities, there are title issues enough to make a saint swear. My brother and I are working on the title issues, and we are far from sainted. I’ve even had to reopen the long-closed probated estates of both of my grandparents and one of my great aunts to resolve matters.

And yesterday, taking a well-deserved break to engage in a little church-related activity, which is always good for the soul, I stumbled across a float of the Flying Spaghetti Monster created by the Seattle Atheists.

 

 

I want it.

The Arkansas Society of Freethinkers needs one. Can’t you just see it in the annual holiday parade here in Little Rock? We freethinkers can dress in our clerical vestments – that is, full pirate regalia  – and toss packages of Ramen noodles to parade watchers. It’ll be Christmas, Mardi Gras, and soup kitchen all rolled into one. We would be able to touch so many people with his noodly appendages!

And I have nothing else to do but figure out how to build a working model of our amazing deity. Really.

(source)

But wait!  What’s this? In my inbox is a missive from the company that manages the condos that lie on the other side of my back fence. Gracious, whatever could they want?

Dear Ms. Orsi:

I obtained your contact information from a mutual friend, David Simmons. I am writing on behalf of the Townhouses-in-the-Park Property Owners Association. I have been asked to contact you in reference to your swimming pool and the manner in which the water is being drained. The POA Board believes that the chemicals in your pool water are killing the ivy and eroding a French drain located below your pool on the TIP property. The POA Board wishes to handle this matter in an amicable and neighborly fashion. Would you please contact me to discuss this issue?

Thank you, in advance, for your cooperation.

 

Mr. Bill
(source)

Not again. This is, sadly, not my first rodeo with these “amicable and neighborly” people.

I clicked on the attachments.

 

 

I swear by the noodly appendages and meatballs of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and by all else that is holy, that these two photos are what I was sent as proof of the evildoing of my swimming pool.

I fumed a bit. I needed to collect my thoughts before I called the email’s author, because I was more than a little irked.  I tend to become extremely sarcastic when I’m annoyed. Sarcasm is not “amicable and neighborly,”  or so I’ve been told. So I called Mom and ranted for about 20 minutes.

When I finally calmed down, I called the contractor who had installed the offending pool in 2009.

“Jimmy,” I said, “you aren’t going to believe this.” I told him what was up. He sighed, and said he’d come take a look.

When I calmed down some more, I called the author of the email. She was out.

A few days later, Jimmy came. He looked. We both peered over my fence onto the hillside between my pool and Townhouses in the Park. He scratched his head. “So, where’s the dead ivy?” he asked. Unable to answer his question, I peered over the fence again. Nope. No dead ivy could be seen.

“What do I do?” I asked him. He shrugged helplessly. He outlined the possibility of draining the pool higher up the hill, still on my property, of course. I asked him for a bid. He left, shaking his head. We both know that the mere existence of my pool bugs the crap out of the Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association. We’ve been down this road before.

Dad, Summer 2002, on the lake in his boat

My beloved father, whose ashes were spread into the Cache River on our family farm over a decade ago, wrote what our family calls “John Letters.” Sometimes he sent them. Usually, Mom, Susan, Jay or I edited them to remove the most sarcastic and offensive parts. At times, to Dad’s chagrin, we’d edit them into starchless, plain vanilla, politely worded protests that in no way resembled what Dad really and truly wanted to say.

The city of Des Arc was the recipient of at least one unedited John letter a few years before Dad died. The city was not amused. Dad was proud of himself. He was such a clever wordsmith.

I’ve written a John letter to the property manager representing Townhouses in the Park. Oh, I’ve edited it. I’ve refined it. I really, really want to send it. I’m proud of myself. I am such a clever wordsmith.

(source)

 

Dear Ms. Jackson:

The Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association is fond of complaining about my swimming pool, which apparently exists mostly to annoy them. While I was in the process of building it in 2009, Townhouses in the Park reported me to Little Rock Code Enforcement for building not just one, not even two, but three swimming pools in my back yard. Seriously.

After that, they said that the drainage from the pool was washing out the soil from beneath their asphalt and would cause their parking lot to collapse. Yes, they really said that. To alleviate their concerns that my pool would wash Townhouses in the Park all the way down Cedar Hill to the Allsopp Park tennis courts, I installed a drainage system that diffused the backwashed water over a very large area on my property.

Then, on a Saturday night after a pipe had burst that morning and been repaired, they decided to come over to my house when I was having a dinner party to complain, in front of my arriving guests, that there was too much water in their parking lot. They must really hate thunderstorms.

Next, they claimed that the three year old masonry wall of my pool which faces them, and which they cannot see without coming into my yard beyond the wooden privacy fence that separates my property from theirs– and which even then they could not see since a second retaining wall blocks even my own view – was crumbling and collapsing in decay. It wasn’t.

In their latest complaint, Townhouses in the Park apparently believes that the al Qaeda sleeper cell that is my swimming pool suddenly awoke after one of the hottest, driest summers in memory to unscrupulously assassinate what appears to be a two foot spread of ivy hanging over a wall, presumably just down the hill from my property.

As Townhouses in the Park is aware, the backwash from my pool, which amounts to about a bathtub’s worth every week or so, is eliminated on my property through a perforated pipe about 15-20 feet long into a French drain that is even longer. The diffuse drainage is unlikely in the extreme to have zeroed in on that unsuspecting bit of ivy after four years of peaceful coexistence. From the vantage point of my property, I am unable to discern any dead ivy; I cannot tell where the photo was taken. The plants on my property that are even closer to the point of drainage are alive and healthy. Even the ivy.

But, in the interest of resolving this matter in an amicable and neighborly fashion, I had the contractor who installed the pool and drainage system come to look at it. Unsurprisingly, he said there was no way my pool’s backwashed water was the cause of the dearly departed’s demise. Had my pool water been inclined to murder unsuspecting plants such as that particular patch of English ivy, it would do so from the point of drainage all the way to the wall; it would not have the necessary intelligence or purpose to target a single spot at least ten feet away from the point of drainage, leaving all plants between the drain and the target unmolested. That’s just how terrorist swimming pools and their affiliated suicide bomber drainage systems roll.

The seepage pipe in the wall is similarly unaffected by me backwashing my pool. By the time the water gets from the drain to the wall, it has gone through soil at least ten feet wide, twenty feet in length, and ten feet in depth. There is simply not enough water concentrated in that area at any given time to cause the problem complained of.

Townhouses in the Park should be aware that in the event there ever really is a problem that I don’t already know about (and haven’t promptly taken reasonable steps to address), I may not take them seriously. There is a story about a little boy who cried “wolf.” The Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association should familiarize themselves with the moral to that story.

 

Should I?

(source)

 

Oh, hell. I know I shouldn’t. But I really, really want to.

 

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