Day: December 14, 2000

The other day I wrote about a city banning fire fighters from erecting Christmas trees in city-owned fire stations on the separation of church and state grounds. Now Accuracy in Academia’s Sara Russo reports that Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania has banned the school’s bell tower from playing Christmas carols that have religious overtones. Apparently non-Christian professors and students will be permanently harmed by hearing an instrumental version of “Silent Night.”

Bloomsburg University seems to be a hotbed of absurd anti-Christian protests. Russo writes,

The controversy over Carver Hall bell tower is not the first dispute over religion to erupt at Bloomsburg this semester. When a drug and alcohol awareness group on campus erected crosses on the university quad to commemorate the college students who have died due to alcohol related incidents, the campus was beset by protests that placing a religious symbol such as a cross on public grounds was inappropriate.

In this incident, too, faculty vehemently denounced the presence of Christianity on the campus. “[The crosses] shove it in the face of every minority that we are a Christian campus,” said Dr. Walter Brasch, professor of mass communications and the instigator of criticism. Dr. Wendy Lee-Lampshire, professor of philosophy, added, “Crosses are narrowly Christian symbols. If the only way we can think to represent death is by Christian crosses, then that is … monumentally offensive … We are not all Christian … Did they mean to imply the only lives that have value are those that end with crosses on their graves?”

Representatives from the Drug, Alcohol and Wellness Network (DAWN), who helped arrange the display of crosses, argue that their actions in no way violated the principle of separation between church and state. Dr. Barry Jackson, the director of DAWN asserted, “The cross is used as an international symbol of death, and is not in any way religiously connected.”

Don’t these folks have better things to do?

On September 29, 1999, Mexican immigrant Ismael Mena was shot and killed in a no-knock drug raid on his house. The only problem was police had the wrong house; the target of the raid lived in the house next door, but police officer Joseph Bini wrote the wrong address on the search warrant.

A couple weeks ago, Denver District Judge Shelly Gilman sentenced Bini to a year of probation and 150 hours of community service. Bini had plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of official misconduct in October.

LeRoy Lemos, a spokesman for the Justice for Mena Committee, was outraged by the sentence. “She’s the worst judge I’ve ever seen in my life not to impose any type of sanction on a man who was derelict in his duty, who through his actions cost an innocent citizen’s life.”

While Lemos is correct and Bini’s sentence should have involved at least some time in jail, Bini’s attorney David Bruno also has a point when he said that “[Bini] made a mistake, but did not create the mistake.” The overarching mistake is a drug war in which no-knock raids by paramilitary police armed to the teeth are now routine.

Until police and prosecutors decide to declare a ceasefire in the drug war, Mena will hardly be the last innocent person killed by overzealous police.

Source:

Officer gets probation for role in fatal raid. The Associated Press, December 2, 2000.