http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081128/ap_ ... curity_god

Ky. law requires Homeland Security to credit God

LEXINGTON, Ky. – A lawmaker says the state's Homeland Security office should be crediting God with keeping the state safe.

State Rep. Tom Riner, a Southern Baptist minister who was instrumental in establishing that requirement in 2006, disapproves of the fact that Homeland Security doesn't currently mention God in its mission statement or on its Web site.

The law passed under former Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who prominently credited God in annual reports to state leaders. But Gov. Steve Beshear's administration didn't credit God in its 2008 Homeland Security report issued last month.

"We certainly expect it to be there, of course," Riner, D-Louisville, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

The law that organized the Homeland Security office first lists Homeland Security's duty to recognize that government itself can't secure the state without God, even before mentioning other duties, which include distributing millions of dollars in federal grants and analyzing possible threats.

The religious language was tucked into a floor amendment by Riner and passed the General Assembly overwhelmingly. It lists the office's initial duty as "stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth."

Included in the law is a requirement that the office must post a plaque at the entrance to the state Emergency Operations Center with an 88-word statement that begins, "The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God."

Thomas Preston, Gov. Beshear's Homeland Security chief, said he is not interested in stepping into a religious debate.

"I will not try to supplant almighty God," Preston said. "All I do is try to obey the dictates of the Kentucky General Assembly. I really don't know what their motivation was for this. They obviously felt strongly about it."

Riner said crediting God with helping ensure the state's safety is appropriate.

"This is recognition that government alone cannot guarantee the perfect safety of the people of Kentucky," Riner said. "Government itself, apart from God, cannot close the security gap. The job is too big for government."

But state Sen. Kathy Stein, D-Lexington, a frequent critic of mixing religion and government, said requiring the department to credit God takes away from Homeland Security's mission.

"It's very sad to me that we do this sort of thing," Stein said. "It takes away from the seriousness of the public discussion over security, and it clearly hurts the credibility of this office if it's supposed to be depending on God, first and foremost."

wrong thread...

the onion thread is a bit further down the page, friend.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi- ... 4488.story

Kentucky law puts God in charge of security? Atheists appalled

As an atheist and a Kentuckian, Edwin Hensley was rather put off to learn that the God he has spent decades not believing had been put in charge of keeping the Bluegrass State safe from terrorism.

Turns out a stealthy legislative move by a Baptist preacher-turned-politician led to the passage of a 2006 bill requiring the state's Office of Homeland Security to acknowledge formally that safety and security in the state "cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon almighty God." The language in the bill only recently came to the public's attention, leading Hensley and some like-minded Kentuckians to file a lawsuit against the state.

"It's absurd to me," said Hensley, a proudly godless Louisville resident. "It's as absurd to me as it would be to a fundamental Christian if you told them the security of Kentucky is in the hands of almighty Zeus."

So riled up are the atheists over this apparent squeezing together of church and state that the lawsuit resorts to name calling, claiming the plaintiffs fear "their very safety as residents of Kentucky may be in the hands of fanatics, traitor or fools."

One set of those hands belongs to Rep. David Floyd.

"No Christian minds being called a fanatic in the service of God," said Floyd, who disagrees with the notion that the U.S. Constitution requires a "wall of separation" between church and state. "But the term 'traitor or fool'? Well, this lawsuit is either constitutional or it's personal. It would seem by the phrasing of the lawsuit that it's personal."

And indeed, it is.

"We're not trying to be nice," said David Silverman, national spokesman for American Atheists, a national advocacy group that filed the suit on behalf of Hensley and nine other Kentuckians. "These people are breaking the law. They're breaking the law knowingly. They are trying to get sued."

The law in question also required the state's homeland security office feature a plaque that reads, among other things, "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh in vain."

Rep. Tom Riner, architect of this kerfuffle, is a Baptist preacher of enviable persistence. For more than three decades he and his wife, once a Kentucky legislator herself, have pushed to keep God in school, in the courthouse and in all the places Constitutionalists think the Almighty shouldn't be.

"If we don't affirm the right to recognize divine providence, then that puts that right in jeopardy," said Riner, a Democrat. "It's part of our history. Whether we believe it personally or not, it's what America is. And in the struggle to sanitize our classrooms, courtrooms and public buildings of all references to God, we are in many cases suppressing the ability of our young people and others to know our history."

As Andrew Koppelman, a Northwestern University law professor, points out, one man's "suppression of history" is another's "abiding by the First Amendment."

"It is so flagrantly unconstitutional that it's hard to imagine how a responsible executive could comply with it," Koppelman said of the Kentucky law. "If there is anything that this law accomplishes it's that it lets the state officially stick it to the atheists. But the First Amendment means that the state is not allowed to stick it to the atheists."

Clearly, however, the presence of that pesky amendment doesn't stop people like Riner from trying, over and over and over again.

When his wife, Claudia Riner, was a state representative, she sponsored a 1978 bill requiring classrooms across Kentucky display a copy of the Ten Commandments. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the bill unconstitutional in 1980, but the Riners have never relented in their quest to keep God in the public arena.

In recent years, states across the country have faced church-state dust-ups over everything from the Ten Commandments to nativity scenes on the courthouse square. Illinois has wrangled with the constitutionality of a morning moment of silence in schools, and local atheist Rob Sherman is suing to block the state from giving a $1 million grant to help rebuild a South Side Baptist church.

All the activity leads people like Sherman to believe they are fighting a non-holy war against a movement to make America a monotheistic nation.

"It's part of a pattern of Christians trying to use government as a weapon for imposing their religious beliefs on everybody," Sherman said. "Guys like me are working on eliminating these laws. And Christians are working on enacting them."

For Rep. Kathy Stein, who says she's the lone Jew in the Kentucky House of Representatives, the law itself, and the lawsuit she knew would follow, is a silly waste of time.

"It's a waste of taxpayer dollars, and we're in a significant budget crunch here," Stein said. "I believe the man" - and by that she means Jesus - "would rather us spend the money we used for a plaque in the homeland security office on insurance for an un-insured child."

While she may disagree with his intentions, Stein does admit that after more than a decade of serving with Riner, she admires his moxie.

"He has a tremendous faith, and that's good," she said. "I think he's kind of crazy, but he certainly has faith."

This is fucking bullshit and disrespectful to all the other Gods who are not Almighty and may have assisted in keeping Kentucky secure.

this won't effect the bourbon output will it?

heh. i wish.

Athiests appalled? What about everybody else?

well...obviously tehy drank too much of the stuff on site!

PD would disagree. The philistine.

I agree. I hate how in stories about church and state, ithey often portray atheists as being the only ones upset. I would wager that the vast majority of people who believe in God would also think that what this State Rep wants is ridiculous. It is very possible to believe in God, but also concurrently fully believe in seperation of church and state.

one must wonder where god was for 9/11 (courtesy KH).

i would agree that second statement, but to shed some disappointing light on the first statement:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/08/27/ten.commandments/

Yeah, I think you got your "vast majority" a bit mixed up with "small minority". Without looking at the article c_b posted, I would guess that nearly all christians would be perfectly fine with, if not stronly supportive of, what that state rep is trying to do.

i read "homeland security credit god" as a position, and was wondering what that might entail...

Christians are like programmed to hate anything against their stupid religion, because they feel like if they don't, "god" will hold it against them. It's really just a profit off eternal guilt..

i mean, this has to be ruled unconstitutional, right?

are you really that sure there's no god?

that involves just as much faith as christianity



i would think so/hope so

I don't believe, and I'd bet neither do you, in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, little green men visiting earth to probe rednecks or an infinite of other silly things some people do believe..

It's not a question of faith but of reason. Belief is an active thing, non-belief is the default state of things.

Yes because those are the exact same things.