It looks like the publicity surrounding Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis’s claims that her private religious beliefs should allow her to disobey any law she thinks is wrong has encouraged other crazies to adopt her attitude and demand that their ‘freedom of religion’ means that their religious practices and privileges take precedence over everything else and everybody else’s rights.



We have this case where a church in Washington DC claims that a proposed new bike lane that passes by their church violates their freedom of religion. Why? I leave it to you to try and make sense of their argument.

The parking loss would place an unconstitutionally undue burden on people who want to pray, the church argues, noting that other churches already have had to flee to the suburbs because of similarly onerous parking restrictions. The church says that DDOT lets cars park diagonally on the street during busy times, which would be seemingly impossible if a protected bike lane were on the street.

Then we have a high school football coach in Washington state who claims that ‘his agreement with god’ entitled him to lead team prayers at the 50-yard line despite being told by his school district that this violates US Supreme Court rulings. These people’s delusions are quite amazing.

“I kind of made an agreement with my personal faith and with God that this was something that I was going to do, and I was going to give him the glory after every single game, and do it on the 50,” the coach added. “I’m kind of a guy of my word, and I’m just going to go through with what I’ve always done.”

Then Duquesne University in Pittsburgh claims that it has a First Amendment religious freedom right to fire or not rehire people. As Hamilton Nolan explains, “Duquesne is arguing that is poorly paid adjunct professors should not be allowed to form a union in part because such a union might impede the school’s ability to fire a history of science professor for teaching un-Catholic science.

Then in Texas (no post on religious craziness is complete without something out of Texas) about a hundred people gathered and prayed loudly before a school board meeting and demanded that all meetings in future begin with prayer. Of course, they claim that their praying does not infringe on anyone else’s rights.

“Nobody’s trying to coerce anybody to pray and we’re not trying to establish a religion by praying we’re simply exercising what the Constitution says is our freedom of religion,” Goodson told KXXV. “It says that congress shall make no law that respecting and establishes a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

These people have no idea what the Establishment Clause means and think that the Free Exercise clause gives unbounded freedom for any religious practice, any time, anywhere, as long as it is Christian of course.