‘5 Religious Organizations’ Updates

Last winter I wrote an article about five religious organizations you should hate. And since The BEAST is the one and only True News Source (peace ‘n blessings be upon Us), you may have missed some new developments for those groups. So here they are! But (spoiler alert) you should know that none of these updates should make any decent person stop hating them.

LOL WARREN JEFFS

Jeffs, seen here with one of his “child brides.”

In the section on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), I referred to the “prophet” Warren Jeffs’s 10 years-to-life sentence for being an accomplice to rape. That sentence has since been overturned by the Utah Supreme Court on the grounds that the jury were given faulty instructions.

So his conviction was overturned on a technicality. That’s the bad news. The good news for those of us in the popular anti-child-fucking demographic is that there are plenty of other child-rape charges against Jeffs to go through, and the courts in Texas are dealing with that as I’m writing this. This past week he was found guilty on two charges of sexual assault against 12 and 15 year old girls. The sentencing phase is curently underway.

This most recent trial contained 100% of the FDA’s recommended annual allowance of WTF. In classic megalomaniac-on-trial fashion, Jeffs first fired his expensive, high-powered attorneys and opted to represent himself with the help of “God’s word.” Then he started interrupting the judge and threatening the court with “sickness and death” unless they would “cease this prosecution against my pure and holy way.” Jeffs claimed it wasn’t him saying this though. It was all just a message from Jesus, presumably so he wouldn’t have to take any responsibility for it.

Later the court heard audio clips of Jeffs explaining to a 14 year old girl how best to be raped by him, and then another audio file of the actual rape itself. Here is one of the files used in court where Jeffs explains the system of arranged “marriage” and child rape to a young girl. Jeffs never learned from Nixon to stop recording audio when you’re doing incredibly evil, illegal shit.

The prosecution also showed pictures of the beds Jeffs allegedly used to rape kids and had a former FLDS member testify on the system of arranged marriages within the cult. The witness testifying was actually one of Jeffs’s step-mothers (Warren’s father, Rulon, also held the same position in the church before he died in 2002). FLDS is very meticulous on book-keeping because they want to have records which match the records kept in heaven. The court gave Jeffs 30 minutes for a closing statement. He used all of it, mostly just to stand there in silence, but he reportedly said, “I am peace” at one time.

It is a good thing he reminded the court that he’s peace because he was immediately afterwards found not guilty. No, just kidding, he was found guilty on 2 counts of sexual assault. The sentencing phase is now underway, and Jeffs faces up to life in prison. [UPDATE: He got life in prison, LOL]

Lord’s Resistance Amy

Thomas Kwoyelo, a former senior commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is on trial in Gulu, which is in northern Uganda. He has 65 charges against him which apparently took almost two hours to read out. They’re all from the deplorable crimes committed by the LRA, which I wrote about in the original article.

One way in which Kwoyelo’s trial has been awesome came from when the convoy dropped him off for his trial. There was also a marching band (via) there. If only Warren Jeffs had thought to bring along the FLDS marching band.

Kwoyelo is the first defendant out of hopefully many others in a move by the Ugandan government to bring the LRA to justice. Kwoyelo had applied for amnesty under the controversial Ugandan Amnesty Act, but his application is still pending. There is apparently a lot of double-standards in how the Ugandan government has been prosecuting, or trying to prosecute, LRA members and how their judicial proceedings have related to international law and the International Criminal Court.

Aside from the amnesty controversy, Kwoyelo’s attorneys plan their defense to be that charges which are breaches of the Geneva Convention have not been formally filed, and that the proseuction had not yet fully disclosed their files on Kwoyelo – at least, not at the time of the Human Rights Watch report cited above. Both of these issues may have been resolved by now, but I can’t find any more recent update since the second hearing, which was supposed to be July 25.

The UN Security Council has released a statement harshly condemning the LRA’s violence across not only in Uganda, but also in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. This is probably a positive development because the Ugandan government has a credibility problem in dealing with the LRA. They’ve granted amnesty to combatants who were higher in rank than Kwoyelo. Some spectators of the trial are suspicious of the government’s motives. They think that the trial is a PR move for the government to show off the efficacy of its new International Crimes Division. Even one mutilated LRA victim interviewed by a reporter said that the government should be concentrating on helping the war-torn regions of northern Uganda and that the trial will not do that.

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice

“We wear the table cloths from Italian restaurants on our fucking heads.”

If you’ve made it this far, you might have expected that these updates are all going to be uplifting stories of assholes being brought to justice. Well, Saudi Arabia. That’s probably all I’ve got to say about those expectations.

The Saudi Arabian government’s reaction to the Arab Spring uprisings thruoghout the Middle East and beyond have been pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Back in March when it looked like Saudi Arabia might be the next country to really shake things up politically, the foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said that his family would “cut off any finger raised” against them. There were some protests afterwards, and things appear to have fizzled out since. So much for the hope of getting rid of one of the worst governments on the planet.

And my friends in the Religious Police have been adopting a similar ‘fuck you’ attitude towards the population it’s supposed to serve and protect. Only in their case, most of what they get involved in has this element of total goofiness in it because they’re so obsessed with these absurd superstitions.

One thing that’s awesome about the Religious Police is that they have an Anti-Witchcraft Unit. Wait, no, not awesome, I meant “pitiful and sad.” Last month the Anti-Witchcraft Unit received word that someone had found a decapitated wolf’s head wrapped up in women’s lingerie . If you’re a normal person, you might hear about that and think it’s the inevitable product of pent-up psycho-sexual frustration resulting from such a stifling and oppressive society. Sure, whoever did it is sick and needs help, but when you set up a society like Saudi Arabia, you’re kind of asking for a higher proportion of people who are not quite right in the head.

You’ll be surprised to learn that that is not at all how the Religious Police saw the matter! They immediately identified it as some sort of witchcraft, kind of like how they do with everything that’s not Wahhabi. Would they be able to break the spell? It turns out they did! Which should be pretty easy when the whole thing’s made up to begin with.

Speaking of women’s lingerie, there is also some conflict between the Kingdom and their Religious Police. The Kingdom is replacing all of the male salesmen at lingerie shops with women in order to reduce female unemployment, and the Religious Police and their advocates are pretty upset about that. They would like the lingerie shops to set up dividers to make sure men buying lingerie for one or several of their wives aren’t intermingling with the women working there.

And lastly, in surprisingly non-lingerie related Saudi news, a man going on a picnic with some friends was possessed by ghosts! At least, that’s what his friends said. And since they said so, that proves it’s true, so the Religious Police read the Koran at him and burned some incense. Somehow, this forced the ghost to leave the man’s body via his hand.

That is all for now.

Repent Amarillo guy will run for mayor of some town

Hey, remember those distinguished gentlemen from Amarillo, Texas who like to execute Santa Claus in effigy and harass patrons of swingers’ clubs? Their leader is running for mayor of Amarillo. Here is a video of him in what looks like a church, announcing his candidacy:

At the 1:47 mark, you can hear him say this (emphasis mine, factual and grammatical errors his):

“It is time that Christians rise up and start taking responsibility of their civic duties seriously and start running for office.”

Yes, the time has come for Christians to start running for office. They must start doing this. For too long, only non-Christians have been running for office.

He prefaces all this with a long reading from Romans 13, which I initially thought was the one the KKK likes so much. But after checking back to where I heard that, it turns out it was actually the 12th chapter of Romans. So it’s totally different! Oh, except he has the exact same “Christian flag” as the “Grand Wizard” of the Klan in the Safran video.

KKK Grand Wizard Chris Johnson showing off their Christian flag

David Grisham of Repent Amarillo announcing his mayoral candidacy

I don’t think this means Grisham is a secret Klansman, or even that he’s necessarily racist. The Christian flag seems more like a dog whistle than the established flag of any particular Christian extremist organization. If you go to the Focus on the Family HQ in Colorado Springs, you will see it there also:

According to Wikipedia, it was first designed in early 20th century Brooklyn, probably by Satanic hipsters trying to be ironic. So again, Grisham’s not necessarily a Klansman just because he and the KKK share a flag, just like he’s probably not a communist just because he seems to strongly imply in his campaign video that he’s going to try to use government power to shut down what I’m sure is Amarillo’s totally happening bar scene. But still, very creepy, especially if he ends up winning.

Dallas preacher steals Christmas

Sandra McGriff is this pastor who, it looks like got busted for burglary. I say it looks that way because the police records say that the person arrested was named Kathy Robinson, but McGriff’s brother-in-law Weldon claims it was her. So either it’s McGriff and she was carrying someone else’s ID or this is all some holiday prank gone horribly wrong. Or right.

She also said that McGriff had called her to talk about an hour before the burglary was reported. During that conversation, Agnew told McGriff she was away from home visiting her daughter.

PROTIP: Don’t do this. If you’re going to rob someone, find out when they’ll be away from home using their status on the Facesbooks.

After McGriff was treated for the injured arm, officers struggled to arrest her. She slipped out of one set of handcuffs and resisted being restrained.
She slipped a second set of handcuffs off while waiting in a police car, and kicked and tried to scratch officers as they again restrained her.

PROTIP: DO do this if you are arrested, if only for the sake of awesomeness.

Essentially this woman is being charged for taking too many shortcuts in her job. If you want to take your parishoners’ belongings (yeah, the person she robbed went to her church, which is called the Church of the Living God), you have to convince them to give them to you by “tithing.”

Killing Santa for God in Amarillo

Repent Amarillo is this Christian quasi-militia group which became famous when they started trolling swingers’ club patrons a few months ago. Now they have moved on to more serious matters, which of course means they made these awesome sweatshirts and wore them while executing Santa Claus in effigy.

The very serious man in this video reads out the list of crimes Santa has committed. The first one’s idolatry – obvious, really, because of all those people who worship him. And the second one is that he lies by claiming that he actually exists. But how can he do the lying without existing? And how can you execute someone who doesn’t exist? Isn’t Repent Amarillo buying into the lie of Santa Claus existing by executing him? After all, you need to exist first before you can be executed. As Rene Descartes put it in Discourse on the Method:

This proposition, I think, therefore I am, is the first and the most certain which presents itself to whomever conducts his thoughts in order. The runner-up is, Then I get executed by a freelance Texan firing squad.

So then this distinguished gentleman calls Santa out for not having a soul and then says something about global warming.

I’m no expert on firing squads, but I was under the impression that they usually don’t 1. have their guns aimed for them by leveling them on a rack, 2. have the target only a few feet away 3. wear pretty pink earmuffs, and 4. hilariously mispronounce coup de grace.