Friday, August 21, 2015

Can you name this law?

My ladyfriend watched a video in which some tea partiers were interviewed on the Washington Mall, at a gathering convened by Glenn Beck. One of the people interviewed was a woman who insisted that Barack Obama has passed a law which forbids her (or anyone else) from praying at "national monuments." Apparently, this law has something to do with the menace of communism.

Can you name this law? I mean, is there any law passed since January 2009 which could be interpreted as having any bearing on where one may pray?

Let's suppose that such a law exists. Since laws are made by Congress, not the president, and since Congress has been largely in control of the Republican party, hasn't this tea partier just given us a good reason not to vote for the GOP?

(We have many real problems in this country. I'm continually stunned by the number of people who prefer to be upset by hallucinations.)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The woman may be wrong on the specifics, but there is an element of truth in what she's saying. There's a law against dancing at national monuments. There may well be a law against praying, but some dancing is religious (Rain Dance, etc) so such prayers would be outlawed. Enforcement of stupid laws is at the discretion of Parks Police which is under the Dept of Interior, an Obama appointee. There's a lot of discretion about which laws get enforced. Parks Police turned a blind eye to Occupy DC encampments until they were no longer politically useful. Around the time of the Beck rally, Parks Police were arresting dancers at Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

James said...

Obama has barely been able to pass any laws, let alone a law that might infringe on the ability of morons to exercise their delusional beliefs. This woman is as much of a fraud as the rest of the right-wing blowhards who bitch about imaginary problems.

joseph said...

She's talking about an executive order, of which there are none related to not praying at monuments. There is a national day of prayer, but nothing prohibiting prayer that I can find, and I looked. By the way, Jewish ergo Mossad? Really? A lawyer started Ashley Madison because he saw a way to make a buck. Whether that site is appropriate or not is something I not only don't have an opinion about, but is something I don't care enough about to have an opinion.

Propertius said...

I suspect this myth grew out of this incident:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/fdrprayer.asp

In a nutshell, the Administration opposed a House bill to install a plaque with FDR's D-Day prayer on the WWII memorial. The bill passed the House, but stalled in the Senate. That's the closest thing I could find - and it's pretty easy to see how a semi-literate person might be confused.

Joseph Cannon said...

"By the way, Jewish ergo Mossad? Really? A lawyer started Ashley Madison because he saw a way to make a buck."

That's precisely what I SAID.

I am simply suggesting that the hackers -- not the company, the people who attacked the company -- might be spooky. Biderman is probably clean.

Now, the hackers could be employed by any number of services, including the Chinese and the Russians, not to mention our own NSA or CIA. But I would put Mossad high on the list of suspects because it seems quite possible that Biderman would trust a firm like ZoneAlarm/Checkpoint. And there are plenty of other small computer security firms with 8200 alums.