Official Moves to Christianize His County After Supreme Court Ruling
Al Bedrosian is a good Christian. He believes in corporal punishment but not in global warming. He ran for a seat on his Virginia county board promising to bring the Lord Christ back into its meetings. With the grace of God and John Roberts, he's keeping his promise.
Thanks to a decision handed down yesterday by Roberts and four of his colleagues on the Supreme Court, sectarian prayers are now legal at town hall meetings. Bedrosian, a former Xerox salesman turned insurgent Republican supervisor in Roanoke County, Virginia, wants to take his home's relationship with God to the next level—striking a recent law from the books that required prayers at county meetings to be nonsectarian, and packing the agenda with lovers of Christ.
"The freedom of religion doesn't mean that every religion has to be heard," said Bedrosian, who added that he is concerned about groups such as Wiccans and Satanists. "If we allow everything … where do you draw the line?"
The supervisor campaigned on the idea of eliminating the policy, and the ruling has breathed new life into his idea for a policy that could lead to the exclusion of non-Christian groups from the invocation....
When asked if he would allow representatives from non-Christian faiths and non-faiths, including Jews, Muslims, atheists and others, the Hollins District supervisor said he likely would not.
Roanoke County is no backwoods: It's home to a highly educated, highly professional metropolitan population. But Bedrosian, who identifies himself as a "limited government" guy, thinks Southwest Virginia, like the whole country, needs churchin': "I think America, pretty much from founding fathers on, I think we have to say more or less that we're a Christian nation with Christian ideology. If we're a Christian nation, then I would say that we need to move toward our Christian heritage."
That's an old theme for him, as this 2006 op-ed shows:
Freedom of religion has become the biggest hoax placed upon the Christian people and on our Christian nation...
Christianity, by its own definition, does not allow freedom of religion...
Christians are kept occupied by fighting a battle over the removal of the generic word 'god' from our culture. This really is not the true battle. The word 'god' can refer to anything. Hindus, Islamists, Buddhists and Satanists all have gods.
In fact, the global warming crowd worships the environment as god, the abortionist has the death of unborn babies as their god, and the homosexuals have sexual freedom as their god.
But it's about a lot more than that to Bedrosian. In a January county meeting, he tied the current "secular" policy of allowing prayers for all to the erosion of gun rights and the advancement by environmentalists of U.N.-sponsored global warming myths.
That's how you know he's a good Christian. It's about liberty and freedom and dignity. Like the liberty to pick up another parent's two-year-old child in a hospital waiting room and freely spank the dignity out of that child.
That's the kind of Christian Al Bedrosian is. And thanks to the Supreme Court, he can forcibly share that understanding of Christ's love and mercy with all the fine denizens of Roanoke County.