Texas lawyer exposes religious hiring test for peace officers: County only wanted Baptist constables

[diabeticman]

https://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/texas-lawyer-exposes-religious-hiring-test-for-peace-officers-county-only-wanted-baptist-constables/


A Texas judge ruled last week that a case against Williamson County could go forward after a job applicant claimed that commissioners had a religious test for constable jobs.

Robert Lloyd explained at a press conference that Williamson County asked about his views on marriage, abortion and religion during a 2013 interview for a job at the Williamson County Precinct 3 Constable’s Office.

“I was shocked,” Lloyd said, according to KVUE. “I was sick to my stomach when I left because I had never believed that things like this in government would go on.”
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I'm starting to see a pattern here. People don't understand the first amendment.

[smirkymonkey]

1. This country is going backward so quickly my head is spinning.

It's these constant little daily "WTF's?" and then suddenly you wake up and realize that you are living in a dystopian society.

[diabeticman]

3. YEP!!!

[Baitball Blogger]

4. You have no idea.

And when you get a closer look as to who is skirting the law to benefit the cronies, and how that good deed comes back to a member of the family...

Well, you need a subscription to ancestry.com and a three dimensional scoreboard just to keep up.

[hifiguy]

2. Well, isn't this a fine kettle of carp.

Injunctions and firings would be a good start, but only a start.

[brewens]

5. When will thise persecution of Christians end? God fearing people only wanting the type of officers

they can count on to run things their way!

[TexasProgresive]

6. Some more of that taking their country back crap

There were Texas school districts during the 50s that only hired Baptists.

[jwirr]

16. Yes, the Baptist church has always been bulding the

end times dominion that they interpret from Revelations. Not just now but even back in the Reformation era.

I feel very sorry for the people who are not Baptist who live in that county.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

17. I can tell you a story about that.

My dad was an attorney in Pasadena (large suburb of Houston) and a friend of his who was an attorney and former mayor had to go to the Pasadena school board in the early 1960s and talk to them to get them to hire a schoolteacher who was Catholic. This lady was a client and friend of my dad's.

And the public schools were not desegregated until long after I graduated. Probably desegregated in the late 1970s. Our senior government teacher told us how they used redlining, although he didn't use that word. He told us that if a black family looked at a house to buy, the real estate agent would triple the price. There was one black student in my high school out of a total of 3,500 students. This was early 1970s. His father was the janitor at the bank.

[arely staircase]

7. Williamson County is a right wing suck hole

Their former DA pled guilty to railroading innocent people and got disbarred. It is just up the road from Austin (part of the city actually spills over from liberal Travis Co.)

[gollygee]

8. Can you imagine if Dearborn said they'd only hire Muslims?

I'm trying to imagine how people on the right would respond to that. How these specific Baptists would respond to that.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

14. Let's start a rumour.

Gee, golly, did you hear that McDonalds in Kentucky was hiring only Muslims as managers now? I heard they're not going to allow regular or Canadian bacon on any of the sandwiches, and not allow any of their subordinates to put them on either!

[noiretextatique]

9. not just religious questions: political questions

they want rw baptists, not just baptists.

[senz]

18. Exactly. They don't want loving Christian baptists

they want kick-ass rightwingers who won't tolerate anyone's right to think for him/herself.

[TexasTowelie]

10. I've been keeping up with this story since 2013 and posted threads about it in the Texas Group.

Here is the link to the most recent article in the Williamson County Sun along with links to the earlier threads that I posted:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/107828347

[diabeticman]

11. Thanks for the link

[Fred Sanders]

12. Fundies are forever confusing freedom of religion from government interference with religious freedom to do as you please.

[sarge43]

13. It's not just the First Amendment

It's Article 6, para 3 - no religious test for public office or trust.

[diabeticman]

15. That's right. Thanks for the reminder.

[senz]

19. Which means they don't have a case.

Should be pretty easy to put a stop to it.

[Monk06]

20. I had to give up a friendship with a guy I've known for thirty years because he joined a Canadian

Last edited Tue Sep 8, 2015, 08:51 AM - Edit history (1)

Baptist congregation that over the years has completely aligned itself with the Southern Baptist Convention. He was bombarding me with email copies of letters to the editor of local and national newspapers, letters to Prime Minister Harper and even letters to the Superior Court and the BC Law Society.

His pet peeves of course are abortion rights, euthanasia rights, and marriage rights.

His gripe with the BC Law Society was due to it's denial of accreditation to a proposed law school at Trinity Western University, an evangelical school which required students to sign a 'heterosexual' abstinence covenant as a condition of enrollment counter to the Charter of Rights.

This from a guy who is 56 years old, has never lived outside his parents house and who last had sex with a woman in 1986 after which he broke up with her because premarital sex was a sin. He has been saving himself for marriage ever since. He hasn't dated any women for longer than three weeks before pronouncing them biblically illiterate because they had opinions that conflicted with his own.

The last straw for me was when he said in order to live biblically he could no longer 'believe' in evolution. He had no education in science and he refused to listen to my counter arguments despite my having a philosophy degree in logic, philosophy of language and science. He dismissed Empiricism out of hand without reading Bacon, Hume or Locke. Read no evil see no evil was his way of dealing with secular ideas.

He was a literate guy who read most of the major Marxist writers including Horkheimer, Adorno, Jameson, Guy Debord, Bloch, Lukacs and others. Unfortunately his Marxist reading were merely to give him a pretext for writing papers decrying secular atheism.

Baptists are as hide bound, dogmatic and misogynist as any Taliban or ISIS lunatic. They hate democracy yet thrive under it's protections.

[LuvNewcastle]

24. That last paragraph is spot on.

I was raised Baptist -- Missionary Baptist and Southern Baptist. Basically, they hate people who don't agree with them. Their preachers (my dad was one) get up at the pulpit every Sunday and say all sorts of awful things about people of other religions, and generally, anybody who isn't a born again Bible worshiping RW lobotomized asshole for Jesus. He'll, I've seen preachers advocate violence against unbelievers and preach racist sermons. You are right. Some people here like to play this shit down, but I grew up in it, and I'm saying you're right to compare them to the Taliban and other radical Islamic groups. If Southern Baptists ever got secular power over this country like ISIS has over Iraq, it would be just as fucked up here.

[Lee-Lee]

21. I have seen thinly disguised political favortism before, and some thinly disguised religious stuff

But nothing this open on a religious front in LE hiring.

There was a Sheriff in Eastern NC that forbid any of his employees from living with a partner unless married, using the excuse that there was still a law on the books forbidding it but that was just his way to weeding out those he saw as morally undesirable. That led to the entire law being shut down.

Sadly it wasn't too long ago when you had to be a registered democrat to get any job in state level LE in NC, and there was a huge mess with Federal investigation about how the DMV enforcement division had senior leaders telling subordinates that you had to donate to certain Democrat political campaigns to get promoted or a job. It resulted in the entire DMV being reorganized and moved to the Highway Patrol. Those were left over old school Dixiecrats that were DINO's doing that, but it sure caused a lot of scandal and made Dems look bad around the mess.

I worked for a Democratic Sheriff who, by DU standards, was pretty far right. But he never seemed to care about religions affiliation or political leanings of his deputies, unless you were actively campaigning for his opponent.

[lpbk2713]

22. Isn't it bad enough they reject high test score applicants?

And now this?


{Link to Article}

[TeamPooka]

23. Cromwell's Roundheads are running the place nowadays. nt