The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions.

But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.

Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

Gosh. I guess Christians in Alabama are just extra-special people. The rest of us — Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, animists, whatever — not so much.

Isn’t it just amazing that the governor of a secular state would stand up and unabashedly make a speech declaring a specific religious group as having a privileged status with him?

Jackie Trebesh and her daughter attended a Catholic church presided over by “Reverend” John Kelly. One weekend she was surprised when they were both denied communion. She was in for a further surprise: when she left the church, she was pursued by a Santa Rosa County deputy, pulled over, and given a warning for trespassing, at the request of the priest.

What do you think her crime was?

According to Trebesh, she learned the reason she was denied communion was because someone at the church had seen the daughter dispose of the host, as it is called, improperly in the church parking lot.

“The matter of disposing of the Eucharist in an inappropriate way is a serious matter to us,” Peggy Dekeyser, the communications officer for the diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee said in confirming Trebesh’s theory.

Trebesh said the only thing she could think of that Kelly or anyone else might have seen her daughter do was “spit out a piece of gum in the parking lot.”

It’s fine that crazy Catholics want to enforce their crazy doctrines within the scope of the church; if crazy John Kelly wants to refuse to do his crazy mumbo-jumbo for anyone, that should be his right. But what’s really disturbing here is the county deputy using his official status to administer punishment outside the church.

I don’t care what the priest believes or does, but that deputy needs to be fired.

Senator Grassley launched an investigation into the finances of religious organizations, after reports of abuses — you know the sorts of things that are common, like obscene salaries to ministers, active politicizing from the pulpit, etc. The Grassley report has been released, with a dull thud.

According to the review, many of the ministries operate multiple non-profits, with the leaders drawing some form of compensation from each of them.

“The number and types of entities, including private airports and aircraft leasing companies, raises concerns about the use of the church’s tax-exempt status to avoid taxation. However, given the four churches’ refusal to provide tax information, we are unable to determine whether and the extent to which they are reporting and paying taxes on income earned in those entities,” the review states.

Notice…six were investigated, but only two cooperated. The investigators declined to submit subpoenas to get to the heart of the potential scofflaws. Their final conclusion: these megachurches ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong. They make one big recommendation: maybe we should change our laws to allow church electioneering.

Big investigation. Scamming churches allowed to decline to participate. No wrong-doing found. Only significant conclusion is to increase the politicization of religion.

I think we were had. Grassley wasn’t digging into malfeasance, he was throwing up a smokescreen to cover efforts to give further benefits to churches.

The Mount Soledad Easter Cross has a long and contentious legal history. It’s a 43-foot-tall concrete cross standing on public land, initially erected by Christians, and used as the focus of Christian religious ceremonies, and is clearly intended and used for a sectarian religious purpose. It is clearly a violation of the separation of church and state to use public land to promote a specific religion, yet a federal judge ruled that “the memorial at Mount Soledad, including its Latin cross, communicates the primarily nonreligious messages of military service, death and sacrifice,” and decided it was constitutional. I suspect that judge was not an atheist, a Moslem, or a Sikh; it takes some twisted logic to decide that a prominent religious symbol is not actually a religious symbol.

That’s been settled for now. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a humongous cross erected to celebrate Easter actually is a religious symbol, despite all the dishonest subterfuge by Christians who were emulating St Peter. I recommend that, after reading the ruling, they open their bibles and turn to Mark 14:66-72. The denial isn’t usually considered a high mark of Peter’s service.

They might consider that before filing for yet another appeal, as we all know they will.

The British government has been getting a bit mother-henish lately, arresting people for cruelty to religious texts, and clearly has it in mind to provide special legal protection for a certain class of books. My first thought would be that that is insane, books are mere objects that are easily replicable, and providing for a special privilege that we don’t also grant doorknobs or transistor radios or light bulbs is absurd. But a man named Eugenio has a better idea: we need to leap on the sacred book bandwagon.

I am therefore writing to you today to request that legal protection be accorded to all copies of the three editions of J.D. Jackson’s “Classical Electrodynamics” (ISBN 978-0471431329, ISBN 978-0471309321, ISBN 047130932X).

I believe it ticks all the boxes for a sacred text: by making me understand for the first time in all their clarity and power both Maxwell’s equations, the first step towards a Grand Unification theory that would give a single explanation for all physical phenomena in the universe, and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which let me glimpse for the first time the true nature of space, time and causality, it changed my view of the universe and my concept of our place and role in it; it opened my eyes to the beauty and harmony and marvelous complexity of everything that exists; it gave me a clear and understandable explanation of complex and baffling phenomena; it requires lengthy and intensive study under the guidance of learned masters to truly grasp its significance; I tend to swear on it when I need to prove my absolute sincerity and my cat is not around; finally, seeing it defaced, burnt, thrown in a skip, pulped or in any way damaged causes me emotional pain and occasional mild irritation.

I realise it appears to fail the test in important areas – for example, it seems to contain far less made-up stuff than, say, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon or Dianetics; but in fact, if you look at the exercises section, you’ll find plenty of perfect conductors, infinite planes, and continuous (in the mathematical sense) physical phenomena and bodies. All demonstrably imaginary, as any first-year physics student could easily prove. So in fact there is plenty of made-up stuff, it’s just well hidden, which should make it a better-than-average sacred text.

One thing though might be construed as a flaw – the fact that nowhere in the book, not even in the pre-New Age, 1962 first edition, there is a call to genocide, ethnic cleansing, war or mass rape. In spite of the fact that the title itself refers to classical electrodynamics, there isn’t even a call for the extermination of quantum physicists – something I tended to consider a major oversight in my last year at university, to be completely honest. I’m not sure this will be enough to disqualify it from the status of sacred text, if that should be the case perhaps we could add an appendix with Richard Feynman’s autobiography, which at least contains reference to a couple of punch-ups, as a sort of Saint Dick the Divine’s Apocalypse – although he wasn’t nearly high enough to be compared to the author of the original one, not even in the bit where he tells about Brazil and the bongos.

Although I blew up a considerable number of electrolytic capacitors during lab courses (I tended to get the polarities mixed up with annoying regularity) I haven’t caused any intentional explosive damage to anything/anyone since my mother threw away my chemistry set when I was 12 (and even then, the Kitchen Table Incident was at least partly an accident); therefore, alas, I cannot threaten you with an onslaught of terror, violence and murder in case you should not accede to my request, but I’ll be severely annoyed and possibly even a bit snappy if The Book does not receive the full protection of the law. After all, what matters is how I feel about it, not the actual fact that it is God-, Allah-, Xenu- or Flying Spaghetti Monster-inspired, and I feel very strongly about this.

I am not a physicist, but I’ve read enough of James Clerk Maxwell to be humbled before his obvious holiness, and agree that his works deserve the same or greater protection that we would give to frauds and poseurs like Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed. They never unified electromagnetism; they never even got off their butts long enough to ask the question, “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”

Let’s not stop with Maxwell, either. Give me a minute, I’ll make a list.