The United States is a place where silly, medieval, religious beliefs don't determine our laws. We're free from the unenlightened nonsense often witnessed in backward countries like, say, Iran, whose silly embarassment of a government includes an "Office for Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice." Can you imagine? And who could forget the barbarian government in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan which sported their own, "Office for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice?"
Sure glad the United States of America isn't like those silly backwards nations.
What? Just a second,…..what the….
"Back in the fall of 2007, with only the most practical motives in mind, George Kalman took his pen to the standard form for creating a limited liability company in Pennsylvania.
The first line on the document asked Mr. Kalman to supply his chosen corporate name, and he printed it in: I Choose Hell Productions, LLC. In a personal bit of existentialism, Mr. Kalman believed that, even if life was often hellish, it was better than suicide.
A week later, the daily mail to Mr. Kalman’s home in the Philadelphia suburb of Downingtown brought a form letter from the Pennsylvania Department of State. His corporate filing had been rejected, the letter explained, because a business name “may not contain words that constitute blasphemy, profane cursing or swearing or that profane the Lord’s name.”
Surely this is a unique, isolated incident peculiar to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?…..
While they are “arcane and rarely enforced,” as Professor Gordon put it in an interview, the laws provide the states with a “symbolic power” of moral condemnation, as well as the prospect of actual punishment. To cite just one example, Oklahoma’s statute authorizes as much as one year in prison and a $500 fine for anyone convicted of blasphemy.
Several of the state statutes explicitly outlaw verbal attacks on God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost and “Scripture.”
Whew, man,….I'm so relieved that America isn't backwards about this religious stuff.
On a more somber note….whattya' think? Should The Reverend turn himself in now….or just send in the fine money?
