calling a spade a shovel

[rone]

Jym Dyer at meme_machine_go suggests that we call Pat Robertson's actions by their proper name: he has issued a fatwah.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

and they don't force you to swear on a bible anymore in court

Maybe not, but some version of this did bother me a little the last time I had jury duty. I didn't get on a jury but I did get into the courtroom and get sworn in. It was a collective thing: the court officer read off an oath that included the words "swear" and "so help you God?" and we were all supposed to say "I do" just like we were getting married.

I figured that as long as I was swearing to the Ceremonial Deist God described in certain Supreme Court opinions about how "In God We Trust" has nothing to do with religion, I was all right, since I fully intended to do everything I was promising to do; but in some part of my mind I was imagining a nightmare situation in which somebody figured out I was an atheist and tried to get a verdict overturned and me thrown in the pokey for contempt because in some bizarre technical sense I had committed perjury by swearing to a God I didn't believe in. And I was wondering if I should have approached the bench and annoyed everybody by asking for a nontheistic affirmation. (I figured probably not, since this was Massachusetts and not Texas.)

All this fretting because of some God-language that didn't legally mean anything anyway.