Jailed For Not Believing

Recently reported in the news was this interesting article…

Barry Hazle is an atheist who was incarcerated for a year due to a drug charge before he was released on parole. As a condition of his parole, however, Hazle was required to attend a 90-day residential drug treatment program. Although Hazle did not object to attending such a program, he did object to the fact that he was assigned to a 12-step program with explicitly religious content referring to “God” and a “higher power.” 

As Hazle wrote in an official challenge to this placement, “I have committed myself to a full and lasting secular recovery and complete abstinence from illegal drugs,” but he objects to “forced participation in any spiritual/religious activities.”

Despite his objections, Hazle remained in the religious 12-step program, all while unsuccessfully trying to get transferred to a secular program. A little over a month after he entered the program, however, the program complained that Hazle was “sort of passive aggressive.” Hazle was charged with a parole violation, arrested, and incarcerated for another 100 days.

Though the state later claimed that he was removed from the 12-step program due to his own behavior, a federal judge rejected this claim, explaining that the state’s “argument rings hollow in light of the undisputed facts showing that Plaintiff was only ‘disruptive’ in the program ‘in a congenial way.’”

Bravo for the Judge but can you believe how all this intelligent minded, well intentioned people simply act without thinking…  or, without thinking it through completely.

And, here is the real wonder of it all…  the article on Hazle continues with the following:

…the Constitution forbade the state of California from placing him in a religious program against his will in the first place. As the Supreme Court explained in the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing.

Boy, this revelation is a zinger and clearly someone did not do their homework.  But, we are not done yet, because the article continues with this mind boggler:

…the federal appeals court which oversees California was even more direct. “For the government to coerce someone to participate in religious activities,” the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit explained in Inouye v. Kemna, “strikes at the core of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” So Mr. Hazle could not be given a choice between participating in a religious program or being put back behind bars.

When will it ever end, asked rhetorically.