Ecrasez l'infame!

Patheos reports Texas churches are suing to become eligible for FEMA relief despite the fact that they do not pay taxes.

Regretfully, they are being assisted by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. I used to have aloha for Becket, which up to 25 years ago did good work supporting non-Christian and oddball Christian cults being harassed by mainstream Christians and local governments.

Since then, however, Becket has changed from supporting religious liberty to suppoting religious dominance. One way you can tell is the speed with which Becket jumped into this dispute. As a smallish organization, it used to spend a long time debating which disputes to intervene in. It looks like it had the papres drawn up and was just looking for an occasion.

Again, we see Christians in America claiming to be persecuted when it never happens.

Nut grafs:

Using Trinity as a starting point here also seems to stretch the limits of that decision. Five of the justices who ruled in favor of the Missouri church made clear the ruling applied only in cases like a church playground, where the benefits were secular.

We haven’t seen that decision applied at the federal level, but the FEMA case isn’t a natural consequence of Trinity. It’s ridiculous for anyone to argue taxpayers should fund the rebuilding of churches — which would obviously benefit religion — when no one would ask taxpayers to fund the building of those churches in the first place.

One correction to Patheos. It is not true that no one is asking that taxpayers fund building churches from the start. The Catholics do.