[The Non-Euclidean Blog] Tony Alamo Convicted

[NEB]

74-year-old Arkansas cult whacko and multimillionaire Tony Alamo is facing 175 years in prison. Jurors took one day to find him guilty of "marrying" multiple girls as young as 9 years old, then transporting them across the Arkansas border to exercise his conjugal rights. Predictably, Alamo blames his legal travails on a corrupt government which has purchased false testimony to bring down a preacher of the gospel, and which "murdered, burnt up, the Christians at Waco, Texas!" He also manages a scathing critique of the US government which has apparently proven itself communistic, socialistic, and chummy with the "homosexual Pope."

This comes after the conviction earlier this month of an Alamo Ministries associate in Los Angeles County. (We've got a Tony Alamo compound here in the Santa Clarita Valley). Douglas Christopher pled no contest to charges of child abuse, stemming from the brutal 1988 beating of a 12-year-old boy at Alamo's long-distance direction. The beating lasted an hour and a half, the sentence Alamo imposed by phone for offences which included giggling in chapel.

It's about time somebody stuffed this maniac away in a dark corner. Abuse from any authority figure is bad, but it's particularly sickening when it comes from someone claiming divine sanction. If folks are convinced God is backing you up, they'll trust you and absorb your cruelty a lot longer than would otherwise be the case. In turn, meek acquiescence feeds the appetite for power, leading to increasingly brazen abuse.

But, occasionally, that sort of thing catches up with a person. If the system works as it should, Alamo will be shut away for the rest of his natural days. Not only does that thought make me smile, but it also gives me hope that I'll stop finding his newsletters shoved under my windshield wipers.

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Posted By NEB to The Non-Euclidean Blog at 7/24/2009 12:51:00 PM