LIBERADIO(!)

Good thing I checked the local blogs before sitting down to quell my frustration and anger by writing about Phil Valentine’s latest pack of lies and obfuscations in Sunday’s Tennessean. Bruce Barry, writing for the Nashville Scene’s Pith in the Wind beat me to it. Thanks, Bruce, for saying exactly what I wanted to say with much more eloquence. I’m reprinting Bruce’s post in its entirety. And stealing the picture, too. With a slight modification.

I realize that calling out Phil Valentine for his rhetorical hallucinations is old hat, but he outdid himself in his latest Sunday assault on reality. Yesterday Phil used his Tennessean column to showcase his abject ignorance about constitutional law, rehashing a simplistic and misinformed argument that no legal basis for disentangling government and religion exists since the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution. Wrapping his rant around the latest religious misadventure in Wilson County Schools, Phil goes the extra mile by reinventing some recent history:

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Wilson County schools a couple of years ago over the annual See You at the Pole event and the National Day of Prayer….A federal judge threw the case out. Even though they lost, it was apparently enough to spook school administrators.

“Threw the case out” is, to say the least, a creative reinterpretation of U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Echols’ 59-page finding that:

The [plaintiffs] have proved by a preponderance of the evidence that they suffered a constitutional violation and they will suffer a continuing irreparable injury if they are not able to enroll their children in Lakeview because Lakeview is not complying with First Amendment religious freedoms…The Court will grant the [plaintiffs] limited permanent injunctive relief.

We all realize that facts are a fleeting and optional commodity in conservative talk radio, but isn’t it high time that The Tennessean stopping giving prime Sunday op-ed real estate to a lowbrow hack who just makes shit up? (Disclosure: I sit on the ACLU of Tennessee board.)

I would like to add, however, in response to Valentine’s’ assertion that you never hear of the ACLU “rushing to the aid of someone who’s had their religious rights violated unless that religion happens to be anything but Christianity,” that yes, the ACLU does that all the freakin’ time, jackass.