A Valley Station Road church is sponsoring an "Open Carry Church Service" in late June, encouraging people to wear unloaded guns in their holsters, enter a raffle to win a free handgun, hear patriotic music and listen to talks by operators of gun stores and firing ranges. In an effort "to promote responsible gun ownership and 2nd Amendment rights," the organizer, Pastor Ken Pagano, who also had been trying to get more people into the pews of his New Bethel Church, hit upon the marketing idea of an "Open Carry Church Service".... "It's just a celebration we're doing to coincide with Fourth of July," he said. "There are people who own firearms and do so responsibly and enjoy them as a sport, maybe like golfing or bowling."
Somewhere, in a place likely both warm and beautiful, Jesus Christ is weeping into his Corona. In what has to be just about one of the single most ignorant bastardizations of Christianity, Pastor Ken Pagano has just raised the bar for displays of overt religiosity. And I suppose this service dovetails with the teachings of Pagano's "Guns don't kill people, Godless Libruls do" theology?
Somewhere in the back of Pagano's pointy li'l haid lies the explanation as to why packing heat in a church is a good thing. Uh, didn't we just see what can happen when someone brings a gun to Sunday morning service. Dr. George Tiller's family just buried him, and his killer, Scott Roeder is being treated by many as some sort of freakin' hero for killing to protect the unborn. And it's OK because it was done in the name of Jesus Christ? Don't even get me started on that lunacy....
I'm not certain that the 2nd Amendment has anything at all to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ, but Pagano seems to see the two as somehow joined at the hip. For God so loved the world that he gave us the AK-47...and the Constitutional right to use it.
If Ken Pagano is a man of God, then I'm the Queen of England. I may not be a Christian, but at after being force-fed Lutheranism as a child, I think I can recognize when someone is following the teachings of Jesus Christ. Ken Pagano is as much about those teachings as I am about do-it-your brain surgery. Why he's not being held up to even greater ridicule is beyond me.
And Jesus wept....
