Anti-Religious Snow?

A recent Wall Street Journal article chronicles the court battle taking place in Arizona over religion and snow. It seems that the Arizona Snowbowl pitched a plan five years ago to make man-made snow by using treated wastewater from the nearby city of Flagstaff. (Annual snowfalls have dropped due to the ongoing drought in Arizona.)

But in March, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals killed the scheme --- based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Did you get that?

It seems that the mountaintops are sacred to the Navajo and twelve (12) other tribes, even though the land is not part of their reservations (they don’t own it and neither does any government). The tribes regard the mountains as “living deities” that would be offended by the man-made snowmaking, especially if it used treated wastewater. The tribes further contended that the snow melt would contaminate plans and spring water used in religious ceremonies. The court compared the snow from treated wastewater on the mountains to requiring Christians to use reclaimed water for baptisms.

Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligence life down here! Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? I hate to break it to the Indians, but most of the Christians I know do their baptisms with tap water or water in common swimming pools. There is nothing sacred about the water Christians use for baptisms. But moreover, we will allow private landowners to have their rights trampled by the warped religious views of a minority people that are not involved?

Where do the Indians get their water now? Do they not get the fact that water is millions of years old and has already been recycled or reclaimed by Mother Nature? Pardon me if I get a little sarcastic. But if we let them build a casino by the ski resort, do you suppose it would have made any difference?

I’m so sorry that the Indians were treated poorly generations ago. But we are all here now and we all need to live together. We do that by treating each other reasonably and rationally. Our courts have bent over backwards to accommodate the Indians here. I think they have now crossed the line of what’s reasonable. The Indians are welcome to get their holy water somewhere else. If the mountains are so sacred, why don’t they take the casino profits and purchase the mountain lands? I’m sure the struggling ski resorts would love to be bought out with that casino money.

Mind you, I don’t have anything against Indians. But I do have something against stupidity. We need to quit catering to the left-wing minorities and start doing what makes sense in this country. God help us to do that, and soon.