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Candidate’s courageous actions

Wednesday evening, Gabriel Rench and his supporters boldly took to the streets of downtown Moscow to defend his unrestricted, God-given and constitutionally-protected right to spread a deadly disease in the middle of a pandemic.

He would like you to know that the jack-booted thugs of the Moscow Police Department cruelly restricted his religious and civil liberties by citing and arresting him.

In doing so, Rench held up a lens to the trials faced by white, male Christians in this country. We are a notoriously powerless group, represented by no more than 44 out of 45 presidents. In the current session, just 78 percent of Congress is white, only 76 percent are male and an all-time-low 88 percent are Christian.

Surely, when the 2021 edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is released, candidate Rench deserves an entire chapter.

In performing the religious act of singing hymns while conducting a crime to claim religious persecution, Mr. Rench has also laid out a helpful strategy for other criminals seeking to circumvent laws they find inconvenient.

The next time I’m pulled over for speeding, I’ll follow candidate Rench’s strategy and simply inform the officer that my fellow-passengers and I are engaged in a high-speed Bible study. Or perhaps instead of collecting tithe, the congregation I worship with could simply rob a bank mid-service this weekend, while quoting scripture.

While I am neither a legal scholar nor theologian, I’m sure that a leading citizen and political candidate like Mr. Rench would not mislead me on this matter.

As you make your way to the ballot box in the coming weeks, I hope that you will remember candidate Rench’s courageous actions. It would be a poor thing if we did not recognize his heroic sacrifice for the benefit of the oppressed.

Andrew Hoehn
Moscow

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