The effort to bring federal charges has been met with resistance by some career prosecutors who argue the crime doesn’t appear to fall under any federal statutes.
Three months after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Justice Department is weighing how to bring federal charges against the shooter, including under a novel legal theory that it was an anti-Christian hate crime, according to three people familiar with the investigation.
The suspect, Tyler Robinson, is already facing multiple state charges, including an aggravated murder count, and Utah prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty. Robinson’s partner is trans, and authorities have produced text messages from the suspect to his partner saying he was motivated to kill Kirk because he had “enough of his hatred.”
It’s not uncommon for defendants to face both state and federal charges, including for drug-related crimes and domestic terrorist attacks, among other offenses. But the effort to bring federal charges in the Kirk case has been met with resistance by some career prosecutors who have argued that the crime doesn’t appear to fall under any federal statutes, the three people said.
A lot of Christians don’t think Mormons are Christian. They are of course, but many don’t think so.
Someone told me the other day that Catholics weren’t Christians. I’m like… They are the og Christians.
The person refused to believe me.
That’d more likely be the Copts.
Were they Baptists? I know plenty of Protestants, most especially Baptists, that will definitely be quite vocal about their belief that Catholics are not “real” xtians.
Why yes. They were.
You gotta go to the Seventh Day Adventists, imo, to get some reeeeaaallll hardcore Catholic hate, good lord do they hate Catholics.
(This message brought to you by Corn Flakes: Stop masterbating)
Oh yeah you hear the wildest shit from protestants growing up catholic
I grew up with that nonsense. Many evangelical and charismatic Christians think that Catholics aren’t true Christians. My “non denominational” high school encouraged students to visit other churches, as long as it wasn’t Catholic, Anglican, Mormon or Jehovah’s witnesses. I guess they had a direct line to God Almighty in the principles office.
Mormons not believing in the Trinity is a pretty solid argument that, at the very least, they’re not Christians in the way nearly all other Christians are Christians.
That puts them in the same bucket as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Unitarians, Iglesia ni Cristo, and Christadelphians.
… thats why most Christians don’t think Mormons are really Christians, that they are instead more like heretics.
Not that I personally have a dog in this fight between the finer points of varying forms of mass shared delusions based on a corpus of hundreds of different texts that have been edited and translated and added to and subtracted from, tens or hundreds of thousands of times, over approximately 2500 years…
… but the idea of the Trinity is a pretty big deal, going back through the entire history of Christianity.
Whole lots of nontrinitarians have been called, and killed for being heretics by whole lots of trinitarians, for… what, roughly… 1750 years?
Yeah that’s a pretty solid historical precedent.
Following a fraudster who wrote his own scriptures in the 18th century is a fairly extreme deviation from the mainstream. I mean, OK, William Blake wrote his own scriptures too, almost a century before that, but he was self-aware and wasn’t a con artist who claimed he could find gold using a magic stone in a hat.
Right. And we’re talking about Christian on Christian crime. Take a parallel, make it about race, then tell the same story.
It’s an interesting thing to do when discrimination comes into play… Swap out gender or race or LGBTQ and see what the parallel feels like to your gut.
How is it an interesting thing to do?
Hateful bigotry is bad, is that your point?
… Religion is the only one of those things that, by definition, constitutes a worldview that… very often serves as a generator of violent bigotry, in and of itself.
‘Race’, gender, sexual orientation, those things can lead to the actual enactment of violent bigotry against outgroup members… but they have to be paired with an accompanying worldview and/or material economic situation of disparity for that to arise.
Religion is the only one of those that doesn’t need any extra components for its adherents, its members, to enact violent bigotry against outgroup members.
I’m not justifying violent bigotry.
I’m explaining what causes it:
So long as there are idiotic squabbles over nonsensical and contradictory and logically incoherent worldviews, that are deeply held with great conviction, there will be violent bigotry.
Further, ‘race’ itself is an ultimately incoherent construct, it is a worldview, one that is just so ingrained into so many that we don’t even realize this.
People groups exist, ethnolinguistic groups exist, heritages of haplogroups exist… ‘race’ doesn’t, ‘race’ is a way of thinking, promulgated by some societies, that just clumsily and incoherently defines people into ingroup and outgroup members, and then oppresses the outgroup members so hard that they are functionally forced to adopt it as a practical, lived identity.
Imagine trying to do the ‘one drop rule’ with the US conception of ‘white people’.
Oh, sure, you’re uh I dunno, Norweigan, eh? Well, there’s actually a German, and even a Spaniard, somewhere in your set of great great grandparents, so clearly, you’re some kind of white mochalatto, not really pure white, thus impure.
… Absolute nonsense.
Gender and sexual orientation?
These are unchangeable, naturally arising aspects of people, that some other people with some worldviews may choose to hate, or not.
Religion?
Very often the worldview that chooses to hate.
‘Race’?
Yeah, more complicated, more like a clumsy worldview that is enforced onto others untill they adopt it or have no choice but to adopt it… by certain other kinds of worldviews, which are very often religions.
That’s a belief that some people have. But gender isn’t as binary as you might think. And more importantly, how gender is manifested is a social construct, and it is, in some uncommon chases, changeable. And I know a number of people whose sexual orientation has changed in the course of their lives, or who could be said to have no fixed sexual orientation at all.
And views on race are a complete dog’s breakfast, full of clinal attributes that are forced into bullshit binary categories that miserably fail to reflect the incredible multidimensional spectrum of human phenotypes and cultures.
Mormons call everyone else, including other xtians, “Gentiles”.
It’s amusing how all this works, since LDS members tend to think that they form the real xtianity. Hey, it’s not really any more arrogant than the Jewish heresy called xtianity (maybe more appropriately called Paulianity) that now seems to turn around and claim that the OG religion got so many things wrong, but the heretical sect has it right. But, oh yeah, they’ll use the old text and claim that is what gives the new heretical sect and its writing its legitimacy, LOL.
Hey, if it’s all just made up, who’s to say? Remember: the Nicean Creed was voted on, nearly 300 years after the character of Jesus is said to have died.
There are numerous religions that started as revitalization movements claiming that the old-time religion had been corrupted by accumulated human error and self-interest. Islam’s a great example of that: it claims to be the same pure religion practiced by Abraham and Jesus. And there are some spin-offs of Islam that believe that, whenever things get too far off track, Allah sends another prophet to do a reboot (though mainstream Islam believes that Muhammad was the last prophet until Judgement Day).
Heresy plus power equals orthdoxy.
Wait, Mormons appropriated the term Gentiles, from… Jews?
That’s incredible.
I’ll be frank: Mormonism is based on the fan fiction of an easily provable, known at the time to be a serial con artist and fraudster.
… Who then went on to lead a cult of what we would now call domestic terrorists.
He specifically tried to destroy any press outlets that were critical of him.
Like, with violent armed force.
Every element of the origin story of Mormonism collapses under any serious scrutiny from anyone who isn’t a Mormon, its laughable.
He also just appropriated a bunch of Masonic poses and hand signs and such, like, verbatim, without modification in a good deal of cases, and invented rituals to go make use of them.
The uh, what is it, the papyrus he picked up off of a travelling antiquities merchant, that he then declared was “The Book of Abraham”?
He was just bullshitting around his total inability to read actual hieroglyphs… the knowledge deriving from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was quite rare at the time, so he felt comfortable making up a nonsense ‘translation’.
Then, some decades later, actual Egyptologists get around to reading the original text and the “translation” and uh… welp, long story short, its a copy of a fairly common Egyptian funerary rites text, instructions on how to breathe properly when in the underworld. Has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham, bears no relationship to Smith’s fabricated translated story.
Mormonism is literally a fraud.
But!
That hasn’t stopped other cults and religions from… making it big time.