AZ Lawmaker In Charge Of House Prayer Tells Colleagues He’s An Atheist

USA Today says Juan Mendez (D-Tempe) put in a request to have Secular Coalition of Arizona director Serah Blain speak before the house during yesterday’s “prayer time,” but his request was somehow misplaced, so he decided to address the House in her stead.

“Most prayers in this room begin with a request to bow your heads. I would like to ask you not to bow your heads,” Mendez told his fellow legislators at the start of yesterday’s invocation. “I would like to ask that you take a moment to look around the room at all of the men and women here, in this moment, sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people of our state.”

He continued:

This room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration. But this is also a room where, as my Secular Humanist tradition stresses, by the very fact of being human, we have much more in common than we have differences. We share the same spectrum of potential for care, for compassion, for fear, for joy, for love.

Carl Sagan once wrote, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” There is, in the political process, much to bear. In this room, let us cherish and celebrate our shared humanness, our shared capacity for reason and compassion, our shared love for the people of our state, for our Constitution and for our democracy - and let us root our policymaking process in these values that are relevant to all Arizonans regardless of religious belief or nonbelief. In gratitude and in love, in reason and in compassion, let us work together for a better Arizona. Mendez went on to point out several Secular Coalition for Arizona members watching from the House gallery, and said he hoped Arizona’s non-believers would now be able to “feel as welcome and valued here as believers.”

The Phoenix New Times reports that one of the Coalition members in attendance “said she was ‘witnessing history.’”

In related news, the Supreme Court this week announced its plans to review the constitutionality of holding prayer sessions at legislative meetings.

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Alex Jones Is a Tornado Truther Because, Obviously

Yesterday, we explored the wild reality of Tornado Truthers, who believe that massive storms are created by the HAARP antenna farm in Alaska (HAARP is actually a research station to communicate with aliens living underground — only fools think otherwise). Still, the whole affair was missing the input of King Nut himself, Alex Jones. Well, guess what? He’s down.

“Of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on — we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force,” Jones said on The Alex Jones Show yesterday.

Jones elaborated that while he’s not sure that this week’s tornado outbreak was caused by the government, he’s absolutely sure that the government “can create and steer groups of tornadoes” (powers usually reserved not for any branch of the government, but for the X-Men).

Jones said that the smoking gun of government involvement would be if a helicopter or aircraft was spotted “in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things.” He continued, “if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that’s the thing, we don’t know.”

We just don’t know if the tornadoes were caused by small, sentient black helicopters or a variety of atmospheric conditions. We don’t know. WE’LL JUST NEVER KNOW.

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Alex Jones is a conspiracy Poe. You can’t distinguish his actual statements from a parody.