It Gets Worse: A Family Is Kicked Out Of A Church While Black

In what is surely a sign that having a racist in the White House has created an environment of extreme racism and intolerance in this country, we have been witness to an eight-year-old black girl who had the police called on her because she was ::: gasp::: selling water; we saw three black teenagers kicked out of a community pool by a white woman because they, ahem, “didn’t belong.” We watched a white woman call police on a black family because they were having a barbecue and just last week a young black boy had police called on him because he accidentally mowed the grass on someone else’s lawn and a woman who was harassed by a white man because he didn’t believe she had a right to be at a community pool.

Oh, and then yesterday I saw a video of a man, a drunken white man, shrieking at a woman because she was wearing a t-shirt that read: Puerto Rico.

Seriously. This is America under _____, and it’s only gonna get worse until we do something about it … on election day.

But, will it get worse than this?

At St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, “Pastor"—and it deserves to be placed in quotes—Michael Briese became so infuriated during the funeral of Agnes Hicks, a black woman, that he kicked the entire funeral party, and the deceased, out of the church.

Apparently, an attendee accidentally knocked over the church’s “sacred golden cup” and Briese lost it:

“There will be no funeral, no repast, everyone get the hell out of my church.”

My church. Briese then ordered the family to remove the body of Agnes Hicks from the church, where she’d requested to be laid to rest because she’d been baptized there half a century earlier.

Shanice Chisely, the daughter of Agnes Hickes:

“[Briese] disrespected our family, he disrespected my mother. He called my mother ‘a thing.’ He said, ‘get this thing out of my church! Everyone get the hell out of my church!’ It was very sad. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

But, of course, it got worse, because then “Pastor” Briese called the police on the family because, you know, black. When police arrived, however, they determined, as would anyone with a brain and without the racism gene, that the family had done nothing wrong and escorted them to a funeral home in a different county, where another pastor finished the service.

When the story broke, the Archdiocese of Washington issued an apology to the family:

“What occurred at St. Mary’s Parish this morning does not reflect the Catholic Church’s fundamental calling to respect and uplift the God-given dignity of every person nor does that incident represent the pastoral approach the priests of the Archdiocese of Washington commit to undertake every day in their ministry.”

But what will they do? They claimed to take “the matter seriously,” and claimed that the incident was “still under review” but this is a church that turns a blind eye to priests raping children, so I’m sure this is nothing, and nothing will be done.

In the Age of _____, this is just business as usual. This is a country where, when you feel uncomfortable because someone is speaking Spanish near you, when you are worried because two black men are sitting in Starbucks, when you are scared because a black woman is sleeping in her dorm’s common room, you use the police to make you feel better … about being a racist, close-minded, intolerant, bigoted fuck-monkey.

WokeSloth