Recently, a television was installed in my local post office, presumably to keep patrons waiting in line from getting bored or talking to one another. It's fairly innocuous, usually tuned to Regis and Whatshername or one of the soaps. Easy to ignore.
Today, however, I found the thing tuned to the 700 Club, on which perennial disaster-predictor Pat Robertson was interviewing some guy named Mike Evans, who was yammering about his book which describes how Jimmy 'Godfather of World Chaos' Carter purposefully brought down the Shah of Iran and created the Taliban and al Qaeda. Zomazing world view.
Now, I get enough nutcase broadcasting in the doctors' offices and banks where they insist upon running FAKES News on their yammerboxes. It is the prerogative of those businesses to choose what they wish to play in their establishments.
However, the United States Postal Service is something run by my government, with my bucks, and the blathering of CBN in a government facility ain't, um, kosher.
I got to the front of the line, got my stamps and told my postal pal, "You've got to change that station."
She looked up at the TV, to which she had been paying no attention, and asked what was wrong.
"This is a government building. The establishment clause of the first amendment to the Constitution prohibits religious propaganda from being endorsed by this facility."
"Ah," she said, "Yeah, that comes on a couple of different stations."
"Well, it's got to go off now."
She said she'd change the channel. I thanked her and went to leave. The guy behind me in line came up to the counter and said, "Well, I don't mind it."
I turned to him and said, "It doesn't matter whether or not you mind it. It's against the law," gave my postal pal a little eyeball and left.
I like my postal pals and, though most of them are believers (crosses, etc. tell the tale), I will not have my government establishing a religion. If I find the yammerbox tuned to religious programming again, I'm calling the postmaster downtown to report it.