Posted on 03/01/2018 12:17:33 PM PST by nickcarraway
A Pennsylvania school district will be moving its elementary students for the day on Wednesday due to a nearby church’s decision to bless couples carrying AR-15 rifles.
The Wallenpaupack Area School District will move students out of Wallenpaupack South Elementary School in Newfoundland due to its proximity to the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary church, where couples will be blessed alongside their semi-automatic rifles.
The district in the Poconos sent letters to parents on Friday notifying them that students would attend class at another elementary school further from the church on Wednesday. Students who miss school that day will be marked as excused. The move will impact about 260 students.
Both the Pennsylvania State Police and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office will have a presence at the school to protect the maintenance and support staff remaining behind, assistant superintendent Keith Gunuskey said. An extra school resource officer will also be deployed at the school. No other schools in the district, which spans parts of Wayne and Pike counties, are moving students.
Gunuskey said parents were rattled by the news of the gathering, particularly since three years ago the district was forced to shutter classrooms during the manhunt for Eric Frein, who gunned down two state troopers outside their Pike County barracks in 2014, killing 38-year-old Corporal Bryon K. Dickson.
“It has definitely had put some parents on edge,” Gunuskey said of the church’s ceremony. “For us, there are no templates to follow, so it does cause some anxiousness within the community, which is understandable.”
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
“...the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary church, where couples will be blessed alongside their semi-automatic rifles.”
...but that is just WEIRD!!!!
Blessing a person - yeah, that’s fine, I’ve seen it done ALL the time.
Blessing an inanimate object, one with no volition of its own and no soul - no, that’s akin to idol worship for me.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
The school district seems tad insane, uneducated and paranoid.
I don’t know of any religion that would qualify this as observant.
I agree; blessing the guns is a bit off.
Have they not considered that some of those children’s’ parents are the ones in the church?.............
I own a 2nd home in this school district, great my taxes get to pay for this nuttery.
I didn’t even know Pennsylvania had a border with Newfoundland...
;-)
It’s the Moonies, I think.
Ooooh, black rifle!
Boogety boogety!
CC
Yes, they are Moonies. I’d be more concerned if parents or faculty members were attending the service.
Moonies is the craziest peoples.
“Blessing an inanimate object, one with no volition of its own and no soul - no, that’s akin to idol worship for me.”
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” Matthew 26:26
So you think Jesus was an idol worshiper?
Oh. It’s the Quaker State, full of foreigners for a couple of hundred years.
At least it’s not snakes!
Typical liberal stupid thinking. People in a church are NO THREAT! I don’t expect the school authorities to understand that. They don’t understand that the threat is from people whose “value system” allows them to shoot up innocents. People who got that way thanks to SCHOOLS systematically destroying kids’ values.
It’s not about a piece of metal. It’s about the freely chosen acts of the will of humans with a piece of metal.
A couple of evenings a week a blue light would be illuminated on the front porch and folks would make their way down from the hills towards the church. Anywhere between two and four pick-up trucks would arrive early carrying "snake boxes", and in good weather the congregation would usually hang around socializing outside for a little while as they arrived. At the appointed time they would all file in to the church to have their meeting and do whatever it is they do. They handled primarily timber-rattlers which are the most dangerous poisonous snake indigenous to Virginia.
I thought about going in a few times but I never built up the nerve to attend one of their services. They few of them that I ever spoke to were certainly nice enough, and do not think they would have made me feel unwelcome, but on the other hand no one invited me, and I know I would have felt out of place. Several of the congregation members either owned or worked at small businesses in the valley (feed store, general store, gas station, etc.), and they were plenty nice to do business with. Most of the congregation populated the hills that surrounded that valley, though, and they were rarely seen except when the blue light was on.
Thank you.
Obviously some education is needed right here on Free Republic, and you’ve provided it.
I once lived near a snake-handling church in southwestern Virginia. It was in a small valley, and their church building was a simple rectangular cinder-block structure with a wooden porch, painted white.
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They were probably Pentecostals. They snake handle and speak in tongues also. Have a large congregation in the South.
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