Free Republic

CLINTON — The peace activists — a hospice nurse, a Catholic priest and a minister — said they were following a higher law to protest a crime against humanity: the making of nuclear weapons. The judge said the laws he took an oath to uphold bound him. “I’m obligated to follow the law and treat you like any other defendants,’’ Anderson County Criminal Court Judge Don Elledge told the activists. With that, Elledge today threw the book at Father Tom Lumpkin, Rev. Erick Johnson and nurse Pam Beziat, meting out the maximum 30-day jail sentence for obstructing a roadway. They...

OAK RIDGE - Eight peace activists were arrested Saturday after they refused to leave the entrance to the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. They were demonstrating in remembrance of the civilians killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II and protesting the continued production of nuclear bombs. Y-12 enriched the uranium used in the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the Oak Ridge plant now manufactures replacement parts for the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons. About 275 people participated in a Saturday rally at Oak Ridge's Bissell Park and a march to Y-12, where protesters chanted, pinned paper...