Cop Under Fire

by David Clarke

  She was surprised when the two men, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), sued her. (The Washington state attorney general has also sued Barronelle, and as I am writing this, the Washington Supreme Court is days from oral arguments commencing on the case.) “We are saddened that we were denied service by Arlene’s Flowers after doing business with them and valuing their services for so many years. We respect others’ religious values, but being discriminated against was hurtful and illegal,” they wrote in a joint statement. “This business has broken the law, and should be held accountable. We appreciate the support from people across the globe, and look forward to having this issue resolved.”4

  This case, however, isn’t really about refusing service on the basis of sexual orientation. She’d sold flowers to Rob for years and even helped him find another florist. Rob and his partner got so many offers of flowers that they could’ve done twenty weddings at no cost.

  In spite of this, they’re trying to intimidate and harass Barronelle to use her God-given talents in ways that compromise her Christian beliefs. Interestingly, they sued her in her business capacity and in her personal capacity, which puts her at great risk. The statutes allow the ACLU and the state to collect attorney fees, which will be six to seven figures. In other words, all of her assets are at issue. Because the ACLU and state can create the precedent they want by just suing her business, going after her personally was spiteful and unnecessary. Not only could she lose her business, she could lose everything because she refused to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding that had plenty of flowers from other vendors.

  “I want to believe that a state as diverse as Washington, with our long commitment to personal and religious freedoms, would be as willing to honor my right to make those kinds of choices as it is to honor Rob’s right to make his,” Barronelle said. “That’s not endorsing a negative thing as I’ve been accused of doing. It’s promoting good things: reason, fairness and mutual tolerance. I don’t think that’s too much to ask of a court of law—or from a friend I dearly miss.”

  This case has taken a toll on Barronelle’s life. She’s had to stop doing all weddings during the lawsuit because of the liability exposure. She’s lost what she enjoys most about floral design as well as all of the referrals a florist gets from weddings. Those referrals are extremely helpful to a business and allow florists to serve customers from cradle to grave.

  Beyond that, she’s had death threats, threats to burn down her business, and threats against her computer network. For a while, she had to drive different routes to work, hire computer specialists to create a protective firewall, and install security cameras. When the news of the case broke, her local community was extremely supportive. However, activists from around the nation e-mailed and called her. Paying customers had a hard time getting through to place an order since activists swearing, threatening, and generally harassing her deluged her business with calls.

  It’s hard to believe all of this is directed at a seventy-year-old florist because of her deeply held religious beliefs. It’s even harder to imagine that this is happening in America.

  Baby-Killing Drugs or Business-Killing Boycotts

  In 1944, Ralph Stormans opened his first store at the Grand Central Public Market, the first large supermarket in Olympia, Washington. It quickly grew but was replaced in 1956 by an expanded version called Ralph’s Thriftway. In 1977, the family purchased Bailey Drugs, and the thriving store still offers groceries and medicine to its community.

  But not all medicine. The Stormanses declined to sell abortifacients, or drugs that cause a miscarriage by killing a fertilized egg. When customers request a drug like Plan B, the Stormanses refer them to one of the more than thirty other pharmacies within a five-mile radius. (Convenient for the customers, but very inconvenient for the unborn baby.) The Stormanses’ decision not to sell those drugs didn’t prohibit one person from acquiring the drug of choice.

  “But to anti-Christian bigots, it is intolerable that Christian professionals exist unless they bow the knee to the Baal of the sexual revolution,” First Amendment attorney David French wrote. “So Washington’s governor took action—demanding that the Washington State Board of Pharmacy issue regulations that required pharmacists to issue abortifacients regardless of religious or moral objections.”5

  Notably, the state has never investigated any pharmacy for a failure to stock a drug in the forty-five-year history of the stock rule. Also, ten times as many pharmacies don’t stock this drug because it’s not profitable enough than those that won’t stock it for moral reasons. Though the state does nothing to the pharmacies that don’t stock it for financial reasons, they investigated the Stormanses for ten years straight.

  All over the nation, Christian pharmacists had a choice—to comply with these new regulations or close their doors. This, of course, could have negative repercussions throughout the nation. Some small mom-and-pop pharmacies serve areas that aren’t as packed with pharmacy options as Olympia, Washington. When they close their doors, patients have fewer options and less access to the drugs they need.

  The Ninth Circuit sided with the state, and the sorry Supreme Court declined to hear what French described as the most “plainly vicious anti-Christian cases I’ve ever seen.”6 Thirty-five pharmacy organizations—both local and national—support the Stormanses’ right of conscience. None support the state.

  Like Barronelle, the Stormanses have paid dearly for their stand. The governor, state legislators, and pro-abortion groups have boycotted their business; they’ve had to hire security guards after activists blocked their streets and entrances. Activist groups sent in fake test shoppers who pretended to want to purchase the morning-after pill. With every test shopper’s complaint, the state launched a new investigation, the media picked it up, and the protests began anew.

  The state has said the Stormanses are in “outright defiance” of state law, and board members have testified that they will revoke the pharmacy’s license if a complaint for a failure to stock Plan B is filed.

  The Stormanses rely heavily on the pharmacy for their business because a significant number of shoppers come to the store for their medicine. Not only do they fill prescriptions, but the shoppers frequently buy groceries while waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. Because of this morning-after pill controversy, their business revenue has plummeted 30 percent.

  Your Off-Duty Faith May Cost Your Job!

  Chief Kelvin Cochran had the kind of employment history that would inspire books or a Hallmark movie. Born into deep poverty in the segregated South, Cochran was one of six children. When his alcoholic father left home never to return, his mother was faced with the daunting task of raising her children alone. She took them to church and taught them to love America. They ate mayonnaise sandwiches and—if they wanted dessert—made “sugar water” for a sweet treat (just sugar in tap water). One day, a neighbor’s house caught fire, and Kelvin watched in awe as a big red fire truck arrived to save the day. At church, he was taught that he could do anything he wanted to do in America. Even though the Shreveport Fire Department was completely white, he believed them.

  In 1981, Kelvin achieved his childhood goal of becoming a firefighter. He was only the eighth or ninth black person to be hired at the Shreveport Fire Department. Soon, he was promoted to Shreveport’s fire training officer, then to assistant chief training officer. He was soon a captain in the training academy, appointed assistant chief, and then became the first black fire chief of the Shreveport Fire Department.

  In 2008, Cochran was recruited to become Atlanta’s fire chief. This career trajectory would be enough to make anyone proud. But the following year, President Obama appointed him as the US fire administrator for the United States Fire Administration, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After his stint there, he learned that Atlanta’s department had been unsettled by budget cuts and low morale. In 2010, he happily returned to Atlanta to revitalize the department and faithful
ly serve as fire chief. His hard work paid off. Fire Chief magazine named him “Fire Chief of the Year.” In 2014, Atlanta earned a Public Protection Classification rating of Class 1 from the Insurance Services Office. For the first time in the city’s history, it received this rating because of the “exemplary ability to respond to fires.”7

  Cochran, who is a Christian, sometimes led Bible studies in his off-duty hours, including a study group called Quest for Authentic Manhood. During that study, he noticed what God asked Adam in the Garden of Eden after he and Eve sinned: “Who told you that you were naked?” Cochran believed “naked” could be a metaphor for how many of us live today—“condemned and deprived.” But God didn’t leave us in that state. Instead, he clothed, redeemed, and restored us. Only God can offer us the dignity and redemption that people crave and need.

  He decided to write a book on this topic, but first he asked the city of Atlanta’s ethics officer for advice. Were there any ethical or regulatory problems with a city employee penning a “non-work-related, faith-based book”? He said she responded that it was fine as long as it didn’t deal with the “city government or fire department.”8

  He wrote in the mornings before work and in his limited spare time over the weekends. He self-published the 162-page book in late 2013. Only six of those pages dealt with sex and sexuality, in which he advocated for the traditional Christian perspective on the topic: sex should be enjoyed within the benefit of a male-female marriage. It seems silly to point this out, but perhaps I should considering the strangeness of the times: Cochran’s position echoes every orthodox Protestant denomination in the United States and every Catholic church.

  Over the next year, Cochran handed out his book to people with whom he’d already discussed their Christian faith, to the mayor, to a few members of the Atlanta city council. No one complained about the book until one employee showed the sexuality pages to a gay city council member. The city council member took the book to Atlanta’s human resources commissioner, and things got complicated fast.

  The mayor publicly excoriated Cochran by saying, “I profoundly disagree with and am deeply disturbed by the sentiments expressed in the paperback regarding the LGBT community. I want to be clear that the material in Chief Cochran’s book is not representative of my personal beliefs and is inconsistent with the administration’s work to make Atlanta a more welcoming city for all of her citizens—regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, race, and religious beliefs.” He went on to say that he’d make Cochran complete “sensitivity training.”

  Not one single fire department employee complained of mistreatment or discrimination, yet Cochran was fired. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the irony here. Cochran was fired because of his off-duty religious viewpoint to prove that Atlanta was … welcoming of all viewpoints. National Review summed this up nicely: “The lesson here is clear. If you believe you are safe from the new thought police, you are wrong. Cochran fought discrimination his entire life. Cochran was an Obama appointee in the Department of Homeland Security. Cochran made a concerted effort to include his LGBT employees. Cochran was fired.”9

  But here’s the thing. Sometimes even when you lose, you win. How? By bringing greater attention to the crisis of religious freedom in this country. I’ve been a cop long enough to know that things don’t always go your way. There are bad days on the job, and there are bad days in any political fight. But I also know that only cowards desert the field of battle. Here’s what brave people do: they support the people who fight and lose, they don’t get cocky or arrogant when they win, and they just keep fighting. The people who’ve declared war on God don’t stop. Why should people of faith?

  12

  Homeland Security Equals Personal Security

  SAMY MOHAMED HAMZEH worked at Round Kickboxing Gym in downtown Milwaukee, where he led classes. According to his students, he was a pretty nice guy, if not very chatty. “He was always encouraging and always pushing us to go harder,” one client said. Little did the kickboxing students know their trainer had more in store for Milwaukee residents than toning their legs.

  After losing his kickboxing job—his boss said he was too intense—Hamzeh and two friends went to a historic building on North Van Buren Street in Milwaukee. Originally built in 1889 as a Romanesque Revival church, it has been a Masonic Temple since 1912 and a popular gathering place for conferences, weddings, parties, and meetings. According to the FBI, Hamzeh and his friends hoped to pull off a terror-type attack that would make headlines across the globe, so they took a tour to scout their target. They planned to cover their heads and enter the building where they’d first come in contact with the receptionist. “If she was alone, it is okay, if there were two of them, shoot both of them,” Hamzeh instructed his friends, and “do not let the blood show, shot [sic] her from the bottom, two or three shots in her stomach and let her sit on the chair and push her to the front, as if she is sleeping.”1

  After shooting the secretary, they planned on locking the event-goers inside the building. “One of us will stay at the door at the entrance and lock the door down, he will be at the main door down, two will get to the lift (elevator) up, they will enter the room, and spray everyone in the room,” he said. “The one who is standing downstairs will spray anyone he finds.”

  They wanted “to annihilate everyone … when we go into a room, we will be killing everyone, that’s it, this is our duty.” But he conceded he might not be able to kill everyone. “Thirty is excellent. If I got out, after killing thirty people, I will be happy 100 percent … because these 30 will terrify the world.” He warned them not to overreact after the shootings occurred. “We leave, as if there is nothing, no running, no panic, just regular walking.”

  Thankfully, Hamzeh was just as idiotic as he was evil. Before launching the attack, he needed three automatic weapons with silencers. Posing as gun sellers, undercover FBI agents showed Hamzeh two automatic weapons and a silencer that he accepted. Once the weapons were in his car, they arrested him.

  Think about that. The FBI sold this man guns and let him drive off. What if he started a high-speed chase? What if he turned his brand spanking new guns on the agents?

  Good thing he didn’t ask for a bomb!

  So why did the FBI agents go as far as selling these potential terrorists guns? It’s not because they like to risk their lives. Rather, they have to meet the burden of proof required by the court system. Even in the post-9/11 world, the FBI operates under a law-enforcement model that seeks probable cause to arrest, a very high standard often not achievable until after an attack occurs. The agency needs enough evidence that the charge will stand up in a court of law. However, the mission of a true intelligence agency is to disrupt, prevent, and detect terror attacks before they occur. An arrest is not necessarily the goal. Informing decision makers in enough time to act is the goal.

  Only when the FBI agents moved in did this criminal, this wannabe terrorist, realize his two friends were informants secretly recording their Arabic conversations for the government. He was not charged with terror-related charges under the police model. Instead he was charged only with possessing a machine gun and a silencer. So after all that work, this goof was charged with a lesser crime, even though he was trying to terrorize Milwaukee and America.

  Here’s where we get it wrong. These people, whether part of an international organization or radicalized American citizens, are not common criminals. They’re enemy combatants.

  As soon as the FBI realized this guy was planning an attack, a prevention mind-set demands that the would-be-terrorist should be picked up and held indefinitely. Under a wartime model, we would have had enough to snatch this guy, charge him with treason, and hold him as an enemy combatant. But what we ended up with here is a less-than-satisfying result. It’s time for our agencies to realize that we are at war with ISIS and need to change from a law-enforcement model to a wartime model.

  As a law-enforcement leader who is on the front lines dealing with domestic terr
orism and attacks on our population, I want to relay one crucial bit of intelligence: we are not structured properly and thus are unable to defend the homeland adequately until our domestic intelligence apparatus changes drastically.

  Yes, this Milwaukee attack was thwarted, but the absence of an attack does not mean other threats have disappeared. FBI Director James Comey stated in 2015 that his “caseload of ISIS suspects has exploded to more than 900 in all 50 states.”2 Let that sink in. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, speaking at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC, two days before the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, said, “If you asked me this on the fifth or sixth anniversary of 9/11, I’d say our job of security had somewhat improved … but since President Obama and Hillary Clinton [have been in power]—and I don’t mean to be political—our national security has deteriorated. Our country is in more danger today than on 9/11.”3

  For the first time since the world wars, local authorities like me have to think about global issues that are invading our communities. We play an important role in protecting the American people from threats that can affect the economic, physical, and psychological well-being of the country.

  Before the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States didn’t even have an executive department with a first priority of defending America from domestic attack. When the 9/11 Commission studied the worst terrorist attack in world history, it assessed the conditions, the agencies, the environment, and the series of events that may have led to the tragedy. One finding from the commission was that a reorganization of the intelligence community was needed.

  That was the wrong conclusion.

  Congress created an entire new federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to deal with protecting the borders, securing transportation, immigration, Customs Service, critical infrastructure, and organizing assistance to critical incidents. The idea was to unify homeland security efforts and reject the former patchwork approach. Fusions Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces were created at the state and local levels to improve collection, analysis, reporting and sharing of information among local law enforcement agencies, the FBI, and the DHS. This relationship coordinated by DHS would make state and local law enforcement a new player in counterterrorism investigations. Efficiency was the goal. Confusion was the result.