Ministers: Did One of Your Flock Commit a Hate Crime? Hand over your uniform.

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When an individual is convicted of a hate crime in most civilized countries, they face some combination of criminal and civil justice. 

Often, those pickup drivers and gun owners and just-plain-malevolent men claim that they were acting out of Christian faith. 

I'd like to adjust the mass of hate crime laws in one small but important way.  It wasn't "god" or "the good book" (that's a laugh--it's a crappy book) that enabled these murderers. It was you, their local priest or minister or shaman or fraudster.  You were careless, and now the responsibility lands in your vestibule. It's the law.

So, if one of your religious tribe is convicted, that's it for you.  You lose your $199 license.  You can't ever run a congregation again.  The crime?  Let's call it spiritual negligence. It's a felony.

Does that make you sweat?  Why? Is it the idea that you have to be responsible for the wellbeing of any one who shows up at your church and puts dollars in the collection plate? That you'd have to work way harder than you currently do to actually monitor the wellbeing of your tiny parish?  That you'd have to think twice before getting all up in people's faces about how you alone understand what the big guy has to say on ethics and kindness and how to behave in the world?

News flash, dude: that was your job already, and if one of your flock kills some one from some one else's flock with their F150, it proves you're incompetent.  

It's much harder to clean spiritual house at the top levels in religious states like the United States, Saudi Arabia, or Israel.  As one current example, the Pope has declared sympathy for the 215 families of the dead children found in Kamloops.  Clearly, the pope guy isn't going to lose his job over this miscarriage of spiritual leadership. Nor is any one else.  But at the local congregation level, get out the brooms and the mops and the industrial sanitizer.

You've committed professional malpractice.

In every other profession, malpractice is immediately actionable.  Join the club.  Take up a new line of work. Pay the fines. Go to jail if that will help protect society from your dangerous "teaching". And, yes, since you're not quite as good at this as you claim: deeply contemplate the nature of your sin.

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