The worker on that cherry-picker right there isn't putting "In God We Trust" in two-foot tall gold letters above a church. Oh, no. That's above the entrance of the Putnam County Courthouse in Cookeville, Tennessee. In fact, the phrase now stands mightily above all four entrances to the courthouse. The effort was funded through donations, and the words went up in November 2012.
Now, to be clear, the motto itself, "In God We Trust," is something that is part of American history, and, for nearly 60 years, it's been the official motto of the United States. So this is not a comment on the appropriateness of the words being on a courthouse, although you'd think that a god you trusted so goddamn much would reduce the amount of methamphetamine production and usage in Putnam County.
Still and all, it leaves a bad taste in the Rude Pundit's mouth that the whole effort was spearheaded by the pastor of the Colonial View Baptist Church in Cookeville. And maybe if they had put it on just one side with, perhaps, "Liberty and Justice For All" or some such nicely patriotic lie over another entrance, it wouldn't seem just so needy and clingy, like God's puppy or his jealous boyfriend.
Apparently, though, the god worshiped in Middle Tennessee has such an inferiority complex that those big fuckin' letters need to be seen no matter what side of the building the invisible sky wizard happens to be on. The Rude Pundit imagines a pissy deity floating over to the back door of the halls of justice, looking up, and nodding with satisfaction. "That's me they're talkin' about," he'd say to passerby. And he'd let Cookeville survive for another day.
And still do nothing about the meth and the poverty and the ignorance and...
