Church Of Holy Bleach Drinking Invokes First Amendment Right To Sell Bleach To Cure COVID-19 – Wonkette
Back in April, a federal judge ordered the Genesis II Church to stop selling its "Miracle Mineral Solution" as a cure for COVID-19 a step in the right direction, given that "MMS" is a powerful bleach and can kill you or cause some pretty severe health problems if you take it.
While MMS has been around for a long while, it has experienced a recent surge in popularity first by being promoted by Alan Keyes, well ahead of the pandemic, and subsequently after being promoted as a COVID-19 cure by QAnon proponents, and bolstered by Trump suggesting that ingesting disinfectants might be a good way to cure it. Suffice it to say, sellers of this crap were pretty jazzed about the increase in demand, and severely disappointed when they were cut off.
Thus, last week, the Genesis II Church responded to the injunction by filing a motion to reconsider the temporary restraining order preventing them from selling or promoting MMS as a cure for COVID-19:
They are also very mad at the FDA for declaring their "sacrament" to be a drug, insisting that this, too, is a violation of their First Amendment rights.
(Typos theirs.) Frankly, they're lucky its being called a drug at all, and not just a poison. There are, after all, other instances in which substances taken by people for religious reasons are classified as a drug when taken for non-religious reasons. Like peyote.
In a no-less-insane letter sent directly to Judge Kathleen Williams and prosecutors Matthew Feeley and Ross Goldstein, "Head Bishop" Mark S. Grenon went on and on about how they have to drink and sell bleach because it is what God wants them to do:
We have the 'right to choose' whatever we decide to put in our temples, our bodies, without any government consent needed. You seem to NOT understand us. You need to 'understand' us and respect our God given rights. You US attorneys and judge seem to forget your oath to the US Constitution to which we have reminded you over and over again. The people of the United States and the world are on our side because they understand freedom of choice that God has given us all.
How can we not help people when we see thousands being helped 'outside of the medical industry' with our Church Sacraments that are healing many. Try to tell the following people that they should not have taken our Church Sacraments to cleanse their temples.
This is followed up with several Not Safe For Life pictures of various diseases like gangrene, skin cancer and probably the most severe eczema on earth before and after supposedly being cured by MMS. And then a whole bunch of Bible verses about healing and whatnot.
The thing is though, the website for the Genesis II Church repeatedly and explicitly refers to it being a "non-religious church":
It only became a church in 2010, conveniently, after a bunch of negative publicity following the horrific death of Sylvia Fink in 2009 after she took MMS to stave off malaria. Prior to that it was just Grenon and his sons, Jim Humble (the "creator" of MMS and also a former Scientologist who claims to be an alien sent to earth with the space navy to heal our world), and a bunch of other snake-oil salespeople trying to sell bleach to people as a cure for literally everything in the world.
As a rule, drinking bleach is a poor idea but purveyors of MMS claim that it can cure literally any physical issue on earth: cancer, autism, gangrene, MRSA, Lyme disease, meningitis, spider bites, HIV, various autoimmune diseases, eczema, hepatitis, acne, Parkinson's and malaria.
The malaria is a big one. Proponents of MMS, for years, were very big on going to Uganda and giving people MMS to "cure" their "malaria," and then putting out videos claiming to have achieved incredible results. However, this was done by doing a not-very-accurate test before the MMS which often gave false positives and then more accurate tests after giving people (adults, children and babies) the MMS.
In reality, MMS does not cure any of these things and in fact causes nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, kidney failure, ruptures of internal organs and more fun things like that. Of course, the claim those selling it make is that those side effects are how you know it's working.
The Genesis II Church is not the only "religious" group claiming that it is their First Amendment right to sell people poison as a cure for COVID-19. Convicted felon Jim Bakker is doing the same thing. Historically, however, it has not been the case that churches are allowed to do illegal shit or put people's lives in danger just because it is their religion to do so. Thus Waco and Warren Jeffs and that couple who went to prison for faith-healing their two kids to death.
[CourtListener / CourtListener]
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Church Of Holy Bleach Drinking Invokes First Amendment Right To Sell Bleach To Cure COVID-19 - Wonkette
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