The March 3 Fresno County Board of Supervisors (BOS) meeting opened with a typically zealous invocation, delivered by Pastor D.J. Criner of Fresno’s Saint Rest Baptist Church. Criner maximized appeals to “father” and “father god” (“Father, we are here, father god; father, give them [the supes] wise counsel, father god…”) and fervently emphasized “Jesus” (“I pray they hear you, in the mighty name of Jesus…in your darling son Jesus’ name, I pray”).
Christian evangelical or fundamentalist prayers, with few exceptions, open every Board meeting, all featuring repeated appeals to a higher paternal authority, making our merely human supervisors not only implicitly subordinate to divine guidance but also its recipients.
The meeting was short (about an hour and 10 minutes) and relatively unremarkable: no temperamental outbursts from Supervisor Buddy Mendes (District 4), no declarations that trees cause air pollution from Supervisor Nathan Magsig (District 5) and no pre-rehearsed soapbox diatribes from Chair Garry Bredefeld (District 2), other than his brief declaration of what appeared to be County support for the war in Iran…