This is not from The Onion – The Hon. Ernie Chambers, a State Senator in the Nebraska legislature, sued God last week - knowing that many of you are lazy and will not click on the link, I am going to quote liberally because it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read (emphasis all mine):
Chambers lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Douglas County Court, seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.
The lawsuit admits God goes by all sorts of alias, names, titles and designations and it also recognizes the fact that the defendant is omnipresent.
In the lawsuit, Chambers said he’s tried to contact God numerous times.
“Plaintiff, despite reasonable efforts to effectuate personal service upon defendant ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ has been unable to do so,’” Chambers said.
[snip]
The lawsuit accuses God “of making and continuing to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons, including constituents of Plaintiff who Plaintiff has the duty to represent.” It says God has caused “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like.”
The suit also says God has caused “calamitous catastrophes resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction.”
Chambers also says God “has manifested neither compassion nor remorse, proclaiming that defendant will laugh” when calamity comes.Chambers asks for the court to grant him a summary judgment. He said as an alternative, he wants the judge to set a date for a hearing as expeditiously as possible and enter a permanent injunction enjoining God from engaging in the types of deleterious actions and the making of terroristic threats described in the lawsuit.
Senator Chambers has obviously done his homework, learning from the precendent set by Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff, 54 F.R.D. 282 (1971), wherein Mayo claimed that the Devil and his minions had deprived him on his Constitutional Rights by deliberately placing “obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff’s downfall.”
Mayo’s lawsuit was ultimately (and unfortunately) dismissed because Mayo did not provide instructions on how to serve process to Satan. Chambers deals with the whole “serving process to a diety” issue gracefully:
The suit also requests that the court, given the peculiar circumstances of this case, waive personal service. It said that being omniscient, the plaintiff assumes God will have actual knowledge of the action.
Chambers, known as ”the angriest Black man in Nebraska,” filed the suit to make a point about frivolous lawsuits.
Frivolous? This is the trial of the century. Senator Chambers is my hero.
Wow. Wow. Wow. This is better than art.
Jamie, I see you had to rush back to work so you could comment on jhk??? Wussupwitdat?
This is awesome, by the way. If the court comes to the conclusion that it’s not evident that these acts were caused by God, insurance companies could run into some real problems with those “Acts of God” clauses.