Students Charged in Ala. Church Fires

They finally caught the nitwits that were burning churches in Alabama. Collage students that say they did it as a joke.

Two of the suspects were identified as Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee DeBusk Jr., both 19-year-old students at Birmingham-Southern College. Matthew Lee Cloyd, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, also was arrested.

They went out to shoot deer, (the last time I checked shooting deer at night was still illegal) and got bored so they set a church on fire. It was so exciting they just couldn't stop and torched nine. The news accounts all mention that they were pranksters from well to do families. They acted in theater at the collage they attended and were looking to a possible acting career. What is getting little or no mention is at least one claimed to be a Satanists. Granted self absorbed collage students are unlikely to actually know anything about Satanism, but an affinity for the concept can't be discounted. A normal person even one addled by collage and beer would not choose churches as the object of their destructive expression.

If they had been burning Synagogues or Mosques and were just regular guys wouldn't they be considered for having committed a hate crime? Maybe they were just lucky that they burned Baptist Churches indiscriminately according to race. Maybe nobody thinks burning a church is such a big deal.