Free the Monks & Free Enterprise

Under Louisiana law, it is a crime for anyone but a licensed funeral director to sell "funeral merchandise," which includes caskets. To sell caskets legally, the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey would have to abandon their calling for one full year to apprentice at a licensed funeral home, learn unnecessary skills and take a funeral industry test. They would also have to convert their monastery into a "funeral establishment" by, among other things, installing equipment for embalming human remains.

Read more: http://www.ij.org/lacaskets

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  Nonprofits & Activism

[whoo689]

First flowers and now caskets and coffins?? God, this licensing shit is madness! There's nothing they won't license. Honestly, why does it matter who's selling fucking coffins? Since when did selling coffins become some huge safety risk or potential hazard?!

[macpduff]

This boils down to government persecution of religion. Monks and nuns have a 2,000 yr history of making and selling things to support themselves. Wines, caskets, jellys, etc.

If Louisiana wins, then other monasteries and nunneries will be forced to stop producing wine and food products. Effectively they will be shut down by the State and special interests. Could be the funeral lobby wants the casket sales and the State wants the sales tax

[theprez98]

IJ wins!

[sgdurtybawls]

That is crazy.. Louisiana your law is outrages. If anyone has ever had to buy a casket for a family member you know that the prices are crazy. When my cousin passed away a year ago his parents got went to the abbey and got a hand crafted casket made by the monks there for nearly nothing and it was a very beautiful casket. Compared to what you would have to pay for if you went some where else.

[mackawack12346]

Fuck Loiusiana, It's a terrible state full of neo nazis and hill billy scum sucking confederates! destroy the south and fuck the corporate big wig hate lizards!

It's a crime in Loiseyanha to sell DInosaur Holocaust to the elderly on a sunday!

Fuck your ears and your mind biatch!

[Brad Lewis]

I think this points more to special interests getting their way through law instead of honest competition by making the entry to business too high, lengthy or difficult. Did you see the Utah lawsuit about the woman they tried to force to go through years of beauty school where they don't teach braiding in order for her to get a license to braid? Special interests make me sick.

[jembeai]

great work on the *WIN*, and thanks for keeping up the fight in our courts!

[flyingbeagles]

EPIC! GO ECONOMIC FREEDOM! DOWN WITH THE MONOPOLIES! *BRANDISHES SWORD*

[BulosIsInnocent]

wow, this is really disturbing. America has free enterprise and anyone should be able to sell whatever they want as long as it has no hazard to human health, and dead people are excluded because you can't hurt them really. They are dead.

[ctnjason]

this has NOTHING to do with religion. NOTHING at all. It is ONLY so funeral homes can charge outrageous amounts of money for caskets. There is NO other purpose at all. If im selling $2500 caskets and these monks start cutting my business, im gonna round up my funeral home buddies, pay off some cronies, and get a law like THIS passed. Get it?? This is true rather its caskets or kids selling lemonade on the street. Keep the government OUT of the free market.

[ctnjason]

whats interesting to me is that in the state of Louisiana, you can be buried in a damn bedsheet. Why on earth cant honest men make simple boxes to bury the dead? I would specifically buy one of these caskets just because i would love to support the little man with no lobby in DC. Who knew there was a "funeral lobby" lol

[cancuks1]

We must consider the well being of the dead. Without these regulations the deceased could become even more dead