In Jesus name, Ontario Council meeting begins

Mayor Leon

On Monday, about two weeks after allegations surfaced that Ontario Mayor Paul Leon was having an extramarital affair with a city employee, Leon issued a vague apology for “errors in his private life.”

You could try to connect the dots, but why don’t you just let Pastor Larry Enriguez, who delivered the invocation at Tuesday’s meeting.

Enriguez spoke at length about Jesus’ words to a mob prepared to lynch an adultress: “He who is without sin, cast the first stone.”

What surprises me more than the mayor’s alleged behavior and the pastor’s seemingly thinly veiled prayer is that government invocations continue to mention a specific god, in this case Jesus. Praying to anything more than an indecipherable, ambiguous diety was ruled unconstitutional by a Los Angeles Superior Court in 2000, and upheld by higher courts. Back in 2005, I spoke with each city clerk in San Bernardino County about whether they were adhering. About half, including Ontario, discouraged sectarian prayer, half didn’t and a few lacked invocations all together.

The article, common of news from the LANG empire, cannot be found in the paper’s online archives or LexisNexis, but here are the top few paragraphs: