We don't need no stinkin' permits!

Quick, off the top of your head: if a government employee showed up at your house and told you that you needed a license to exercise your First Amendment rights, what would you say?

More specifically, if a government official arrived at your doorstep while you were practicing your religion and told you that you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to be allowed to do it or you would be arrested. What would you say then?

If you're still stupefied, welcome to the life of Pastor David Jones of San Diego, as well as his wife's. Apparently back in April, on Good Friday, the couple had been reading their Bibles in the house with several other people, when a San Diego County employee paid them a visit and told them that they couldn't hold a Bible study without purchasing a permit.

A few days later, the couple received a written warning that cited "unlawful use of land," ordering them to either "stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit," the couple's attorney Dean Broyles told San Diego news station 10News.

Talk about a case of the Twilight Zone coming to a neighborhood near you. For those of you who never got the pleasure of viewing the classic TV show, it contained an episode titled "Obsolete Man," in which religion was strictly controlled/banned by the state. Granted, they killed Burgess Meredith, but having to pay thousands of dollars to practice your religion in your home is close enough to make the comparison.

I'm almost stunned, but then again, what are we to expect nowadays? My biggest qualm outside of the flagrant disregard for the most basic of civil liberties in this scenario, is the fact that it happened in San Diego, which is right on the border with Mexico, Tijuana to be exact, one of the worst cities pertaining to drug violence.

Don't the government employees there have something better to do than to harass American citizens in the privacy of their own homes, like making sure that all Hell doesn't break loose on the border? It's like we have the highest source of loons running the most precarious of institutions. I'm running out of ways to describe the absurdity of this whole travesty. Every morning I wake up thinking I've seen it all, and yet, lo and behold, I'm proven wrong.

Memo to San Diego County employees: We the People of the United States, whether you like it or not, have certain rights given to us that you can't touch. One of them is the right to worship God, or not worship God, in our homes. It is enclosed in a nice little document called the Bill of Rights, and it essentially says, in a nutshell, that we don't need no stinkin' permit to open up our Bibles or fold our hands together and close our eyes.

So sorry, but there are things you have no say over, and this is one of them.