What part of "graven image" don't they understand?

It is appalling that this monument was attacked. Those who committed this crime will be caught & held responsible pic.twitter.com/SkYiyUwO8W
— Governor Mary Fallin (@GovMaryFallin) October 24, 2014

There's some surprise running around over the case of Michael Reed, 29, of Oklahoma City, who urinated on the Ten Commandments monument outside the Federal Building (the replacement for the Murrah Building blown up by Christian Identity terrorist Timothy McVeigh) and then smashed it by running it over with his car, under instructions, he said, from Satan, who also advised him to spit on a photograph of President Obama and kill him. But he's a Christian.

According to KOCO TV (via SEK at Raw Story),

Reed's mother, Crystal Tucker, said such an action is not something he would do.

“He would never deface something that meant so much to him. He takes the Ten Commandments very seriously,” Tucker said.

Tucker said Reed has been battling breakdowns for two years.

“It all started after an injury at work four years ago,” Tucker said. “Now, when he has these breakdowns, the one thing that is foremost in his mind, his religion, is the thing he takes it out on.”

Tucker said Reed does not worship Satan.

Well, duh, of course he's a Christian.

I just wanted to make my usual joke here about the Second Commandment in particular, and how if you took the Commandments all that seriously (i.e., if you were a Jew or a Muslim instead of a less than literate redneck evangelical—it seems Muslims accept all of them, except the Fourth on Sabbath observance, which they regard as exclusively aimed at Jews) you might think smashing the monument was a justifiable idea: it's certainly what our ancestor Abraham would have done with it.

But then I suddenly stopped thinking it was funny. This is a badly messed up young man, and obviously it's a cocktail of conservative religion and conservative politics that has messed him up—that's how assassinating Obama got into his story. And then it's a workplace injury that started him off, too, something that could have been prevented by adequate industrial regulation or a good union.

I started feeling really bad. The Church and the Republicans evidently failed Michael Reed, but so did all of us.