cannabisnews.com: Pastor Haunted by Teen-age Drug Conviction





Pastor Haunted by Teen-age Drug Conviction
Posted by FoM on August 06, 1999 at 14:31:50 PT
Goes back to Canada!
Source: Boston Globe
NEWARK, N.YHis 11-year-old daughter, barely able to smile, sat watching as Steven Mullenix loaded up a rental van outside his old church Friday in preparation for the journey north to Canada.
Forget that he's the son of an American, that he can trace his Ohio roots back 200 years, that he's long dreamed of becoming a U.S. citizen. The Canadian-born clergyman's quest for immigration status remains agonizingly out of reach because of a marijuana conviction north of the border in 1981. ''I'm really upset about having to move out because, no matter what the United States has put me through, to me it's still home,'' said Mullenix, 36, taking a break as parishioners hauled furniture out of the rectory. Under U.S. immigration laws crafted to exclude Nazi war criminals, terrorists and other undesirable aliens, Mullenix is deemed ''excludable'' for life. His four-year quest for citizenship stumbled in June when he was stripped of his Assemblies of God ministry for one year for writing an abusive letter to immigration agents. Church leaders said his use of the phrase ''evil bastards'' was ''conduct unbecoming a minister.'' ''So he made an error! Forgive and forget, that's what they teach in the Bible,'' barked Larry Briggs, 63, a retired nursing administrator who was in Mullenix's 100-strong congregation in this village near Lake Ontario. ''He's like a man without a country, caught between a rock and a hard place. The whole thing smells political.'' Without a job, Mullenix was forced to leave the country with his wife and daughters, Esther, 2, and Hannah, who sat on the lawn with a neighborhood pal. ''I don't want to move I have a lot of friends here,'' she said softly. Mullenix was caught with more than an ounce of marijuana at 18 and spent three months in jail. He kicked drugs at 22, turned his life around and had his conviction vacated there in 1992. Only after moving his family to New York on a religious-worker visa in 1995 did he realize his predicament. He is suing in federal court to try to force the U.S. government to grant automatic citizenship to every child born abroad to an American. ''Everybody who knows me has forgiven me,'' he said. ''But the people who don't know me those that run the world I don't think they understand what forgiveness is.'' Mullenix apologized to the church for his remarks, which he said were made in frustration, but to no avail. He's hoping to join another denomination near his new home in Norwich, Ontario. ''I'm hoping he doesn't get depressed,'' said his wife, Loretta. ''He'll just have to pick up and move on. God has a way of working things out in the long run.'' By Ben Dobbin, Associated Press, 08/06/99 15:21 
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