I'm glad to know we're protecting the country from church-going Mainers:
Crossing the U.S.-Canada border to go to church on a Sunday cost a U.S. citizen $10,000 for breaching Washington's tough new security rules.
The expensive trip to church was a surprise for Richard Albert, a resident of rural Maine who lives so close to the Canadian border the U.S. customs office is right next door to his house...
The local U.S. customs station is closed on Sundays, so he just drove around the locked gate, as he had done every weekend since the gate appeared last May, following a tightening of border security.
My wife is from a border town in Maine very much like the one in the article (though her border crossing was open 24/7), so I know from experience that what the government has done to this poor guy is ludicrous. In some of these tiny French-speaking towns (which were lopped off from Canada rather arbitrarily when the border was finalized in the 1800's), the *only* way to the outside world is through Canada. Residents of these towns by necessity have been crossing the border unimpeded for centuries. (Heck, *I've* done it a few times.) Closing a flimsy little gate on these people and fining them when they try to go about their lives does nothing to make us safer.
Neither does leaving a border crossing unguarded in the first place, for that matter.