"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of Religion..."
--First sentence of the Bill of Rights, First Amendment, Constitution of the United States
To the Editor:
The Sacred Heart School community would like to extend a sincere thank you to the Hampton voters and Seabrook voters who supported our child benefit service (CBS) funds article. The yes vote from the Hampton voters on the warrant article guarantees Sacred Heart School’s continued support for the Hampton students. The no vote from Seabrook was close and we hope for success from the Seabrook voters in March 2020.
These funds are applied towards non-religious textbooks, school supplies, technology, testing materials and school nurse services and supplies for our SHS students that reside in Hampton.
We’d also like to express our gratitude to the budget committees and school boards of each town for recommending and supporting the CBS funding for the Sacred Heart School students from each respectful [sic] town.
A sincere thank you for your continued support.
Teresa Morin Bailey
Principal
Sacred Heart School
The principal's argument is not different from the general who says, "For those who object to war making, your tax dollars will go only for the gasoline for our tanks, not for the ordinance or bullets."
--Mad Dog
Before mention even of freedom of speech, the First Amendment begins with admonition to keep church and state separate.
Not lost on those 18th century bewigged founding fathers was the blood soaked history of church and state in Europe, of its effects in the New World where Spanish galleons filled with pilfered silver and gold blessed by the Church, sailed from the conquered civilizations of Mexico and South America.
Those who oppose the separation of church and state see it as an attack on the Church.
After all, if the Church is a force for good, an expression of God's will on earth, why would you ever want to limit its effects on government?
The problem, of course, is when human beings seek to speak for God, who has remained resolutely silent throughout human history, then trouble has often, if not always, followed.
Advocates of the separation of church and state, like Jefferson, were unconvinced that any man, whether pope or Protestant, actually had a special line to the mind of God.
Even today, Mad Dog questions not the goodness of religion, but the ultimate arrogance of any man who claims God speaks to him and not to Mad Dog.
Mad Dog has no doubt churches enrich the lives of many of his fellow citizens, and he wishes them the best.
Churches can be a force for conscience. After all, Martin Luther King, Jr. was first and foremost a minister and he spoke of conscience.
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| Frederick Douglass, A secular voice |
But churches have, since early times, gone beyond theological concerns of saving souls to the practical concerns of feeding the poor, offering care to the sick, founding soup kitchens and hospitals. When church enters the greater sphere of social action, they lose one aspect of their special status and they have to play by the rules established for anyone and everyone who seeks to have an effect in society.
Every year, the citizens of Hampton have ignored the wisdom of the First Amendment and voted to draw a check from the public town treasury and deliver it to the bank account of the Sacred Heart School, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Catholic church, on the grounds of the Miraculous Medal church, on Route 1.
Mad Dog wishes to say immediately and publicly if you look at the rolls of contributors to Sacred Heart, those who have written checks to Sacred Heart, you will find his name (Not signed as "Mad Dog" but under his birth certificate legacy name.) Mad Dog wishes the school well and hopes it thrives. But he insists the school be treated as any other charity, supported not with taxpayer funds, but with private donations written by individual citizens.
You may ask how it would be different if the town of Hampton decided by warrant article every year it would contribute to Catholic Charities. That would make all the difference to Mad Dog. If the town wrote checks to the Jewish Defense Fund, the Muslim Anti Defamation League, the ACLU, the Shriners Hospitals, the Sierra Club, the ASPCA, Mad Dog would not object, if that's what the town people vote to do.
But there are certain things you cannot vote on in America and those are spelled out in the Constitution. That is, in one sense, what the Constitution is all about: These things cannot be voted on. You want to change these things, you have to amend the Constitution.
There were laws, local laws, which made slavery, and then segregated schools legal, which provided a legal framework for these. But that's why we amended the Constitution (13th) to end involuntary servitude and that's why the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v Board of Education: it didn't matter whether local laws in Alabama said separate but equal schools were just fine. Alabama could not vote for segregated schools because Alabama's wishes violate the Constitution, which embodies the sense of justice and of right and wrong of the rest of the nation. If you are part of this nation, you have to cleave to certain agreed upon principles.
For the folks of Hampton, New Hampshire, their violation of the 1st amendment has been reaffirmed annually.
There are reasons for this:
1. It's never been actively or vigorously challenged. In Seabrook, vociferous objections were raised, but Hampton was unmoved.
2. The mechanisms for challenging this offense have been limited. There is only one day when 20 pages of warrant articles are discussed and if you miss that day, tough luck. And even then, there is no guarantee you can prevail.
3. Sad to say, there is simply not the intellectual substrate in Hampton to form a grounding for the debate. A school teacher from Hampton, when asked his opinion about the funding of a religious school by public funds replied, "Well, the separation of church and state has never been absolute in American history."
Mad Dog was not given the opportunity to press him on this, but presumably he's talking about the Pledge of Allegiance ("one nation, under God") and "In God We Trust" on the coins and the fact that Congress has a chaplain. But there is no instance where the federal government writes a check to the account of any church for the purpose buying books, or for that matter for plowing the church's parking lot, or painting its classrooms. All expenses of running a school, even if they are the ordinary expenses of upkeep are the responsibility of the church.
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| Obadiah Yougblood, Water Street Bridge |
The principal of Sacred Heart notes that books bought with town money were non religious in nature, which is entirely beside the point. As is the funding of a school nurse by town money. Just as paying for heating oil, maintaining the plumbing, keeping the flower beds and plowing the parking lot, all are expenses which ought to be born by anyone seeking to run a school. As soon as the taxpayer's dollars go into a church bank account to fund this stuff, the taxpayer is now paying for church activity, just as sure as the townspeople in Henry VIII's England paid to support first the Catholic Church and then the Church of England.
It does not matter how the principal of Sacred Heart School earmarks town funds, whether she is careful to segregate money spent for secular, administrative purposes from money spent on religious topics. The fact is, once the money is provided for costs in the school, the school nurse, for poor student scholarships, that frees up money to continue the religious aspects of the school.
The principal's argument is not different from the general who says, "For those who object to war making, your tax dollars will go only for the gasoline for our tanks, not for the ordinance or bullets."
That the citizens of Hampton, many of whom were educated in Hampton public schools, cannot recognize the conflict of voting to write a religious institution a check from public funds suggests the citizens have not been provided with a sufficient education.
Waving about the letters "RSA" or any other letters to justify the expense of public funds on religious institutions ignores the fact that there have always been laws to justify unjust or unconstitutional actions.
In 1974 a New Hampshire man taped over the "Live Free or Die" motto on his license plate and was arrested. The Supreme Court said he had the right to do that in Wooley v Maynard . Citing a case from 1943, when children refused to say the pledge allegiance in school, Justice Jackson (who later presided at the Nuremberg trials) wrote,
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
Thus an action by a single, humble Granite Stater pushed a principle to the ultimate test. In doing so, he demonstrated that he ought not be compelled to do something, in this case to display a sentiment, with which he did not agree. Like funding Sacred Heart, there was no poster child for this case. Nobody was harmed by the license plate motto and the citizens of New Hampshire saw no reason to take action to remove it. But it offended this citizen's sense of the Constitution which guarantees freedom of speech and by extension guarantees that you cannot be compelled to speak in a manner you abhor or to display a symbol--symbolic speech--which you reject.
Here was a man, a humble citizen, who understood the importance of the First Amendment, which separates church from state, which forbids government from limiting freedom of speech or imposing speech upon its citizens and which protects a free press and affirms the right of people to assemble and to confront the government with complaints (grievances). All that is in the First amendment and every citizen of Hampton ought to know why, what the history was, why the founders put all this into the First Amendment.
And so it is that Mad Dog is deeply offended by the annual payment to the coffers of the Catholic Church in Hampton. Mad Dog contributes from his own personal account to that very same church, but for the town to do this is an offense to the first amendment and if the townsfolk do not understand why that is, then Mad Dog would suggest they spend that $65,000 (up from $45,000) on a course on the whys and wherefores of the First Amendment to be taught in all the schools, Marston, The Academy and Winnacunnett.
UPDATE: MARCH 10, 2021
2179 CITIZENS OF HAMPTON VOTED TO AWARD $65,000 FROM THE TOWN BANK ACCOUNT TO THE SACRED HEART SCHOOL OF THE MIRACULOUS MEDAL CATHOLIC CHURCH.
805 CITIZENS VOTED FOR THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
ONCE AGAIN: HAMPTON EMBRACES THEOCRACY.
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