Emma Goldman

 

One hundred years ago, Emma Goldman was one of the most famous women in America. 

Emma Goldman

William Jennings Bryan was similarly famous, now forgotten, along with most names of that era 100 years ago.  Woodrow Wilson, who purged the federal government of Negroes, who jailed dissidents and sent waves of federal agents to arrest protesters, is now remembered as an idealist who wanted to make the world safe for democracy, and his name still shimmers engraved in Granite at Princeton University. Oddly, one of the few names any American school kid might know from that era is that of Vladimir Lenin, if only because every red blooded American classroom needs a Voldemort to keep the kids interested. 

Best (L) & Banting (R) 1921

The years surrounding 1920--1914 to 1924--were astounding times: Insulin was discovered by two determined but uncertified men in Toronto, Banting and Best; Eugene Debs spoke out for freedom of speech, against the looming World War carnage in Europe and he was jailed for years for his ideas; Hemingway and Fitzgerald were forged in flame; Jazz and flappers and alcohol and premarital sex all ignited and flared brightly,  but were stamped back down by frightened men and constricted minds. Freedom of thought, in Dylan's words, "seems  like it's dying and it's hardly been born." The world's most deadly pandemic, the 1918-1919 influenza killed more than bullets and bombs did. How many school children in America know about this? How many know about the role army camps in the US played in this pandemic?

In a nation where women were not allowed to vote, or to have their own bank accounts, much less contraception, and sex outside marriage could not be discussed publicly, Emma Goldman said sex was something that was a powerful and wonderful force and women should have it, with as many partners as they wanted, and that meant contraception had to be widely available.  Her autobiography took readers through her succession of lovers, none of whom she married, as she thought marriage a form of repression. 

She said a bayonet was a weapon with a worker on either end, and that war in Europe was simply rich men making poor workers vie for domination of one capitalist over another. She was an anarchist, which even today is hard to understand. Did she really think no government was the answer to oppressive government? She meant that ultimately, if society evolved properly, no government would be necessary to force order on people. She was a fool and an idealist but she held up an ideal to which crowds responded. 

Fitzgerald

You can hardly read the history of that era and not see the seeds of today's Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, Jim Jordan, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch.  

Papa

The Second World War was inevitable, and in fact was really just an extension of the First World War, a second round after the first bloody punch out, but both contestants were left standing and once cleaned up in their corners, surged forth for another go round. 

The wonderful thing about reading history is you can see the present so much more clearly--you know how that story ended and you can see the movie currently playing almost as we once did in movie theaters, when you said, "Oh, this is where I came in."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BviTcbeRz8o

Watching this documentary about Emma Goldman is deja vu, as Yogi Berra said, all over again.

Under The Banner of Heaven: Hampton's Fundamentalist Churchfolk

 

God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven, we will be ranged under the banner of heaven against the Government.--John Taylor, 1880, Third President of the Church of Latter Day Saints

"If you want to get good people to do wicked things, you need religion."--Christopher Hitchens

"I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk that's not in the Constitution."--Lauren Boebert

 “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian Nationalists.”--Marjorie Taylor Greene

The United States says we cannot marry more than one wife. God says different.--John Taylor

Allah 'akbar

I wasn't born or brought up Catholic. Well, not officially.

But so many of my friends and my mother's friends were Catholic, from an early age, I didn't realize I wasn't actually Catholic for some time.

My best friends were not always Catholic, but over the years I've had as many Catholic friends as most Catholics ever have. Maybe more.

On the other hand, I've been aware, from an early age, the dangers of absolutism, of anyone who claims to know the will of God or anyone who says he has a special, exclusive private line to God.

Or a certain knowledge of anything, for that matter.

My grandfather's immovable faith in the Communist party brought him to some pretty weird and unenviable places: He was an acolyte of Joseph Stalin.

In college, a professor told the story of Abraham taking his toddler son up to the mountain to stab him to death, because God had demanded him to do this, as a demonstration of Abraham's complete devotion to God. 

"But," the professor said, "Wouldn't a rational human being pause and say, 'Hold on a minute! Would MY God tell me to kill this innocent, lovely child? That could not have been the voice of God. Maybe the voice of the Devil. Or maybe I just didn't hear anything. But no, my God would never tell me to do anything so vile!'  "

Students objected that the professor had no idea of the context of that story: Abraham was living in the days when God walked the earth,  spoke directly to human beings.   Abraham would have known that was God speaking every bit as much as we know it is you up there on the stage speaking to us now.

"No," the professor insisted.  "You can know something by using your sight, hearing, smell. But there are other ways of knowing something. You can ask your rational brain: 'Is what I'm seeing, or think I'm seeing, is that what I'm hearing or think I'm hearing likely to be true? If not, perhaps I should investigate some other explanation.' "

That argument applies to so many current assertions we hear every day now.

When two Mormon brothers slit the throats of a young mother and her infant, they did so under the banner of Heaven, i.e., they did so because they have heard the voice of God, and are acting upon it. Or so they said.

The woman was the wife of a third brother, and she had objected to one of the brothers insisting he was commanded by God to take his adolescent step daughters as his "wives," (i.e. sex partners)  and he used as justification, the early, originalist teachings of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The received word of The Heavenly Father.

The brother whose wife was murdered said later: "They just do what they want to do and then make up an excuse using The Heavenly Father as the reason."

The brother who wanted to take his step daughters to bed reasoned that God had given him a strong sexual urge, and to respond to that gift is to accept God's will, in this case in the direction of his step daughters.

Of course, the Mormons who practice polygamy and occasional murder are as rare, or more exceptional than the Muslims who fly airplanes into buildings or decapitate school teachers for daring to teach girls how to read and write.

But, until recently, I had not thought of Catholics as fundamentalists or extremists. Sure, there may be extremists in any group, but I know so many Catholics who accommodate their religion to the practice of contraception and certainly to free speech and to  the separation of church and state. 

But when a hundred Catholic congregants attended a town meeting to vote for their church to be awarded taxpayer funds to the church, I saw the Church differently. 

These folks were not asking to be reimbursed for a soup kitchen they might have run, but they were asking the town, which has Protestants, Jews and likely a few well hidden Muslims, to pay for the church school which teaches their kids how to be good Catholics. 

And they could not be shamed by appeals to patriotism, or by arguments that  separation of church and state is a good thing, because, after all, it is separation of church and state which grants the church exemption from taxation. It did not shame these true believers to take the tax break with one hand and to hold out the other for taxpayer funds.

Christopher Hitchens

Their minds could not be changed by argument. Their priest was there, in his collar. They were there to strike a blow for their church. Anything that got between them and the money was  "anti-Catholic" and "anti-religion."

Somehow, when I listened to these folks, George Carlin floated up in front of my eyes: "God will send you to burn and suffer for all time! BUT, he LOVES you! And he needs MONEY!"

The essential parts of democracy boil down to two major things:

1/ You must have freedom of speech, to say what you think.

2/ You must agree that once the majority has spoken, has written down a set of rules, even if you disagree, until you can convince the majority to change those rules, you abide by them.  So, if the majority agrees the state should not establish a Church by proclaiming an official state church or by supporting it with taxes, then, until you can change that rule, you abide by it.

You can say, well, we elected a Catholic Supreme Court and they have said there is no such thing as separation of church and state, that separation of church and state is unconstitutional. 

But I will say: The Court is actually not elected. To change the Constitution on something so fundamental, you need Congress and 2/3 of the states to amend it.

If the Court said, well, actually, that thing about freedom of speech, that doesn't really apply any more, then we would rebel.

Oh, wait, actually, the Court did do that, once. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that in Schenck.  The Court killed freedom of speech, practically speaking.

Of course, the Court had a lot of help from President Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover and a host of absolutist fundamentalists who believed in a White, Christian, Anglo Saxon America.

Now we have, in Hampton, a church which believes in power over principle. This church has 1,400 families attending, which likely means about 6,000 citizens in a town of 20,000 souls.  And the members or friends are on the school board, the town budget committee, the zoning board, you name it. They are well placed.

So, it doesn't matter about separation of church and state, the faithful will do whatever they want to do, and they'll use the Heavenly Father as the reason. 

Learning to Love Big Brother

 

When I was in my 30's, running a small business, living not "paycheck to paycheck" because I had no paycheck, only receipts from weekly business, and I learned to set up a separate "war chest," a bank account to which I contributed weekly, to amass enough to be there on April 15th every year, when that fat account got absolutely nuked. 

Watching that account grow, month by month, I had a sense of mild success, only to crash into despondency in early Spring, on the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, and I knew that feeling of deep loss and despondency.

Flying high and fat in January, crushed in April, the cruelest  month. 

Much of those April payments went to something called a "Simplified Employees Benefit Plan" a SEP plan, which my accountant explained to me thusly: "Either you put it away for your retirement, or you can simply hand it over to the government right now."

That government again, holding a gun to my bank account.

In those days, with my income and business in fledgling stages, we never had enough money, even with my wife working. We pinched pennies and saved up for vacations, and that tax burdens seemed really oppressive. We didn't have enough money to buy a new car, but we sent thousands to the IRS and to those IRS mandated retirement accounts. 

My auto mechanic had a sign in his shop that showed a 1099 form, and it showed a line at the top saying: Enter your income here, and right below it a line that said: Enter your tax here. Which was, of course the line above it, your entire income. That sign resonated with me.

But now, the government is depositing directly into my bank account this thing called, "Social Security," which is not enough to retire on, but it covers car payments. And then there is all this SEP money coming back in the form of some mysterious thing called "RMD's" (required minimal distribution) where the government makes you take out of your nest egg a certain amount each year so they can tax it. 

But here's the thing: It's like FOUND MONEY! I never expected to see that money again. It was just part of that annual dam rupture, where all the money in my tax account got washed away and I had to start rebuilding all over again. 

But, the thing is, it didn't just go out to sea. The government forced me to save for retirement and now, well, what do you know?

So, yes, the government was paternalistic and it made me plan for the future at a time I could not believe I'd live to see a future, and when I was dead certain I could not afford to get past the urgent needs of the present to ever make it to the future. 

Thank you FDR, Democrats, big Nanny government, Big Brother and all those other institutions which beat me up all through my penurious, money strapped youth. 

Is Social Security an "entitlement?"

You bet it is! I paid into this program when it hurt to pay into it and now, wow.

Religious Education on the Public Dime?

Audi Alteram Partem

--Hear the Other side

 At the February 6 Deliberative session about the school budget for Hampton public and private schools several arguments were made about why the town of Hampton was justified in paying for operating expenses at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal's church school, the Sacred Heart School.

One of these arguments, which is my main subject today was the argument that of the 239 students, 53 were children living in Hampton, whose parents pay town (mostly property) taxes and those parent deserve to get a return on their taxes by having the town pay for the religious education of their kids, which is the education they have chosen for their own children. Why should they be forced to pay for the public education of the children of other Hampton taxpayers and not expect to get something from the town to pay for the education of their own children?

A second argument was simply there is nothing wrong with taxpayer funds being directed to a religious school because there is a New Hampshire law (RSA 189:49) which specifically permits this, and there was some, uncited, 1975 case at the New Hampshire Supreme Court saying this is perfectly alright and constitutional, despite the New Hampshire Constitution's Article 6 which says, plain and simple, "But no person shall be compelled to pay for the schools of any sect or denomination." (1784)

Other "arguments" coalesced around the notion the Sacred Heart School is a benign institution, a loving place, which treats its students lovingly, so why would anyone want to deny it anything it needs?

And then there were the indignant citizens who simply asserted sending the 53 students to Sacred Heart School saves the town $1 million every year, so it only makes fiscal sense, to send these kids to a cheaper school. This argument, of course, is unassailable, because despite testimony from the superintendent of the schools and from the treasurer of the SAU that the true figure might be anywhere from a savings of zero to $200,000, those who like this idea cleaved to it as if it were handed down engraved in stone tablets from the mountain. 

An aside: The treasurer, who attended SHS herself, tried mightily to not agree the $1 million figure is absurd, said that depending on how those 53 kids get distributed among the 8 grades of the public schools, there might be no need for any new teachers or school buses, but if the students were all special needs going to one grade it could cost "a lot," as if neither she nor the superintendent had any idea at all about what the distribution of those students would be. That "Golly gee, we just don't know," was probably the most appalling thing about the evening.  Everyone in that room knew both the treasurer and the superintendent knew precisely how many of those kids would go to each grade, and if they didn't, these two government employees had no business being locked into their current jobs.

But that is all beside the point.

The main idea I wanted to reckon with is the idea of what the taxpaying public owes to the parents of the children of Hampton.

Heaven knows, the town needs more children. Our schools have been afflicted with declining enrollments as Hampton is not immune from national demographics. And the Sacred Heart School has fewer and fewer students signing up, and fewer and fewer from Hampton.

But what about that idea of the town owing an education, whatever education the parents desire for their children?

Ron DeSantis has attacked public schools as a place where "indoctrination rather than education" happens. 

And what does he mean by that?

If a parent does not believe in evolution, but he finds his child being taught that God did not create all the earth's creatures in 6 days, is that not indoctrination?

If a parent believes the path to uncovering and knowing the truth is simply reading the Bible and asking yourself "What would Jesus do?" and the public schools teach the scientific method, or that to be acceptable an argument must be based on evidence, not simply doctrine from the church: Is that not indoctrination?

And what is "evidence" anyway?

Or, as Ron DeSantis says, the public schools teach our children America is bad, that it embraced slavery for 300 years, that it waged wars on smaller, less developed nations like the Philippines and Vietnam and Nicaragua: Is that not indoctrination?

In college, in the social sciences, I had professors who declaimed there were true things in the study of anthropology, like there is no culture which is better than any other, or any worse, an attitude called "cultural relativism,"  so we should not judge. I did not agree with this, as I thought the culture of Nazi Germany or the tribes where children were sacrificed because they were considered a burden, were worse than cultures where this was thought to be evil.

Today, we have elite universities where dissension from the idea that gender dysphoria is simply a different way of being is deemed heretical. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, was shunned and attacked by medical students and undergraduates for suggesting gender dysphoria is, like anorexia nervosa, a case of being ruled by "a wrong idea."

The lists of people who were unable to speak on college campuses because they advocated ideas like opposition to the notion of "microaggression" against Black people, or against women, or because they questioned the idea that college students should be allowed "safe spaces" where they are not perturbed by disturbing ideas. Or the idea that "believe the woman" supersedes the idea of the accused being allowed due process in his own defense, in cases of alleged campus rape.

When one side refuses to hear the arguments of the other side, the idea of public education and higher education collapses.

On the other hand, I can conceive of an education which simply demands that both views are presented students, every time. I think every editorial in every newspaper ought to be in the point/counterpoint format, and so it should be in the teaching of civics, constitutional law, history in public schools.

Personally, I think every high school student graduating from Winnacunnet should have read somewhere between the Academy and graduation the following books: 

1. "A Peoples History of the United States," Howard Zinn

2. " Midnight in America," Adam Hochschild

3. "The Guarded Gate," Daniel Ockrent

4. "In Prison," Katherine Richards O'Hare

5. "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," Malcolm X.

6. "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution," James McPherson

7. "A Stillness At Appomattox" Bruce Catton

8. "Anti Intellectualism in American Life," Richard Hofstadter.

9. "How the South Won The Civil War," Heather Cox Richardson.

10."War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" Chris Hedges

11. "My War Gone By. I Miss It So." Anthony Loyd

12. "Animal Farm," Gore Orwell

13. "1984" George Orwell

14. "Living My Life," Emma Goldman

15. "Gone With The Wind," Margaret Mitchell.

16. "Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler

And they should all watch the movie "Godfather" and the TV series, "The Wire."

And with each reading, and viewing,  the students should be presented a rigorous counter argument to the case made by each author.

Of course, if someone chooses to home school her child or to send that child to Sacred Heart School, they can opt to read none of this.

And this comes back to the idea of what the purpose of "public education" is.

In my father's day, he went to public school to assimilate into the new country his parents had chosen. He did not speak English when he first set foot into the New York City public schools, and his parents wanted him to absorb what the teachers had to offer him--a new language, the values of his country and an understanding of what was considered proper and righteous in this new land. They could and may have given him a counter argument at home, but they wanted him to learn how to live in this new country and how to succeed and part of succeeding had to do with his learning what was considered acceptable and commendable by society as represented by government and academia, and what was not.

My father's parents knew he would have to function and compete in a larger world, a world larger than their own. They knew he would have to grow beyond them.

Generations of public school kids have brought home ideas which challenged their immigrant parents, who were sometimes scandalized by what their children were being taught in those schools, but these parents did not reject the schools or the idea of public education, however much they may object to some of the ideas about sexual freedom, equality of the genders and what constitutes a successful life. 

England and France have struggled with immigrant populations, primarily Muslim, in which the parents reject the wider society of the country in which they live. Some Muslim parents, and this is not limited to Muslims, some Hasidic Jewish parents, look at the sexual mores, the equality of genders, the clothing of the children they see attending public schools and they refuse to allow their children to grow in those directions. They circle the wagons and withdraw into their own cults. 

But few of these groups expect funding from taxpayers or the government for their schools. They may apply for welfare, as in the case of the Hasidim, but they educate their children at their own expense.

When I went to public schools, I met the children of the ruling class and I was changed by that experience, but I think they were changed by the experience of my challenging their beliefs.

Public schools served as a marketplace of ideas, when they were functioning at their best.

But now public schools are simply targets for those who do not want their own ideas challenged, and we are drifting toward a time where you do not have to accept the challenge--you can simply demand the taxpayers pay to allow you to reinforce your ideas upon your children's minds.

With Friends Like These...

 

My 37 year old son happened to be visiting Hampton when the infamous February 6th Deliberative Session School Board meeting blew up and was briefly hijacked by a sectarian mob. 

Listening to my explanation of the issues, he said, "Sure, you're right. This warrant article gives taxpayer funds to a Church, violating the separation of church and state, but in the constellation of terrible things, this is relatively benign. I mean, so a pretty benevolent school gets some money from taxpayers--most of whom voted for it--so what?  It's just a principle, which not all that many people care about, but nobody gets hurt, and nobody dies."

As it happens, I am deep into "American Midnight," by Adam Hochschild, about the America of roughly 100 years ago, and when you look at people locked up for 20 years for voicing dissent about the draft for World War One, for advocating free love, including homosexual love, or for being Negro in the South--against all that horrific history maybe destroying separation of church and state doesn't seem so dire.

In those days, it was commonplace for a Black man to be falsely accused of raping a white woman, and after he was castrated, hanged from a tree. On one such occasion,  the pregnant wife of such a man protested, and she was run through with a sword, her baby extracted and stomped into the earth. Given the truly horrific wrongs which we have  lived through in America, beginning with slavery--the violation of the principle of church and state--slipping some cash under the table to a struggling Catholic church school, with a declining enrollment, in the setting of the pedophile priest scandals--hardly seems like something which rises to the top of the list of urgent  causes.

"You can't fight every battle" is the new battle cry.

Kent State

Devon Chaffee, the head of the New Hampshire ACLU, who begins her emails with "Pronouns: she, her" said as much in an email to the President of the Hampton Democrats club, to which I was copied. 

Devon Chaffee

She had not responded to requests for help before last year's Deliberative Session and she apologized for ignoring that request, with the explanation that, basically, she had other more important things to do, and that this separation of church state thing is a losing battle.

Looking at some of the other more important things the ACLU-New Hampshire Twitter site trumpets: Making marijuana legal in the state and trying to be sure New Hampshire residents can change the gender on their driver's licenses, and fighting for LGBQT rights. 

Guardsmen shooting unarmed students at Kent State

She links to the New Hampshire ACLU website, where separation of church and state does not even make the list of the 19 most important issues the ACLU supports. Among those priorities are "HIV" and "Disability Rights" and "Privacy and Technology" and "National Security"--now there's a strange one for the ACLU to worry about-- and "Smart Justice" whatever that is, and finally, "Religious rights," which apparently does not include the right to not support religious schools with your taxes.

So the New Hampshire ACLU has been very busy with all this other stuff, and maybe my son is correct--separation of church and state just doesn't seem all that sexy. 

It's all about priorities.

But, and here I know I will be vilified for saying this, while I completely agree that nobody should ever be harassed or demeaned because they have different sexual preferences or identities, while I completely agree people should be judged by the content of their characters and not by their appearance, I do not agree that the 99.04% of us who identify as male or female should have to relearn English to accommodate the 0.06% who are gender fluid or transgender-- and I refuse to try to figure out a simple declarative sentence, "Jane is going to town to get their hair cut." 

When you have an issue which is as complex as figuring out what the phenomenon of gender dysphoria is, you do not thrust that in the face of the lumpen proletariat.  Talk about being wise to not  fight every battle all the time.

The last Democratic state convention held on line began with 15 minutes of Native Americans beating drums and chanting in Abenaqui,  to remind us we should be aware of the existence and rights of Native Americans, which I'm all for, but they didn't open the convention with 15 minutes to remind everyone about my rights as a second generation immigrant. 

Thanks a lot, Ray Buckley.

When you have Devon Chaffee beginning every email with her pronoun preference, you open the door wide open to Ron DeSantis and his cries of "Woke!"  The tone deaf quality of liberal folk is just deafening.

I can listen to Elizabeth Warren all day, but Devon Chaffee, not so much.

Read Katherine "Red Kate" O'Hare in her classic, "In Prison" and read about Eugene Debs, who spent years in prison for resisting the idea of drafting men against their will to fight for "America" which he clearly saw was fighting for Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan. 

What is a bayonet? A weapon with a worker on either side. 

Today's voices of liberalism start their appeals with establishing their bone fides with pronoun choices. 

No wonder the next President will be Ron DeSantis and the US Supreme Court will outlaw separation of church and state, the use of abortion pills, gay marriage, and the right of men with penile uncertainty and erectile dysfunction to carry attack rifles to voting centers and public demonstrations. 

We will have our pronouns and they will have the White House and the Supreme Court and, on "off years," the House and Senate.

We've lived through Red Scares and Joe McCarthy and Jim Crow and daily, state endorsed lynchings, and jail time for free speech. We've seen duly elected socialists expelled from state legislatures and from the US House of Representatives. We supported the 1914 Espionage Act which sent to jail or deported people for criticizing the government, or for "utterances which tended to bring the government of the United States into disrepute." We've seen J. Edgar Hoover and his henchmen crush labor unions, and spy  on anyone he wanted to spy on and throw into jail or deport anyone he thought was "not a real American."

None other than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes handed down an opinion sending a poor man, Charles Schenck,  jail for distributing pamphlets attacking the draft.  Schenck,  represented a "clear and present danger" to the Republic, Holmes said. The right to free speech is not absolute, he said, choosing a metaphor as electric and memorable as it was irrelevant to the case at hand: "You cannot falsely shout 'fire' in a crowded theater causing a panicked stampede."

Who would disagree with that? But what did THAT have to do with sending out pamphlets opposing the draft in World War One and how would that  be a clear and present danger to the Republic? Holmes fought in the Civil War, when the Copperhead press harangued against Lincoln and the Union cause daily, and the Republic survived. When he changed his mind, later, in the Abrams case, he noted it was difficult to believe that a silly pamphlet written by an obscure man could possibly have been a threat. Of course, Holmes was a day late and a dollar short and all that remains is "falsely shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater."

It may be a sign of the relative safety and comfort of our current times, that a spat over the separation of church and state can capture our attention, but it may be a sign of our failed education system nobody seems to really remember the history of state religions and all the trouble that spawned once and still does. 

Do the names Iran, India, Pakistan, Henry VIII, St. Thomas Aquinas mean anything to you?

But, no. We are living in a different world, better times. 

What does it matter if one freedom, the freedom to be free of religion, or requiring to pay to support a church, is rescinded?

What we saw on February 6 at the Academy was simply mob rule. A church told its congregants to flood a meeting to insure the continued flow of dollars from a taxpayer account to that church, and at one point, when it was obvious that of perhaps 300 people in the room, 200 were from the church, then they could vote through anything they wished, and they voted that the entire budget of the Hampton school system be diverted to the Sacred Heart School and they all cheered. In March, 9000 mostly uninformed town voters will mark boxes on 40+ warrant articles and likely not read them, as most voters come to vote on the one or two articles which they know affect them personally--like whether the town will pave the road in their own neighborhood, or whether the town ill repair the sea wall this year. For the most part, most voters barely read the rest of the articles they vote for.

It was only when a school board member, Ginny Bridle, spoke up, as a supporter of the church, saying that having such a warrant article slipped into a thick packet of over 40 warrant articles might not escape the attention of the voters and might tend to capture the attention of "John Q. Public" in a way not friendly to the Church, that the crowd reconsidered, and passed an amendment omitting the word "All" so that it read that "money" rather than "all the money" could be directed to the Sacred Heart School.

It don't worry me. No. It don't.

https://youtu.be/OtcD_eVAclc?t=64

Sacred Heart Acolytes Vote to Defund Hampton Public Schools!

 

Monday, February 6, 2023, an evening which will live in memory. 

The moon was full and the auditorium at the Academy packed.

Congregants of the Sacred Heart School showed up in force, well over 100, a priest in his collar and black suit among them.

The "moderator," whose job it is to keep the proceeding civil,  led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, with special emphasis on the "Under God" part, and he said that topics involving schools and children can be emotional and he admonished all to keep the discussion civil.

The first three warrant articles were dispensed with quickly, and then came Article Four, which awards to Sacred Heart School an open bank account with taxpayer money, which Mariah Curtis (treasurer of SAU 90), uses to pay any invoice presented to her from the Sacred Heart School, a wholly owned subsidiary of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Church. 

This year, it's $57,000, written from taxpayer dollars.

The town has been paying the Church's bills like this for decades, without objection, but last year at this same "Deliberative Session" someone finally objected. And this year more citizens were present to object, and the Church, alerted, mobilized its congregants to be sure that money kept flowing.

Arguments for the continuation of the town tithe fell into four main categories:

#1 The School is Benevolent as a Soup Kitchen

The school is a worthy and beloved institution which serves its children well.  Several citizens rose to testify about the great good the school bestows on the children, and nobody rose to deny any of that. Of course, nobody among the opponents of the article had ever said the church school did not serve its children well. The only objection to the school had to do with where the money came from.

#2 The Million Dollar Lie

If the 53 children from Hampton (about 1/4 of the school's student body) had to leave Sacred Heart and return to the public schools, then the town would be stuck with the expense of educating them, which everyone knows is exorbitant, because, well you know how government wastes money. 

The tacit assumption here is without that $57K the Church would close the school, and all those 53 kids would be forced back to public schools.

And so the Church has been serving the town all these years by educating these kids on the cheap, and if that happened instead of spending the $57,000 the town would have to spend over $1 million dollars to serve and educate these children. At first, Mad Dog was not sure whether that meant $1 million per child or $1 million total, but eventually the speakers seemed to settle on $1 million for 53 students.

This is a widely held belief in town, the Million Dollar Lie. For those who believe in rigged and stolen elections, who need no more evidence than "I heard someone say," this is a convincing argument. 

A woman rose to politely inquire if there was any evidence for this and tried ask the Chairman of SAU 90 and the treasurer (Ms. Curtis) if this were true and Ms. Curtis danced around the number, saying it depended entirely on whether all 53 students wanted to enroll in the 7th grade or whether they were spread out among the 8 different grades. If they all went to the 7th grade a new teacher might need to be hired and possibly a school bus, and if all 53 were disabled then the expense would be higher, and she left that hanging in the air, but then Chris Muns, a New Hampshire State Representative got up and said there was no way, even with all that, the cost could possibly be that high, to which someone on the dais said well, maybe not $1 million but more like somewhere between zero and $200,000.

None of this stopped the million dollar lady from announcing in ominous tones the Million Dollar thing. You can see her and hear her utter certainty for yourself, in the link below. She really is a magnificent example of Twitter trash talk. Just say it, and it's all true. 

You can click on the link below to see this wonderful woman, and then click back here once you've heard enough, using the arrow in the upper left corner:

https://youtu.be/uCRELvLIwHw?t=4632

#3 "This is Niggling" Argument.

Larry Quinn rose to say he was a member of the town Budget committee and he knew the budget for the public schools--where he did not send his kids, preferring Catholic schools himself-- was around $20 million  and he argued that the $57,000 awarded the church was not worth arguing about.

Mad Dog was struck by this.  In a town where citizens will  argue about spending $5 on stop sign repair, suddenly Mr. Quinn is chastising those who object to spending someone else's money as small minded. These sorts who quibble over chump change who would let Tiny Tim starve in Christmas season. 

Mr. Quinn could not see that the objections to the expenditure of taxpayer money to cover Church costs were not about the dollar amount, but about the principle of separation of Church and state.

He's entertaining, though, if you care to click a little more.

https://youtu.be/uCRELvLIwHw?t=5753

#4 It's All Constitutional

A woman who identified herself as an attorney rose to say that the state Supreme Court had ruled  the state law allowing the state to hand over taxpayer funds to religious schools (RSA 189:49) as constitutional, being entirely consistent with the state constitution which says "But no person shall ever be compelled to support the schools of any sect or denomination." 

She cited no particular case. She simply said it.  And so it was true.

This all reminded Mad Dog of that hallowed remark by Donald Trump's lawyer/mentor, Roy Cohn, who famously said, "Don't tell me about the law: Tell me about the judge." 

Truer words were never spoke.

Our national Constitution once said slaves were not human beings, and thus had no right to sue in court, because that's the way  justice Taney saw things in Dred Scott; Black folks could legally be refused passage on white railroad cars (Plessey); there is a right to privacy which insures the right to abortion according to Justice Blackman (Roe) , until privacy no longer matters, because a new Justice, Alito, doesn't want to see it that way any more (Dobbs). 

Same Constitution, different judges.

Every lawyer Mad Dog know says government paying for religious schools is constitutional because they are thinking of all the cases this current Supreme Court has ruled saying just that. Justice Sotomayor has recently written in exasperation, "Separation of church and state is now unconstitutional."

But Mad Dog thinks there is a reality in the Constitution which no judge can obfuscate. It's the reality of what the words clearly say, as read by Mad Dog or any literate citizen. If the words are "No person shall ever be compelled to pay for schools of any sect or denomination," then taxpayer money cannot be used for religious schools, end of discussion. No judge or opinion can change that truth.  We can see the naked emperor with our own eyes.

If the Constitution says that the right to bear arms is conditioned by membership in a militia, then Justice Scalia can write a thesis on the meaning of the word "people" in 1789, but it doesn't change a thing. He has written an obfuscation to make the ruling come out the way he wants it to. But that doesn't change what you can read for yourself. 

"Obfuscation" means to make something unclear or unintelligible, which is precisely what Justice Scalia was all about in Heller.

 "No person shall ever be compelled to pay for the schools of any sect or religion" sounds pretty clear, even it was written in 1784.

DEFUNDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS, GIVING IT TO SHS

After these arguments burned themselves in embers, the true conflagration erupted, almost out of nowhere, much like one of those fires you think has burned itself out then suddenly explodes: an amendment was brought forth that the entire budget of the SAU 90, which funds Centre School, Marston Elementary and the Academy, shall be diverted, in its entirety, to the Sacred Heart School instead. 

Say what?

 It passed overwhelmingly. The entire mid section of the auditorium, the bastion of the Miraculous Medal congregants, held up their orange voting cards amid tumult.

One of the opponents of the original warrant article staggered to his feet and asked the moderator if he had heard right: The entire school budget now goes to Sacred Heart School and nothing to the public schools, defunding the public schools. 

The moderator said yes.

You can see this mayhem on the following link.

https://youtu.be/9RWvScJWaJM?t=6063

 The Sacred Heart mob had shown its muscle. It could do whatever it pleased. It had a massive majority and it ruled the Deliberative Session completely. So it just voted its school everything. 

Of course, it did not take long for some advocates for the tithe to Sacred Heart to realize that a warrant article which shifted the entire $20 million dollar school budget from public schools to the Sacred Heart school might actually get the attention of the voting public in town, even in Hampton.

Ginny Bridle, a school board member on the dais, spoke up. 

The fact she was speaking at all captured the attention of the room, because until then the members of the school board had remained as silent as the grave, refusing to answer direct questions posed to them and depending on the moderator to deflect direct questions away from them, which he did relentlessly.  

When asked directly if the school board approved of taxpayer dollars for religious pageants in SHS, the entire school board stared stonily ahead, as if they hadn't heard and the Moderator asked the treasurer to answer the question instead. Ms. Curtis said she didn't know what the supplies she paid for were used for. 

Qui tacit consentit.

But Ms.  Bridle now spoke for the board: even the most obtuse John Q. Public will notice this amendment, and he just might think this is an effort to kill public schools, and enrich the church school, and even among the sleepy, indifferent citizens of Hampton, they might just notice they don't have public schools anymore,  and so the amendment was quickly amended to say that not ALL the money has to go to Sacred Heart.

And that passed, too.

And so the night was a great success for benevolence toward a beloved town institution.

As Andrea Shepard, who is running for school board, said, "It's all about the kids."