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