Talking Past Each Other

 

Thinking about what people said at the Deliberative Session last Wednesday, Mad Dog has been marveling at what was said, who said it and why.

This group meeting is meant to replace the old annual Town Hall meeting common in small New England towns. Now, with a population of 20,000 (in off season), meetings of the whole town are not practical and, in any event, most people are working long hours or have kids at home, so going out at 7 PM  on a work day is not top of anyone's list.

You have to be highly motivated to come out to the Academy (the middle school) on a cold New Hampshire night to talk about school warrant articles, the funding mechanism for the schools in town.

Various speakers in favor of spending taxpayer money on a Church school argued that the amount of money was almost trivial in the context of a town budget for the school which ran into millions, with which Mad Dog found no dispute. 

Another argued that to vote against the article would exacerbate hostilities in town, saying that this article had raised hackles. He never  considered  that withdrawing the request for taxpayer money would have an even more predictable effect: If the church school simply asked the archdiocese of Manchester for that $50,000, no dissension in the town would occur.

One man said there is nothing illegal about giving taxpayer money to a church, as "attorney N" has informed us  in at least three public discussions over the years. "Attorney N" always cited a New Hampshire Supreme Court decision which decisively found that despite the New Hampshire state constitution which explicitly says no citizen shall ever be compelled or taxed to support any church or church school. (Part II, Article 83, and Part 1, Article 6).  

Mad Dog was surprised to hear this assertion made because at the last Deliberative Session the prior year, a citizen had risen to say that he had Googled this case cited by "Attorney N"  but he found no such case, and in fact he had found an advisory from the new Hampshire Supreme Court, when it had been asked by the legislature whether legislation granting state Lottery funds for religious schools would be struck down as a violation of church/state separation, and the Court said, absolutely it would be struck down so don't even think about it. 

 "Attorney N" never rose to respond to that criticism and by the old legal doctrine, qui tacit, consentit (silence implies consent), she caved, and tacitly conceded what she was saying all those years had been pure poppycock. 

That was all very public and the man arguing that Ms. N had already settled this issue was either not present for that debacle, or had forgotten, or had simply not understood how thoroughly Attorney N had been discredited. 

She was not present at the most recent Deliberative Session: Mad Dog  suspected  she was still smarting from the smack down she had got last year.

Another citizen, a member of the Budget committee, rose to say that just because there are empty seats in Hampton schools, doesn't mean we are paying twice for kids who leave those seats empty and go to Sacred Heart.  It had been argued that paying for kids to go to Sacred Heart was analogous to paying for cafeteria lunch for all students, but then paying for a small group of students to go eat lunch at McDonald's. We already bought lunch for all the kids--why are we now paying again?  

That argument bounced off the Budget Committee man like water off a duck's back. He blithely insisted that if those kids, whose seats await them at the public schools, decided to return to public schools and reclaim those open seats, it would cost the public schools "millions," because...well, he didn't say why, but he did say that's just what he believed.

Somehow, if those kids were, by analogy, to not go out to ' and returned to eat those uneaten meals in the cafeteria, it would cost us all a lot more!

The same man also averred that just because someone says government paying for a religious school violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, that does not mean that such government pay out actually is unconstitutional. Nobody in the deliberative session is a constitutional lawyer he noted. 

He also threw in that "competition is good for public schools" saying that with Sacred Heart competing for students, it would cause the public schools to step up their game, because, you know, private enterprise is always leaner, more focused and efficient than government. This has been the chant of the voucher school programs for years. Private is always better than public.

This left Mad Dog wondering what the public schools would do differently, to "compete." 

If Sacred Heart School, which educates only 45 students from Hampton, were to close down tomorrow. Would the Hampton public schools say, "Oh, well, now there's no more competition, so we can all go skiing or fishing now, because, well, there's no more competition"?

Through all this, that  George Carlin refrain kept running through Mad Dog's brain: Carlin was talking about how local Catholic churches were always seeking sources of money:  "God loves you but he needs money. He always needs money. He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing and all-wise. But somehow, he just cannot handle money!"