Audi Alteram Partem: The Case Against Public Schools

 

As the argument for separation of church and state has emerged in Hampton, prompted by the town warrant which provides an account to pay the bills for the Sacred Heart School of Our Lady of The Miraculous Medal Catholic Church, all sorts of irrelevant, misleading and frankly dumb arguments have emerged:

1. We are only paying bills only for non religious items in this religious school: Of course, if you pay to paint the walls of the classrooms so the Church can now buy new altars or pictures of Jesus, you cannot separate money which allows one from another, and, in fact, it has been revealed bills were paid for paper crowns possibly used in acting out nativity scenes, and for computers which may or may not have streamed mass from St. Patrick's Cathedral.

2. We are not really paying checks to the Catholic Church; we just pay invoices for some of their expenses. This, of course, is the same argument the husband makes when he is caught paying for the rent, the groceries and the wine for his mistress. "I never paid to have sex with that woman!" A classic distinction without a difference.

3. We must support all children in Hampton, and we cannot discriminate against those who prefer to go to a Catholic school or a religious school out of town, or a remedial school out of town. 

This tracks Justice Alito's argument that if a town or state chooses to fund any private school not part of the public school system it cannot discriminate against religious schools. 

Of course, using this loaded word, "discriminate," evokes the connotation that discrimination is bad in all circumstances, since racial discrimination led to segregated public schools, as an effort to  discriminate against oppressed minorities.

Lost in this, is the distinction between something you cannot change--your skin color--and something you believe in, namely that as a Catholic; e.g., you believe homosexuality is a sin, or as a Muslim you believe boys and girls should not go to school together or girls should not go to school at all.

In the case of the SHS, this "we're only doing this to support every Hampton child" is suspect because 75% of the SHS children are from out of town, so what you are really saying "we're only doing this to support all Catholic kids" or not even that, because a substantial number of these kids may not even be Catholic, but may be seeking out SHS for other reasons--as Frank DeLuca suggested, many of the kids at SHS were there because their parents rejected the idea of closing public schools during the pandemic, and SHS remained open. How many of these parents were anti vaaxers or believed COVID was a hoax is unknown.

The most fundamental problem of all is what government aims to do with respect to funding public schools. If the aim is to provide an education at public expense for every child living within a jurisdiction, then we have committed to paying for all children, but we really have never done this.

In Utah, next door to every public school is a school for the Church of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and at noon, the children leave the public schools and file next door to the Mormon school for "lunch" and religious instruction. Then around 2 PM they all return to the public school building to resume their secular education. No public funds go to the Mormon schools. Mormon parents tithe to the church and the non Mormon children who have the schools to themselves in the middle of the day are not discriminated against. Surely nobody in Utah would claim religious schools there, which receive no state funds, are discriminated against. The difference is the Church of the Latter Day Saints respects the idea of separation of church and state. Financial support for the Church is built into Mormon worship. 

But the Catholic Church in Hampton, unlike the Mormons,  feels entitled to town funds because the Church has got that warrant article. And that church knows that "Recommended by the School Board" and "Recommended by the Budget Committee" means it gets its money every year. 

It's a sweet little deal, and all totally "legal," apart from being unconstitutional.

 At Deliberative Sessions members of the congregation say, "Well, any other religious or private school in town can do the same thing we do, and ask the voters to approve money for them."  

Well, almost any other church can ask. When an amendment to the article was proposed which said that if we appropriate $65,000 to the Catholic Church then any other private school in town will be awarded the same, two objections were raised by members of the congregation:

1/ There are no other private schools in town.

2/ If a Church of Satan moved to town with its own school, they would get the money. Which is to say, we only give money to churches we like.

Nothing wrong with that!

The Ideal Public School

If the commitment to public schools is to be sustained, we have to ask ourselves what that idea of a public education means.  

Once, it meant a place where kids could learn to read and write and do sums.

But as our nation grew and grew more diverse, complex and industrialized, and as we began to compete with highly developed countries like Germany, England and France, we realized education was essential to becoming a first world nation. You don't develop an Einstein in a little red one room school house. 

The Brits, with their sophisticated Oxbridge system developed radar, the Enigma decoding machine, the CAT scan and the MRI.

Ron Desantis has harped on the idea of public schools as a place where "indoctrination" happens. This is a way of saying, "they are teaching our kids stuff we disagree with." 

In the past, when my parents went to school, public schools taught new immigrants English, and they played a vital role in the assimilation of a whole generation of people new to this country, and likely they still do. 

And, in my time, they promulgated ideas of good citizenship (staying informed of public policies, controversies, voting) and obligation to serve the nation (paying your taxes, serving in the military) among other things.

Public schools became especially controversial when the anti-war movement fomented resistance to government policies on the campuses of public universities. It was no accident that the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students at a public university, Kent State, and slaughtered students who were learning and teaching ideas the local townsfolk abhorred: That sometimes the United States does really bad things, like burning kids in Vietnamese villages.

And, in New Hampshire, William F. Loeb, the owner and editor of the Manchester Union Leader, made the public schools, especially the University of New Hampshire, his most special whipping boy, inveighing against the pointy headed professors who believed they could get by teaching their communistic ideas of brotherhood and Kumbya and getting paid by the state to do it, not to mention all those "small breasted women" who wanted to talk about love and peace and opposing the building of the world's biggest oil refinery on the Great Bay at the doorstep of the campus at Durham, New Hampshire.

Nowadays, the objections are over sexual things: sexual preference, gender identity, whether or not a person born a boy and still harboring male genitalia should be able to strip naked and shower in the girls' locker room.

I'm no expert, but I suspect the current efforts to do "charter schools" and to fund religious schools in New Hampshire with taxpayer money are part of a conviction on the part of the governor and his head of state education, Mr. Edelblut, that public education is a bad thing and ought to be destroyed and replaced by private schools. 

Is Separation of Church and State Anti-Catholic, Anti-Christian, Atheistic?

 My first introduction to anti-Catholicism was not from the Ku Klux Klan, although it had a presence where I grew up.

I had read about anti-Catholic sentiment when I was in elementary school, in a book which depicted the campaign of Al Smith for President, and the role anti-Catholicism played in defeating him.

But all of that seemed remote and unreal to me. 

Although not Catholic myself, many, if not most, of my friends were. There were pictures on the walls of their houses showing Christ opening his chest to show his heart well before cardiac surgery was feasible, and I asked my parents about these and they responded cryptically, a little uncomfortably, that they were religious and left it there. I had no better luck asking them about the bloody Christ on the cross artifacts on the walls.  

I knew in my seven year old mind there was something different about my family from Sean O'Rourke's family, but whatever that was it didn't seem to matter when Sean and I went out to throw a football or explore the neighborhood with our friends, or have sandwiches his mother made in her kitchen. She always smiled at me and she and my mother would sit on the porch and laugh and chat.

No, it wasn't until I was 13 and John F. Kennedy ran for President that I heard that in some parts of the country his being a Catholic was a problem. 

"But Sean's Catholic and he's going to run for President and I'm going to be his Vice President," I told my mother. 

"And why aren't you running for President?" my mother asked. 

"It was Sean's idea," I explained. "He has Dibs."

Seeing Kennedy campaign in the South, in West Virginia, in the Baptist Bible Belt, and looking at the way those Southerners looked at him, the wariness, the distrust, brought it home to me.

But I loved the way Kennedy went right at the problem, directly, courageously telling them, "Don't vote for me because I'm a Catholic, but don't vote against me because of that."

His famous statement, below, thrilled me.

"Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured—perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me—but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

I was even more moved when he won, when he faced down that prejudice, that hate, and emerged victorious and put to rest all those suspicions. 

Even now, that Joe Biden is Catholic never comes up as a reason to suspect he is under the power or sway of the Pope.  The current crops of crazies find other reasons to hate Biden, but the Catholic thing simply has no resonance any more. 

Kennedy did that, as far as I'm concerned.

Real Hate

In my mind, JFK vanquished anti-Catholicism. All that was just a relic of some dark age.  Catholics were glamorous, open minded, looking to the future, modern, unencumbered by  past doubts.

My friends married without a thought about religion--Jews married Catholics, Catholics married Protestants with hardly a mention, at least in America. 

In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants still hated one another, which baffled me and my friends. It was hard to imagine that could be true, to us Americans. Here in America, with our Constitution, religions simply did not clash, not any more.

I've seen plenty of marriages performed by Catholic priests where the groom steps on a glass wrapped in a cloth napkin, as is the tradition at Jewish weddings. 

All that business about "mixed" marriages is just a relic now. It might have meant marrying "outside the faith" once upon a time, but now it means a Democrat marrying a Republican.

But whenever we discuss separation of church and state, in Hampton, in 2023,  there is a certain element of the Catholic parish who respond that whoever favors drawing a barrier between the church and the state is anti-Catholic, hates Catholics, wants to discriminate against Catholics. 

Because, if you saw the Church properly, you'd know it is a good institution, a wonderful source of joy and truth and morality and bonding of humanity, so why would you ever want to exclude the Church from the benefits of social organizations like the government? Only those hostile to religion, like Thomas Jefferson, would want to draw a line between the Church and the state.

But Kennedy can hardly be said to be hostile to the Church and he was, as anyone can plainly see, emphatic about drawing that line.

Actual Anti Catholicism 

Could it be he saw that drawing the line protects the Church as well as the state, that it allows people to retain the benefits of religion, just as a Catholic wife does when she goes to mass and leaves her husband home watching a football game? 

It gives everyone much needed space.

Now, in Hampton, we have a group which insists separation of church and state persecutes the Church, is motivated by the most vile and hateful motives.

And roving goons drive by in cars and shout obscenities at mothers who have signed petitions in favor of separation of church and state, while  children look up from their play in their front yards. 

We do not know who those goons are, or even if they are members of the congregation, but we can have no doubts it was the opposition to the warrant article that sent them rumbling through town. They are part of the blinded crowd.

THE FEAR

We had Kennedy who brought us so far, and now look what that blinded crowd has done. Oh, how far we have fallen...

Hampton School Board Ducks and Hides

 

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist... Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

--John F. Kennedy

At their meeting last night, November 14, 2023, the five members of the Hampton School board provided the adults and children of our town with a lesson in Lincoln's famous observation, "You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

But they tried.

You can see this display of four adults trying to talk about anything but the issue plainly put to them, and one who did, but later dodged responsibility.

The link below begins with a presentation by school children talking about their visit to an environmental camp, which allowed the Board members to smile warmly at the children of Hampton, and to prove, once again how all they care about is every Hampton child. 

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

But at 19 minutes and 29 seconds a citizen rose to ask the Board members about their votes 9 months earlier to fund the Sacred Heart School, and he asked if the school Board members cared about using taxpayer funds to pay for religious ceremonies and pageants at the school.

The chairperson Ginny Bridle Russel, paused a moment, and then started to move on without commenting, but then Andrea Shepard raised her hand and began a lament about what a difficult and wrenching decision this was and wound up saying she had really, really tried to reach a conclusion but she was still undecided about how she felt about using taxpayer funds to fund streaming of religious services on computers paid for by Hampton taxpayers.

Les Shepard then tried to dodge the bullet entirely by saying the Board had no such request in front of it yet, rather than say what he intended to do when that request arrived. In fact, he was assured by Ms. Russel the Board does have the request and is processing it. To which he said something to the effect of, "Oh, well, then."  He then sank into what looked like a stupor, as if by falling asleep at the wheel, he could avoid facing the consequences of any statement about giving money to buy paper crowns for nativity scenes at the school.

Frank Deluca saw this as a nifty dodge and said, in effect, we may never get the request the Board had already received--a neat trick considering the school has submitted this same warrant every year for the past 50 years and had again this year-- but he would withhold judgment about whether to recommend it, as if the challenge to say how he felt about sending dollars to fund religious teaching had been fully met. He did say, however that kids had no real choice but to go to SHS when the public schools shut down during COVID, obliquely suggesting the snowflakes who shut down our public schools had it--the flight to parochial schools--coming, and again, believing he had deceived everyone in the room to think that he had not remained silent because he was talking about something, just not about the actual question of whether taxpayers should fund religious pageants or computers which stream a mass from St. Patrick's cathedral. On that he remained silent.

Wendy Rega began boldly, but then, inexplicably, tried to absolve the Board of any consequences of of their opinions, even if they stood up boldly and voted to fund a Christmas manger scene, to send kids on a field trip to the Vatican or to pay for invoices for painting the walls of the classrooms. The Board cannot prevent the warrant article from being placed on the ballot, Ms. Rega said, as if that were the point. All we do is make a recommendation, as if that recommendation were immaterial and without importance. 

This ploy has got to be a truly brilliant example of the meaning of the word "disingenuous," in the sense of someone saying something she claims to know less about than she clearly really does know.

Lying silently in front of the meeting was the simple truth that in a package of warrant article ballots extending 30 pages, most citizens simply read the panels at the bottom of each article and if the school Board and the Budget committee recommend it, they shrug and vote for it.  Recommendations against a warrant article are typically a death sentence for that article; recommendations for are typically followed by a rubber stamp approval.

Finally, Virginia Bridle Russel, the chairwoman, inveighed against this whole idea of the importance of the Board's recommendation and said it was up to citizens to "do their own research," as if citizens were lining up for vaccines at the warrant article vote. 

Nobody rose to object that Ms. Bridle was taking the same position as the captain of the ship who directs his crew to pull hard to starboard and when the ship runs aground claims to have nothing to do with it; the crew should have done their own research.

Ms. Bridle Russel then launched into her tremulous support for "every child in Hampton" as if those who opposed religious education funding did not care about those poor students at Sacred Heart.  She did not mention that 75% of the SHS students do not come from or live in Hampton, that those Hampton taxpayer dollars are not paying primarily for Hampton kids, but for kids whose parent want them to be in a Catholic school, no matter where they live. We care about those Hampton kids who go to school in Massachusetts, Ms. Russel said. Our love for Hampton kids is so consuming, it extends to even those kids from surrounding communities who want their kids taught at a religious school and to kids who are for reasons unstated, sent off across state lines. 

At this point nobody shouted from the audience, "Ginny, I love all the children of Hampton, too!  But I don't want to pay for their confirmation dresses or their bar mitzvahs! That's what they got parents for."

Ms Russel did not say whether or not it bothered her that taxpayer dollars may be used to stream services to SHS kids, except by not commenting on it: As was said, silence implies consent--she did not object to that practice, therefore, she is willing to allow it.

To the great credit of the Board, nobody tried to make the argument made by Samuel Alito and John Roberts, that if a local government decides to fund any form of private school when it allocates funds for the education of kids in its community, it cannot "discriminate" against religious schools, as if that invidious comparison between racial "discrimination" and religious "discrimination" actually is not obscene. "Discrimination" when it comes to race, of course is directed at something the Black child and parents cannot help, cannot change, their own skin color. Discrimination in how we hand out taxpayer dollars, is a different thing entirely, because that word is about the distinction we make between people who do not have a choice and those who do.You can send your kid to a school where religion is never mentioned, pro or con, or send your kid to a religious school for a religious education. That is a choice, and we can make a distinction between religious schools where kids are taught about Jesus Christ and, possibly about the "sin of homosexuality," and public schools where neither of these are mentioned.

During the discussion of the warrant article, an amendment to give the same amount to any religious school requesting funds as is given to the Catholic school was proposed but  was rejected with the argument that then Hampton might have to fund a "Church of Satan" school. 

Which is to say, in Hampton, we only fund churches we like.

And so, there we have it. Taxpayers for Religious Education.

John F. Kennedy must be rolling over in his grave.

Gazza: How You Tell The Story

 When Amna Nawaz opens every PBS News Hour with a story and the accompanying images of the children killed in the day's Israeli bombing of a Gazza Hospital, how much difference does it make if she adds, after the first few sentences, "Israel says Hamas has established its control center in the tunnels beneath the hospital"?

Amna Nawaz

By the time you get to this Israeli explanation, which is not presented as an established fact but as a lame explanation, you are so stunned by the suffering of the children and their parents, nothing can undo the story of the dead children, not even the story that Hamas may be hiding behind the skirts of women and children.

I've watched PBS News Hour every day since the October 7 attack by Hamas and yesterday, more than a month into the reporting, was the first time I ever saw images of the teenagers who were fleeing Hamas at that concert, who were sprayed with gasoline and set afire so only their crispy critter bodies were visible, barely recognizable, and that was on a cell phone of an Israeli soldier being interviewed about his attempts to go to the concert site to try to rescue civilians under attack. And that interview was deep into the News Hour. By that time, I imagine, many viewers were pretty numb.

Israeli Babies burned by Hamas

And nothing was said about the moral difference, if there is one, between the direct intention to immolate children by the Hamas attackers and the willingness of the Israelis to kill children inadvertently, in an attempt to kill Hamas.

Is there a difference between the man who aims his gun to shoot and kill a child and the man who drops a bomb, knowing he may well kill a child, but who drops it anyway? One intends to kill the child; the other is simply willing to allow it to happen.

Ms. Nawaz did a longish interview with a woman who heads an organization which tracks the deaths of journalists in war zones and she noted the high number of casualties among Palestinian journalists in Gazza and she says we cannot get a clear picture of what is actually happening there, if Israel keeps killing journalists trying to report from Gazza.

At which point, I found myself asking: What on God's green earth are journalists doing there, if not expecting they might be killed? Again, is are the Israelis intentionally killing journalists? This is the tacit implication.

And then there was the bit where a Palestinian journalist, wearing his blue "Press" helmet, tears it off, and also his flak vest, and exclaims: "They care nothing about the martyred children!"

Wait. "Martyred" children? 

How about dead children? 

As soon as he calls them "martyred" you might ask whether or not this is a "journalist,"  a reporter, or a propagandist. 

In fact, to her credit, Ms. Nawaz did ask someone about the claim most Palestinian "journalists" make no pretense of objectivity and have become propagandists.

John Hersey was a journalist when he wrote "Hiroshima" and his report on what happened to the children there never strayed into the "martyred" territory. What he reported, with no adjectives, just simple declarative sentences, was horrifying enough.

The real story, of course, is that total war, which is what Hamas launched and Israel responded to, is by its nature going to kill as many or more innocent civilians as it does soldiers, just as Americans and Brits did at Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and as Americans did with their fire bombing of Japan even before Hiroshima. In fact, the author of the Japanese bombing, Curtis Lemay, took his show to Vietnam and continued killing women and children from the air in that theater. 

The story which I'd like to see reported is what the Israelis hope to accomplish. We keep hearing interviews with the words, "We have to destroy Hamas," as if you can kill every last Hamas fighter and expect that to destroy Hamas. Can you kill an idea?

Some PBS person did ask some Israeli about that and he replied, "Well, you Americans won your war on terrorism, after 9/11. You killed ISIS and all the leaders of Al Qaeda." But nobody followed up with a question about, "Really? What happened in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did we really win there?"

Read Christopher Hitchens in 2009: he said the combination of a very Right Wing Israeli government which encouraged settlement of disputed land in the West Bank and a Palestinian insurrection which rejects the Palestinian Authority's willingness to accept the existence of Israel, is a potent bomb waiting to explode. 

And that was 2009. 

Can the rise of Bibi Netanyahu and his Right Wing be unrelated to the appeal of Hamas?

I have no way of knowing what the issues are in Gazza and Israel. All I know is that, unlike other foreign imbroglio's, like Bosnia and Kosovo and Ukraine and Afghanistan and, most especially, Vietnam, where I thought by reading and listening and watching the reports coming out of those areas from war correspondents like Kurt Shork and others, I had the sense I was getting a story which might be comprehensible.

Kurt Shork 

With Gazza, I have no such sense. 

It's a hot mess and our best press, PBS News, even though they've sent Nick Shiffrin and Ms. Nawaz over there occasionally, have done nothing to really inform. In some effort to appear objective, they have opened themselves to reasonable suspicion of being biased by the horrible sights of dead Palestinian children.

They do interview people who keep saying things like, "We need a humanitarian pause!" And I keep thinking: What do these people actually know? I know as much as this dumbo.

And it's not like the Palestinians do not have a valid complaint, going right back to 1948. 

But where are the stories about the complexities of that history? 

And where is the penetrating discussion you might have had if Christopher Hitchens were still alive.

It was Hitchens, after all, who observed: Many nations today have had their origins in a crime, or at least in some injustice. The question is how do you proceed now?

PBS has interviewed all the government officials and NGO talking heads, but the real penetrating analysis by people like Hitchens is distinctly absent.  Too many empty suits on The News Hour. What they need is to figure out who are the folks who really might help America understand this conundrum and put them on. 

So far, all they've got is David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, and to their great credit, they at least do not try to say more than they know.

Children Dying in Gazza: That's What War Is, You Know...

 

Images of children dead and dying, or simply stunned into silence, coming out of Gazza are horrific, no matter what your background. 

Any human being has got to respond to these.

Gazza

Since the advent of total war, civilian casualties, the slaughter of innocents, has become a constant, and yet, curiously, sometimes we are focused on these deaths and sometimes not; sometimes we totally ignore the deaths of children, mothers, innocents and sometimes it's all we hear about.

Some have noticed you never see a Hamas soldier in any of the photos coming out of Gazza. It may be the images have been controlled and restricted by Hamas, so the war looks as if it is being waged exclusively against defenseless women and children, so there may be some manipulation by the Hamas propaganda machine. 

Oddly, the Israeli women and children killed by Hamas with it's surprise attack which started the war are nowhere to be seen.

 But the fact remains, children have died and are dying still in Gazza.

Gazza

Watching PBS News Hour and listening to NPR, my impression is that Israel is committing senseless war crimes out of sheer rage, or possibly out of carelessness or simple indifference.

Hirsoshima

And yet, I have asked myself, are children, their mothers and women not always part of the casualty lists in modern wars?  Once total war is launched, is it not guaranteed that innocents will be slaughtered?

Tokyo

Were no children killed at Hiroshima?

Did American and British bombers not kill women and children in Dresden?

Dresden

Did no children die in the London Blitz, when Germany bombed England? 

London

We distinguish between those children killed by American soldiers when they massacred Indian children in their villages at Wounded Knee and other reservations from those killed inadvertently in bombings. It's hard to know, but from what reports we have, the Hamas soldiers swept through villages killing children and raping women in something more akin to Wounded Knee than to the London Blitz.

When children were "collateral damage" from American firebombing of Japanese cities, we never saw photos of that. Children deliberately imprisoned in concentration camps are clearly a crime, but children who die as bombs explode at a wedding in Afghanistan or Iraq, those are just accidents.

Nanking

But Palestinian children are dying in what we do not excuse as accidents. 

Through all this,  at my back, in my ears, I always hear ringing those immortal words of Slim Charles in "The Wire:"  

"That's what war is, you know."

Joe Biden Wins New Hampshire Primary By Write-In Landslide

 

Now, here's a bit of bizarre exotica which could only happen in New Hampshire, the most perverse and cantankerous state in New England. The Live Free or Die, don't tell me what to think state.

Just imagine: It's January 23, 2024, and the official ballot for Democratic candidates for President does not have the name of Joseph R. Biden printed on it. It has Marianne Williamson and a variety of other odd fellows on it, but no Joseph Biden.

Once the ballots are counted no delegates to the National Convention will be awarded or seated at the Democratic National Convention that summer because by holding its election on that date, New Hampshire Democrats have defied the Democratic National Committee which has decreed that the first in the nation primary will happen in South Carolina. 

The reason the DNC did this is because the leader of the Party, namely President Joseph Robinette Biden lost ignominiously in the last New Hampshire primary--came in 5th in fact, and he left the state before the polls closed so he could fly down and start his campaign in South Carolina, where no Democrat has had a snowball's chance in Hell of winning in the Presidential election, but where a Black minority voted to give him his first Democratic primary victory. 

South Carolina is no more representative of the United States demographically than is New Hampshire and has no business having the first in the nation primary, which is an honor which translates into millions of dollars for advertising in local TV markets, hotels and restaurants.  So, the loss of the first in the nation status is a thumb in the eye of New Hampshire, and a hit to the wallet.

Given all that, why would 600,000 New Hampshire citizens trudge out in the snow and wind on January 23 to write in the name of the man who spurned them, once they had spurned him? It's like the man who saw his spouse of 40 years walk out on him, and a year later, he shows up at her wedding to her new husband, carrying a bouquet of her favorite flowers and an envelop with a fat check for the new bride.

Why would New Hampshire Democratic primary voters do this?

Because they are sick of all the news stories about how Joe Biden is all washed up, cooked, toasted, punch drunk and won't last a round against Donald Trump, who leads him in every poll in every swing state. 

And Granite Staters just don't like being ignored. They are going to make some news on fake primary day, and with the landslide, by write in, this is a news story no media outlet can resist. 

Folks in New Hampshire just love sticking the glossy media types in the eye.

So, take that, DNC. Do you miss us yet, Joe? And ignore us at your peril, FOX News. 

It's better than the town which elects the dead man mayor. This state, spurned, rejected, written off, forgotten, votes by write in ballot of all things, for the walking dead.

Don't tread on me. Live Free or Die. Stand Fast.  Regnant Populi. 

What Rep. Boebert Knows: Separation of Church and State Ain't No Thing

 Standing before a crowd of 300 Hampton citizens, on two occasions over the past two years, I have seen the eyes of at least 200 citizens in that crowd, on each occasion, staring back at me blankly, as I urged them to embrace the separation of church and state. 

These occasions were the meetings to vote on a warrant article which allocates taxpayer funds to pay for a Catholic church school in town.

These 200 odd citizens had pulled on their winter coats and boots and driven to the Academy, where the meetings are held to vote money for their Catholic church school and no amount of persuasion, no appeal to reason was going to change their minds. They came to vote for their church and that was that.

To these folks "separation of church and state" was an affront to their fate. By saying the state should not write checks to support their beloved institution the clear message was there is something wrong with their church in the eyes of those who would erect a wall between church and state.

If the church is a good thing, then why would you not want the state to embrace this good thing?

I pointed out that the Constitution says, government "shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion."

But Lauren Boebert, a United States Representative (R-CO) has said: "I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk. This is not in the Constitution, it was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does." 

And, it's pretty clear, that's where those 200 citizens are.  What does it mean to make no law respecting the establishment of religion any way?

Does it mean if you want to make a law respecting the establishment of religion, to forbid establishing a religion, well then, you cannot do that?

I mean, if the government should stay separate from all churches, why not just say that?

Boebert was right about that stinking letter, which was written by Thomas Jefferson, who was always hostile to churches becoming involved in politics. He really did not like organized religion, and he wanted to keep churches in America from playing the same role churches in Europe had played in God and Country type countries like England, France, Spain, Italy and Russia.

Trying to "separate" churches from state funding is an act of hostility. If the citizens of Hampton want to vote money to pay for computers and religious festivals at the church school, well isn't that their right to do that? It's their taxpayer money, after all. 

And, they're right, at the core. The reason Jefferson and I both fear the Church immersed in government is the history of what happens when you have that: holy wars, wars over religion, governments ruled by Ayatollahs which beat women to death for refusing to cover their hair, blood baths in Jerusalem as Crusaders chop at Muslim defenders, beheadings by crazed jihadists defending their faith. But as soon as you go down that road, you are saying the church can do harm rather than good and you've lost them.

"Who are these people who are objecting to giving money to the Church of the Miraculous Medal?," they ask. The Church of the Miraculous Medal has never done any of those things.

It's true, that church removed books from its book sale that depicted homosexual behavior, but homosexuals are sinners who have made a bad choice, and the Church is simply protecting its children.

The Church is a good thing. People in town love the Church.  Who are these protesters who hate this beloved church?

Looking into those uncomprehending, offended faces of the good folk of Hampton, I knew a lost cause when I saw one.

To these folks, words like "the Constitution" or "the first amendment" or "the establishment clause" were all just incomprehensible abstractions. All they knew is they loved their church and I was trying to take money away from their church and they wanted that money.

If the Church is good, then why would you want to defund it?