First Amendment

A Special Kind of Nuts


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North Carolina’s recently introduced House Joint Resolution 494 tells us that, “.  .  .  each state is sovereign and may independently determine how the state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion .  .  . ,” and that, “.  .  . the North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.”  It seems that the state of North Carolina may soon be free of that pesky First Amendment, right up until the time that the Supreme Court of the United States lets them know in a 9 – 0 decision that they are a special kind of nuts.  That will be the end of a legal process that will have cost the state of North Carolina millions of dollars over a brainless political ploy.

Elsewhere, the good citizens of North Dakota will have the scientifically interesting prospect of voting on a new amendment to their state constitution in November, 2014.  The science connection exists because their duly elected state legislators just voted to place on that ballot a referendum for a state amendment that would declare that a human egg penetrated by a sperm is a human being immediately upon their connecting and it has all the unalienable rights of citizenship.  It’s called the “personhood amendment” to their state constitution.

Not to be outdone, the braniacs in the state legislature of Kansas have overwhelmingly passed a bill that declares human life to begin “at fertilization.”  Further, the Kansas legislation will proscribe the information that doctors must provide to pregnant women and to those who might become pregnant, apparently believing that the politicians know more about medicine than do the physicians.

Note that Kansas is the home of the State Board of Education that a few years ago declared that evolution is just a theory.  The board mandated the teaching of “intelligent design,” which is creationism in a different wrapper.  I haven’t checked their genealogical charts, but I suspect that those Kansas Board of Education members are related through unhealthy intermarriage to the geniuses in North Carolina who think it’s okay for them to establish a state religion.

The most poignant part of the current “personhood” effort in Kansas was provided by State Senator Steve Fitzgerald (R – Leavenworth), who is quoted as saying, “The human is a magnificent piece of work at all stages of development .  .  .“  Who could argue with that?

The problem, of course, is the stage of development we’re talking about.  It appears that the Republican legislatures of those states and those of about 13 others doing similar things had their development arrested around the Pleistocene era, about the time the first human beings scratched on the walls of caves.

Senator Fitzgerald, you and your fellow mental luddites in governments all around America are, indeed, a piece of work, a special kind of nuts.

After the 9/11 attack we heard demands from the Muslim extremist world for a return to the fundamentals of Islam, as they understood them.  These are the same principles that punish petty theft by hacking off a hand of the perp and which make women the property of men.  We decried their backward demands as an attempt to return to primitive, dark ages ways.  Yet here we are in America doing the same kind of regression.

It falls to those of us who think that science and learning are good things and who accept actual, fact-based reality to figure out what is behind this national rush to primitive thinking and then to redirect America to a sane path.  So, you better help others remember the current insanity when it’s time to vote in November, 2014 and 2016.  If you let these primitive deniers of reality off the hook, things will get worse.


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

You Can’t Tell Me What To Do


Back in colonial days there was a powerful and well-grounded fear and loathing of central authority, this stemming from very bad experiences with King George III.  He had a habit of controlling the lives of the colonists in ways they did not appreciate and they fundamentally disliked being told what to do.

Following the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation was the binding document among the 13 states.  It allowed for a pitiful central government that was barely able to function because nearly all power was in the hands of the states in the name of “states rights.”  The Articles of Confederation was so puny that General George Washington balked at it.  Ten years later the Constitution was hammered out and it gave the central government the muscle it needed to do what central governments must do.

They called it “states rights” another time and the Civil War erupted.  Of course, the economic costs and social issues of slavery and its abolishment were the heart of the dispute, but there was a powerful rebellion against authority that helped to fuel passions.  That passion lives on today in the hearts of those who call the Civil War the “Northern War of Aggression.”  That battle – the “you can’t tell me what to do” resistance – has continued unbroken, not just in the south, and today it has become nearly as virulent as at any time in our history.  Indeed, it is the ultimate wedge issue.

Since President Obama took office the Republicans have primarily been a stop sign even to things they formerly proposed, endorsed and co-sponsored.  The result has been legislative stagnation in the face of enormous national need.  What is even more telling is the language that has accompanied their obstruction.  It can be simply described as, “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Most recently the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act has elicited histrionic claims of a war on religion and violation of the First Amendment.  The proudly independent types bellow that the government can’t tell them what to do and it most certainly can’t tell their church anything, either.  Let this example be a placeholder for a key cause of the resistance to reform of anything in Washington and it will be pretty close to the center of the bulls eye.

Surely, there is room for discussion about the implications of requiring institutions owned or run by churches (not the churches themselves) to include birth control in their health care insurance plans for employees.  Suggesting that this is a war on religion, though, is hyperbolic nonsense and stubbornly railing against authority raises the question yet again:  Can the government tell us what to do?

Irrespective of your personal preferences, the government says that you may not own a nuclear weapon.  The government requires you to stop at stop signs.  The government says that you may not poison your neighbor’s dog even if he barks through the night (the dog, not the neighbor).  The government says that if you run a meat packing plant that you must follow rules of cleanliness and you can’t include in your sausage the rat that fell into the kettle.

The point is that we have laws and regulations because, as the saying goes, your absolute freedom stops at the tip of my nose.  That means that we must have some agreement about what each of us may do, what each of us may not do and what all of us must do in order to have a civil society and to arrange for what is best for all of us.  That comes at some expense to each of us, surely in the abridgment of our absolute freedom.  The absence of those laws, though, would be far worse than the presence of them.  The trick, of course, lies in finding the middle ground that serves best.

So, yes, Virginia, the government can tell you what to do.  You have the right to not like it.  You have the right to attempt to change the laws.  And you have the right to obey the laws or suffer the consequences of violating them.

But for those who want to push back against anything Obama, please be considerate of the 80% of Americans who don’t want to hear histrionics like “war on religion,” nor do we want to hear the latest installment of “You can’t tell me what to do.”  The battle that has real value is the battle for the kind of America we want this to be for all Americans, not just the impassioned, vocal few.

“Remember that knowing a tomato is a fruit is knowledge, but knowing not to put it into a fruit salad is wisdom.”       Dan Keding


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

The Means, The End and Freedom


I was reading a news magazine recently about Pat Robertson, former candidate for President of the United States, owner of the Family Channel on cable TV, and head of the very conservative Christian Coalition.  It said that he plans to go to Congress and introduce an amendment to the Constitution that would allow “moments of silence” in public schools.  It said he figures this should be acceptable because he thinks it doesn’t violate the principle of separation of church and state in that it doesn’t prescribe prayer in school, just moments of silence.  That scares me.

I remember my mother telling me when I was young that the end doesn’t justify the means.  I think there’s sound wisdom in that.

Don’t  get me wrong:  I like the idea of instilling family values.  I like the idea of mom and dad marrying and raising children to be positive, healthy, contributing members of society.  These are good things, as I see them.  And, as I understand the people of the religious right, I think these are the kind of family values that they want and which most of us agree with.  But achieving the end of instilling family values does not justify whatever means are used to achieve them.  History teaches us that from such well intentioned actions have come some of the cruelest hatred and oppression.

In Sam Keen’s new book, Hymns to an Unknown God, he says that when people,  “ . . . claim to possess the only true revelation of God, they provide themselves with a theological justification for war.  There is a high degree of correlation between true believers, known gods and high body counts.”  If you have trouble with that, review your history book for what happened in the Roman Empire, during the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades, and even today in Rwanda and Bosnia.  In each case, the true believers started with what seemed like good intent and eventually used it to generate high body counts.  Somehow we humans always seem to gravitate that way and I don’t think that we in the United States are somehow immune to that terrible gravity.

So far, we’ve managed to avoid legally declaring this to be a country of one particular religion, thus leaving room for all of us and our potpourri of beliefs.  We’re all the richer and safer for it.  Our Constitution mandates that there be no laws restricting freedom of religion.  That prohibition is there because the people who crafted the Constitution came from places where there was no such protection and they knew full well the terrible price that is eventually paid when religion and the state are mixed.

We as a nation have consistently said that freedom of religion also means freedom for all religion and from religion.  That specifically means that we have the right to practice religion as we see fit, but that freedom does not give us the right to force others to do as we do.  Institutionalized “moments of silence” in our public schools would violate that freedom with a tacit instruction to pray in the prescribed manner.

The place for formal prayer in schools is in private institutions; prayer doesn’t belong in the state arena.  I don’t want prayer in public schools forced on anyone’s children.  I don’t want us to take this step backward to having a state-endorsed We and They society.  Indeed, it’s taken decades of civil rights work for us to agree that we can all eat at the same restaurants, use the same seats on busses and not be subject to employment discrimination based on gender and race.  Let’s continue to break down the We versus They mentality, not build it up again.

I don’t want those who want us to conform to their views to use principles that most of us support to manipulate us because it will inevitably lead us into a downward spiral.  The end does not justify the means.  What history teaches us is that when true believers attempt to force us to their way, their means will likely separate us and become the beginning of the end.  And that end is cruel and, ironically, even god-less.


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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