I have seen it done in a number of places dealing with a number of issues.

Fanatics, in order to solidify their positions or beliefs, will be so concentrated on throwing things out there to support them, but in their fast and furious approach to vomiting up polices and statements they believe supports them, the rapidity leaves no room to review as they flit from one statement to another like a bee with flowers in a garden and never see that while individual statements may stand alone and appear solid, when connected with other statements on the same issue they are contradictory.

Take Governor DeSantis.

The Guv recently suspended the Hillsborough County Attorney, Andrew Warren, who signed a letter along with other state and county attorneys saying they would not prosecute any women seeking an abortion from their doctors and would protect transgender minors undergoing gender transition treatment.

The statement is somewhat theoretical as no such laws exist in Florida, but perhaps such a letter might engender a real discussion and any laws dealing with these two topics might results for reasoned thinking and discussion, not politico-religious propaganda.

Desantis responded by suspending the elected county official claiming, “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law. We are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida.”

He has proudly announced a number of times that Florida is a law and order state, after all.

However, while objecting to a county official making it known he has problems with two as yet nonexistent laws in Florida and hopes this will create discussion before knee-jerk political laws are passed, Desantis has said nothing about the Florida sheriffs who have vowed not to enforce gun control laws they oppose and believe are unconstitutional, even the ones that already exist.

It would seem the greater crime in Florida is saying you will not follow an as yet nonexistent law as opposed to refusing to follow existing ones that you do not agree with while declaring you are law enforcement officers.
Florida has its share of sheriffs who have declared they will not follow laws they do not agree with.

One Florida sheriff has stated he wouldn’t enforce a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would require owners of semiautomatic weapons to register them with the state if it were to be adopted, and DeSantis let that go.

Same circumstances in both instances, but one supports people while one supports guns.

Not only has he suspended this county attorney, but he has called for a statewide review because he is concerned prosecutors selectively enforce laws based on their political beliefs, although this Florida county attorney was the only one on the state signing the letter.

Another nonproblem in need of a solution from those who avoid dealing with real issues.

DeSantis has a new cause.

Although the governor can suspend state and county officers for malfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony and the Florida Senate decides whether to permanently remove the officer, while DeSantis based his move on his charging the county attorney citing ‘neglect of duty’ and ‘incompetence’ he has not taken any similar steps with any outspoken sheriffs who have made their selective, politically based intention of not enforcing laws with which they do not agree very open and public.

The charge is presumptive non enforcement of certain criminal violations, including trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication and prostitution but does not cite any cases of the attorney having done any of this, basing the removal solely on the attorney’s policy positions as no cases involving abortion or gender-transition treatments have come before him.

Beside sharing the same Atlantic coast line, what is the connection to Massachusetts and, specifically, Bristol County?

The sharing of the belief that a county sheriff can decide which laws they will enforce based on personal, political. and religious beliefs.

The law is the great equalizer, or so we are told, as everyone must follow it and everyone is, theoretically, punished equally for breaking it. The truth of this, however, comes into question if a county sheriff makes it clear that everyone must follow the law, but he can decide which ones he will enforce and which he will follow.

Testifying at a meeting of the Massachusetts House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, when Sanctuary Cities and Safe Communities were being discussed, Sheriff Thomas Hodgson of Bristol County stated that arrest warrants should be issued for elected officials of such communities even though no law bans them from supporting Sanctuary Cities as correctly defined.

When ICE agents began going into court houses to make arrests over civil immigration violations even though the person might have just been acquitted of the crime for which he was in court and no one had requested ICE be in the court for any reason, seeing that among other things such a practice could keep people who had an important role in a court proceeding from going to court and thus interfering with the proper execution of justice, Boston-area public safety officials and advocates filed a lawsuit to stop ICE from doing this as it had, among other things, an adverse effect on enforcing the law.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson had something to say about that,

“Shame on the elected officials and pro-illegal advocates for filing this frivolous lawsuit, which seeks to make it more difficult for federal law enforcement officers to apprehend criminal illegal aliens.”

He loves the phrase “Criminal illegal aliens” because it is packed with subliminal bigotry.

When Trump made the rigged elections the cornerstone of his reelection campaign leading up to the actual election, Sheriff Hodgson, the honorary state co-chair of the Trump reelection campaign, made it clear that he and his deputies and specialty units were prepared to go to the polls to guarantee a fair election. He was ready to play his part in helping to set up the plan to claim that in the event Trump lost, it was because the election was rigged or fraudulent, or perhaps, make sure they were at least questionable by inserting chaos into a traditionally staid event.

By state law no one other than the local law enforcement department performs security duties at polling places, and other groups could only join if the locals call for help.

To help Trump, though, the sheriff wanted to ignore this law because it interfered with his political agenda, he let it be known that he did not like that law and boasted about ignoring it. He claimed he was law enforcement to stretch the law to cover himself even though he is not law enforcement but the administrator of a county jail and its operation, and this made it clear to the state legislature it needed to make the existing law more obvious even to the most dense among us. A state representative proposed an amendment to add sheriffs to those who needed to stay at least 300 feet away from a polling station.

The sheriff was going to have none of that. He wanted to just go right in where he had absolutely no reason to be as there was already security watching over the voters and poll workers and he voiced his objection to this amendment, announcing that if the law were to be amended, he would ignore it.

As the man who insists the public should respect the law put it,

“No legislator is going to tell me when I can and cannot respond to someone who needs protection. I will not stand down!”

Well, again, the law says he can respond to someone who needs protection, and this case the person requesting such protection would be local law enforcement calling for back up.

The report from the state Attorney General’s Office dealing with the disturbance at the ICE detention center in May of 2020 on the sheriff’s main facility campus found,

”The Bristol County Sheriff Office’s calculated use of force included the use of a variety of less-lethal but dangerous weapons— including a flash bang grenade, pepper-ball launchers, pepper spray canisters, anti-riot shields, and canines—against detainees who had exhibited calm and nonviolent behavior for at least an hour before this operation. The BCSO deployed these weapons both indiscriminately upon entry and also specifically against particular detainees who were not combative, assaultive, or otherwise actively resisting staff. Informing our conclusion that the BCSO’s use of force was excessive.”

“The BCSO violated the civil rights of the detainees …… by using excessive force against the ICE B detainees and by acting with deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of serious injury or harm to the detainees and their health.”The report included a list of recommendations to improve conditions and avoid potential repeats.

This paragon of law and order and the respect those who enforce it deserve responded with,

“shame on Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey for demonizing the corrections and law enforcement professionals at the Bristol County Sherriff’s Office with her latest politically motivated stunt” that was “littered with baseless allegations and assumptions, and was clearly written and released to advance her long-documented anti-ICE, pro-illegal immigrant political agenda.”The day after the incident, at a hastily called press conference, the sheriff welcomed any investigation because all evidence would show that while the detainees were the spawn of Satan, he had been the paragon of order and reason. However when the evidence showed otherwise and the report and recommendations were issued, he declared it was “halfway down the sewer pipe. That’s about how much value I put into the attorney general’s recommendations.”

 “How dare she say she expects me to follow them.” 

The basis of his attitude, and the inherent danger in it is clear from his being one of the first six county sheriffs across the country to join the Protect America Now organization whose founder justified its need because,

“I had a lot of fellow sheriffs that felt the same way. We want to be able to stand up for the rule of law in this country. We want to be able to fight against bad policies and orders like we’re seeing with the immigration stuff.”

Standing up for the rule of law only includes those laws they agree with.

As we read about Constitutional Sheriffs and others who claim as law enforcement they will only obey the laws with which they agree and think it is not our concern because Massachusetts is an enlightened state, we have to accept that some people are not all that enlightened.

The Bristol County sheriff, the man who insists he keeps the people of the county safe by enforcing the laws with the necessary toughness, and who wants only the toughest of laws to be passed when it comes to those below him while insisting that citizens must obey the law and those who enforce it, while telling those same citizens either because he knows he can get away with it, or foolishly by letting his words get ahead of deep thinking, that he himself only obeys those laws with which he agrees and will continue to do so with all future laws.

This is not Florida.

But there are those who would betray the ongoing spirit of Massachusetts for the cult.

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Meanwhile, Hillary sips her tea and James Comey’s self-esteem takes a hit.

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For those who had not taken much notice at the time, those who did at the time but may now have put it in the recesses of their minds, and as younger people may need to be told, over the last 20 years when things like climate change, alternative energy, new understanding of humans were discussed, the GOP stood in opposition beginning each speech, large or small, big crowd or congressional chamber with opening words in some form of “I am not a scientists but….” and then launching into supporting or opposing a bill because it went contrary to what they think the science is when they had just let it be known that they had no knowledge of it, so their arguments based on it actually had no foundation.

A classic example was Senator Inhoff of Oklahoma announcing he was not a scientist before holding up a snowball he had made on the way into the capitol building from the snow on the ground outside and, while attempting to be serious and using the snowball as physical proof, threw the snowball to the president of the senate asserting that if global warming was real, he would not have that snowball. Assuming this proved him right very dramatically, he actually proved that because he was not a scientist his statement was incorrect as he had a woefully poor grasp of the difference between climate and weather. 

If he had listened to the people telling him things instead of arguing with them, he might not have looked so blatantly stupid without realizing how blatant it was.

By the way, bringing a projectile into the senate chamber with the intention of throwing it at a member is not Kosher. 

I do not know how to play Yahtzee. How stupid would I be if while someone was showing me how to play so I can join the other players, I kept interrupting with my opinion of the rules instead of just learning them and then deciding at the end of the explanation that the game was too stupid to play, not because of its actual rules, but because of my irrelevant opinion of the rules  based on my irrelevant questions and my not hearing how the game was actually played. 

You do not follow asking for someone to explain something to you with forcing them to wade through the rip current of arguments, interruptions and unnecessary opining.

Just a week or two ago, when anxiety was being expressed about Clarence Thomas’s dissent reference to rescinding Marriage Equality, rather that ask his Gay constituents about their fears, even if it was just to look like he cared but while being told things was thinking of other things in his head like his shopping list and only heard “blah blah blah”, with the possibility to learn things if he couldn’t think of a way to distract himself, he decided that not only was the issue of protecting Marriage Equality simply a “stupid waste of time,” but that as a Senator in DC, whereas he focuses on “federal problems that matter to real people,” like the price of food, inflation, employment which those in Same Sex Marriages, not being real, apparently, are not affected without mentioning he had voted against their solutions. no one cares about Marriage Equality except “a bunch of affluent elite liberals” and a “bunch of Marxist misfits, who sadly today control the agenda of the modern Democratic Party.”

He jumped in the pool again when in attempting to sidetrack a bill being debated by introducing an irrelevant amendment which he formulated ignoring the information that is out there but, rather than look at it, he chooses to continue to base his reason on what he has always thought while everyone around him sees him falling behind.

I am not a Gender expert and, like most people of my age group, as I grew up you were either a Straight man, a Straight woman, you better be one of those, a Gay man, or a Gay woman. There were other categories, but they were so far in the shadows that even those in those categories did not always know why or if they should even be there. For Gay activists the community was simple. Two letters, G and L.

Then the little known became more known and I, as we all should, had to begin learning the subgroups within “my people’. I will admit the simple division was easier to handle because the easiest way to explain things to the willing was just pointing out who you had sex with, all else being the same.

Now, there are so may legitimate nuances to gender that I have arrived at the age and accompanying realization that I am too old to learn everything new, but I can learn what I can and not judge people by what I don’t know or just haven’t learned yet.

Although familiar with Two Spirit people, special thanks to Sue in OKC, I cannot grasp the concept fully and have to understand it according to my ability to do because of cultural differences. My knowledge is limited so my opinion is worthless and any treatment based on that is immoral.

Little Marco thinks otherwise.

During debate on the Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday, Rubio offered an amendment related to Transgender people.

I am sad to have to admit there is a part of me that has some nostalgia for the days when that would have been “The Gays”, but time moves on. I must accept the dethronement.

Displaying his total lack of information and lack of a basic understanding of what “Transgender” is about, something by this time is deliberately chosen ignorance, Rubes, offered an amendment to a bill dealing with climate change, inflation, and prescription drug prices to ban people who aren’t “biological females” from accessing pregnancy care programs.

Doctor and long-time professor of gender studies Marco Rubio explained,

 “The only people who are capable of being pregnant are biological females, and, therefore, I think federal biolo- federal pregnancy programs should be limited to biological females, and that’s what this would do.”

It would also seem there is a huge number of Trans Women “the likes of which the world has never seen before”, of Trans women faking pregnancies to get benefits and prenatal care and scamming the government. 

Not to wax nostalgic, but Gays were once told that if we got our rights especially as applicable to Gay school students, there would be Gay people popping up everywhere filing lawsuits and bankrupting Straight people, the real people, with our greed, having been created in those great numbers in the moment.  

At least with the migrant caravans you can see them coming. With the Gays then and the Trans people now, it’s like the reverse Rapture.

Whoop. There it is.  

In reality, this amendment was just a ploy.

Rubio needed a hot button issue that he could form into an amendment and by offering it and getting senators all riled about an irrelevant issue, slow the progress of the debate and ultimately help in killing the bill.

The GOP senators are obsessed with Transgender people in a negative way, like they are with everyone else’s sex and private lives, so this was like chicken thrown to the Gators at a Florida attraction.

Rather odd too that a man who had stated with certainty that he focuses on “federal problems that matter to real people” like the price of food, inflation, employment, attempted to introduce the opportunity to exercise bigotry into a debate on a national bill dealing with climate change, inflation, and prescription drug prices .

It would seem under the circumstances that this amendment was a “stupid waste of time“, but he had an airtight, historically based, rationale for the amendment and explained it without hyperbole,

“I looked back across 5,500 years of human history, so far, every single pregnancy has been a biological female, and so, therefore, the only thing I’m trying to do is make sure that federal law is clear, since every pregnancy that’s ever has been in a biological female, that our federal laws reflect that.”

And he knows this to be true after having consulted the extant record of every human birth for the last 5,500 years and all the details of the circumstances around each as well.

When his amendment failed he spun the loss by claiming,

“Senate Democrats insist men can get pregnant.”

Does he know that while there are only cisgender people in his world, in the real one we also have Trans women and Trans men in various stages of transition and other existing gender variants? 

The world is not as black and white as Marco needs it to be. His world is his safe space.

Although claiming he is all about national issues that affect real people, Marco is up for reelection in a state obsessed with all things GLBT and all the letters I skipped.

DeSantis doesn’t want anyone in Florida, most especially himself, to know there are Gay people there. It was hard enough hiding the alligators in the swamp property for sale, but no one can know the Gays are here.

State Republicans passed the Don’t Say Gay bill that bans discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in younger grades, restricts such discussions in older grades, and ignores there are Gay students, some students with same gender parents although they themselves are straight, some students with Gay friends, and some whose friends have same sex parents are in the room too.

 Florida’s Board of Medicine voted to begin the process of banning gender affirming medical care for both adults and minors in the state.

There’s money to be made in Abortion and Gender affirming treatment carpools and Uber vans.

Marco must feel that his position as candidate in Florida may have been weakened by his failure to clinch the anti-Transgender amendment or have it destroy the bill then somehow blaming Transgender people for the failure of the entire bill that would have been good for everyone.

This year a former city of residence reinstituted its Human Rights Ordinance and the Human Rights Commission after they had been done away with some 26 years ago when the city council avoided having to add Sexual Orientation to the city’s ordinance by rescinding the ordinance and removing human rights protections for all citizens and then blaming it on the greedy Gay’s whose demand for inclusion cost everyone.

So, yeah, it is a Republican thing reapplied.

But he still has time to try again to get some anti-Trans thing attached in the most irrelevant of places.

He needs redemption.

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It would appear that if the modern GOP ever really was in tune with the pulse of America, it may now have reached a point to often declare a corpse alive.

In it’s effort to create a crisis at first just in name only, like their declaring a crisis in education in the Reagan years with their false solutions to a false problem eventually producing a real, ongoing one begun big time under GW Bush based on a false remedy, cooking the books, that had a failing Texas school district appear to be saved by an approach to education that was impotent yet harmful, and then foisting it on the rest of the country. Besides reducing schools to test preparation centers, in the process, shop classes were eliminated because, according to the “experts'”rubric, kids not being told they need to go to college, but, instead, to pursue their natural talent for certain trades and find future success, is an attack on their self-esteem because teachers were telling them they were too stupid to go to college.

Education crisis?

Yep, they made sure of that and forced it on the rest of the country.

Assuming that the public believed its propaganda as much as the GOP had come to believe it themselves, they recently attempted to petulantly get back at the Dems for passing a law that was pro-people by voting against a second law they had originally voted for that would have helped the veterans the GOP claim they, and only they, really support.

The first law was intended to protect Marriage Equality after Clarence Thomas’s saying in his statement on Roe that now that abortion was dead, it’s time to go after Gay people again. The majority of the citizens of this country, the people congress represents, support marriage equality. With the GOP in the senate either not knowing that or, worse, ignoring it, they voted against it, making Thomas’s plan come a little closer.

MAGA!

The second was to provide the medical care necessary for the veterans that those who love them show their love for by sending them to fight wars and face all manner of injury to either maintain the beneficial status quo or get more stuff.

The backlash had them going back and changing their votes back to yes.

In both cases, they say they would have voted for both bills but there was something about them that was not strictly procedural so, golly, their hands were tied.

But they had the other big issue- abortion.

This has been the big goal, the thing that had been firing up the base since it was discovered after Roe v Wade that a “pro-life” stance could bring in big money to politicians, churches, and organizations with religious sounding names. Many attempts were made to rescind the law, but they failed, which may have been an overt failure but a covert success because the money that would have rolled in to fight Roe might stop coming in without it.

It finally took three nominated judges to lie under oath that Roe was established law that could not be rescinded so they could, and did, get on the Supreme Court and re-un-establish it.

The conservative pot was sweetened when Clarence Thomas added getting rid of Marriage Equality, and that meant the money would keep coming.

Conservative states jumped right in to pass draconian and now unchallengeable laws to restrict abortion, with some leading the pack by already having laws ready to kick in if Roe died.

They did the same with the Don’t Say Gay legislation that has been passed or proposed in various GOP run states, and, of course, they are doing this because that is what the people want.

And “by people” they mean their own fellow subscribers to one religion and one political view.

16 states are suing Florida because of the DeSantis anti-Gay law, one aspect of which, beyond the moral and Constitutional, is that beyond being based on folk-lore and political tropes that, like old Italian Jokes becoming the Polish Jokes by the mere switching of the joke’s nationality, is so vague as to be applicable to whatever enemy they need to replace the latest one lost. It promotes practices that can really hurt children and families and these hurting people can bring that to other states when they move and, let’s face it, would rely on local resources to fix what Florida broke and won’t fix.

We have people going to other states to get abortions and we will see parents moving for the sake of their children.

The claim that they represent the “American People” seems to be weak.

It got weaker when a Red State, a non-liberal, it-is-part-of-our-heritage-flag waving, non-East Coast, non-educated elite, god-fearing, American loving state, told the senate and the GOP that they are reading the signs wrong.

When Kansas seemed to be still Kansas and wanted to amend the state Constitution to ban abortions, in what is usually a poorly attended election, and so, a good one into which to slip something that would otherwise not pass, the voters rejected it.

It was the first election after the killing of Roe.

Linsdey Graham, I assume dealing with the vapors, was able to admit,

“It’s definitely a wake-up call for us.”

“Kansas, which is a pretty red state ― it’s hard to find the words. I think people should look at it,” was how Thom Tillis responded to a question about the vote.

When they wake up and look, they will see that the country favors Choice and that includes abortion, the reason for which is up to the woman and her healthcare provider.

With Thomas about to go after Marriage Equality, the GOP might have to accept that the old days are over and the people they speak for are either long since dead or living on the fringes.

Some GOP candidates might have been comfortable approaching the fall elections, but that comfort was established before the Supreme Court made its anti-citizen choice of religion over Constitution ruling with the new justices having been in a position to do so because of perjury.

It began with going after the Trans Community and spreading lies to create yet another threat they could use and modify as needed.

Some people woke up.

They came for voters’ rights.

They met resistance.

They came for the right to choose.

More awakened.

They lost the ability to go back to oppressing Gay people of any Letter.

The vet vote riled others.

When the draft of the Supreme Court decision that ended Roe leaked, the National Republican Senatorial Committee asked voters to choose between two poorly veiled exaggerated candidates, a Republican who supports “banning abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for the life and physical health of the mother or severe fatal abnormality of the baby,” or a Democrat who “supports unlimited abortion up until the moment of birth.”

However, the hypothetical Republican candidate does not exist in the Republican party and the only way to get people to reject abortion and support the Roe decision so as to have the GOP reaction to it justified as the opinion of the people was to ask a very loaded question that guaranteed the wanted results.

They weren’t teaching the public anything. They were hoping to validate their own belief in what America wants in spite of Americans’ constantly saying otherwise.

The Kansas vote was the real test, not the loaded question.

Of course, very revealing was Thom Tillis’ statement that showed that ignoring the people in favor of promoting ideologies with which they may not agree but the Party wants, is just not the way to go right now as they have riled the bears and elections are coming up.

“I do think it’s always best to be in touch with what your constituents support. Kansas has a 22-week ban. I think it’s a policy that a good number of Republicans seem to think is OK.”

Perhaps a lesson learned or the old one of acting one way before the vote and another after with the sequins and feathers removed revamped.

Only a fool would gamble.

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After a two-year hiatus imposed by Covid 19, the big Portuguese Festa in New Bedford is back on.

The Feast of the Blessed Sacrament is the largest Portuguese feast in the world as well as the largest ethnic festival in New England. People come from all over and the area of the Festa is just wall to wall people from Thursday to Sunday celebrating the contribution of immigrants to this country and the city more specifically who continue to come here for what the American Promise offers and with what they can offer it.

This year, however, there will be a big change at least when it comes to the parade.

The riot at his ICE Detention Center in Dartmouth in May of 2020 resulted in the federal government cancelling his ICE detention contract because an investigation of the incident showed that, in spite of the sheriff of Bristol County, Thomas Hodgson, consistently claiming he was the victim and something, something Trump, he had been using excessive force and denying the detainees their civil and human rights.

The treatment of his prisoners ignored the fact that, even if found to have come into the country improperly, that is, at best, a misdemeanor and does not merit torture both physical and mental.

This year, unlike in the past, Sheriff Hodgson will not be able to parade down the street celebrating immigrants by having his ICE squad and ICE command center and van the biggest part of his County Sheriff Office contingent, after the ICE agents spent the night before the Sunday parade randomly checking for undocumented immigrants among the people milling about on the streets surrounding the Festa Grounds, or perhaps heading for the car to go home.

It’s an election year, so whatever he brings to the parade will be an advertisement for him couched as part of his duties while he hopes people forget what he had done that affected people along the parade route.

I sincerely hope that this year, unlike in 2017 when he attended the Festa, he does not wear his badge and his holstered gun as he sips glasses of Madeira wine amidst a massive, crammed together crowd, all members of which, without exception, admire and respect him.

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The United States began as the colony of a country whose secular king was also the head of the country’s church.

Since its founding, every president of this country has been Christian, as has the majority of the house and senate, the justices Supreme Court, and the governors and legislatures of most states, if not the majority of them. We have slapped “In God We Trust” on a lot of things, added Him to the secular Pledge of Allegiance, have people swear on Bibles for any number of reasons, and have to deal with just wanting to watch a football game but have to either get coerced into praying or have our time taken up by watching a coach pray.

And, yet, Christians in the United States claim they are being persecuted.

By whom?

Their own?

In a word, “Yes”

The claim in this country is basically that persecution consists of not letting religion run the country according to its dictates and disagreeing with Christians on political and personal matters. Persecution could be merely a matter of having expressed an opinion and sticking to it in spite of the other person invoking Jesus in a Caesar situation.

The first modern attack on religion, specifically Christianity, is supposed to have been when schools stopped having students saying the “Lord’s prayer” complete with the Protestant doxology added at the end to improve on Jesus’s version of the prayer that He composed Himself, or any prayer that favored one particular religion. The proponents of prayer in school will claim that no child can pray under any circumstances which is patently false. They can pray so long as it does not get forced on others or disrupt instruction.

You can pray before a test, but you cannot suddenly begin praying out loud, forcing others to pray along, or swing a dead, bleeding chicken at the end of a string in ever-widening circles over your head to get a good grade on a test.

They hold that Christian politicians are attacked for their religious beliefs and for refusing to authorize same-sex wedding certificates. Businesses are persecuted if they refuse to bake cakes or arrange flowers for their customers’ same-sex weddings. One Pizza joint claimed it was persecuted because it advertised it would not cater any Gay weddings without pointing out the obvious fact that his pizza joint was failing and needed publicity, he had no Gay customers who would have asked, and that no sane same-sex couple would have a pizza joint cater the wedding reception and his customers, the ones he never had, continued not to come. Colleges silence Christian voices. Again yes, but only when the religious speech is intrusive and forced on an unwilling crowd.

Sometimes it is not the message but the presentation.

Don’t deny me a wedding cake and then say you are being persecuted because I complain about that.

The Southern Baptist Church came into being to support slavery. Was the Civil War religious persecution?

The Separatists came here to freely exercise the religion not accepted by their head of the church king or by his rivals, the Puritans, a rivalry that resulted in a civil war and the uncivil beheading of the head of the English church.

Of course, when the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, anyone not of their faith was on their own with no help from the colony. They would have been of the wrong, unacceptable religion.

America began with one Christian sect rejecting all others in one colony and in the other slavery.

When the Puritans came here, they were able to pick on the Separatists again. The monarchy was restored as was the national religion.

Christian Nationalists and those who self-identify as persecuted Christians are correct in claiming Christians in this country have been and still are routinely persecuted when you consider how the Quakers were treated upon their arrival, having to isolate in what would become Rhode Island, or the Mormons who had to go to Utah, or the Catholics with the Know Nothings.

Yes, religion has been mistreated and Christians are still being persecuted.

However, the persecution of Christians was not perpetrated by the minority religions and anyone with a lack of religion, but by Christians themselves.

While finding fault with them in modern times, Christians were and remain to a degree the non-Muslim version of Sunis and Shi’ites.

It is the Incubus and Succubus thing redux. Commit the offense and not only blame someone else but claim by being held responsible for the act makes the perpetrator a victim.

Catholics and Protestants (both Christians) waged war on one another in various ways.

Depending on a person’s religion, political office was out of the question.

Lord Baltimore, wanting better conditions for his fellow Catholics, founded Maryland and his intentions were clear and acceptable as he received a Charter. Yet, when Protestants eventually outnumbered the Catholics, they voted to take rights away from Catholics in the colony.

During a discussion at the Continental Congress of the “Intolerable Acts” that had been introduced to the colonies after the Boston Tea Party, among the Acts that specifically targeted Boston and the 13 Colonies that would become the United States was one that applied only to Quebec, also part of the single British North America. That intolerable Parliamentary act legalized the practice of Catholicism in Quebec.

Christian, John Jay, wrote about this acceptance of a Christian denomination,

“Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.”

Intolerance of the religious beliefs of Native Americans led to kidnapping Native children and forcing them to become Christian at “Indian Schools” where they were forbidden to speak their languages or worship their gods.

A person has to wonder why, if people started coming here for religious freedom, they had to move away from established colonies or areas within them to be able to practice their religion because the religion of the region would not tolerate theirs and took action to make that very well known.

Remember, there was no diversity allowed in religion. You were Catholic or Protestant, therefore Christian, or not.

Quick review:

A Huguenot colony was established for religious freedom at Fort Caroline, the modern Jacksonville, Florida, area. The Spanish, whose territory Florida still was, established a forward operating base at St. Augustine and wiped out the Fort Caroline colony because, as Spanish commander, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés told King Philip II he

“hanged all those we had found in [Fort Caroline] because…they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.”

The same erasure was faced by survivors of a French shipwreck because of their religion.

Catholics were originally banned from the colonies and four Quakers were hanged in Boston over a two- year period for being Quakers.

Cotton Mather, Boston’s famous colonial minister, gave sermons against the Catholics and the French, and in various colonies statutes were enacted that discriminated against Catholics in matters of property and voting.

Before he became THE Benedict Arnold, when George Washington dispatched him to get support for the cause from the French Canadians, he was warned by George about possible religious conflict,

“Prudence, policy and a true Christian Spirit will lead us to look with compassion upon their errors, without insulting them.”

Unfortunately, this alliance was one of the reasons for Arnold’s defection. He did not approve of America’s alliance with Catholic France and said so publicly.

After the Revolution, in Massachusetts only Christians were allowed to hold public office, but Catholics could but they would first have to renounce papal authority. Catholics were banned from public office in the New York State constitution. In Maryland, Catholics had full civil rights, but Jews did not. Delaware required an oath affirming belief in the Holy Trinity, and not the peppers, onions, and celery one, and a number of the new states had official, state-supported churches.

Thomas Jefferson may have drafted a bill to guarantee legal equality for citizens of all religions, or none, in Virginia, but it was Patrick Henry’s bill calling for state support for “teachers of the Christian religion” that was favored.

In the course of debate, James Madison presented reasons why the state had no business supporting Christian instruction, among them,

“the Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every…man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an inalienable right.”

He also asserted that the government sanction of a religion was, in essence, a threat to religion asking,

“Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?”

He argued that Henry’s proposal was “a departure from that generous policy, which offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion, promised a lustre to our country.”

The Henry bill was defeated and the Virginia legislature went with Jefferson’s plan for the separation of church and state and this was brought to the Constitutional Convention and influenced Article VI which states that federal elective and appointed officials

“shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution, but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,”

in a constitution that does not mention God or a deity and forbids Congress from making laws that would infringe of the free exercise of religion or establish one as the religion of the land.

In the 19th Century it was preached and accepted because of that, that, if permitted, Catholics would turn America over to the pope and this actually was resurrected when John Kennedy ran for president.

An anti-Catholic mob burned a convent to the ground in Boston because of reports that young women were being abused in the convent school.

Anti-Catholic sentiment in Philadelphia resulted in the Bible Riots of 1844, during which two Catholic churches and the homes of Catholics houses were torched and 20 people killed by other Christians in the name of Christianity.

During this time, Joseph Smith founded a new religion unacceptable to the mainstream Protestant majority so, he got tarred and feathered and he and his followers were expelled from their home state by Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs. Three days later, 17 church members, including children, at the Mormon settlement of Haun’s Mill were massacred by a militia of Christians, and later a mob of never to be convicted of any crime members murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum while they were jailed in Carthage, Illinois.

In the 2000s, a candidate in Oklahoma was accused of being the wrong type of Christian because he was Catholic not Baptist, so his opponent, hammering on that, claimed this should have people vote against him.

It worked.

I know my own Boston Irish History, so I know of the mainstream Christian on Christian persecution but am not so knowledgeable about those little churches that dot city blocks whose congregants’ weekly donations would add nicely to that of the bigger church nearby that somehow is able to get that church to have to close so the members migrate to the bigger church bringing their money with them.

All this to say that, yes, there is religious persecution of Christians. They have been persecuting each other since Paul took the teachings of Jesus and made them political.

It is also to remind people that, with all the Christians in charge of this country, the persecution will be directed out from them toward each other and the rest of us and will somehow be justified on the basis that their religion or idea of God is the only one.

The suffer from Beam Eye.

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No tan suits were harmed.

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