New York has been a godsend for gun rights in passing a series of unconstitutional limits on Second Amendment rights only to result in major adverse rulings. It may soon do the same for the free exercise of religion. New York is now going head-to-head with a group of Dominican nuns over a law challenged as unconstitutional. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state are being sued over a law that forces religious organizations to adhere to LGBTQ policies.
Mother Marie Edward, O.P., explained to Fox News Digital that they will not set their faith aside under the threat of fines, loss of licensing and even jail time. She noted that they ask nothing from the state and ask to be allowed to offer charity without abandoning their religious principles:
“We are consecrated religious Sisters and have one mission. It is to provide comfort and skilled care to persons dying of cancer who cannot afford nursing care. We do not take insurance or government funds or money from our patients or families. The care is totally free…
We are supported by the goodness of our benefactors. We do this without discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or sex. We do it because Jesus taught us that, when the least among us are sick, we should care for them, as if they were Christ himself.”
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who run Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York, objected that the law requires them to assign rooms by gender identity, not biological sex; allow access to opposite-sex bathrooms and coerce speech recognizing identities and relationships that violate Catholic values. It would also require staff training on gender ideology and the posting a public notice stating compliance with these demands.
According to a press release from the Catholic Benefits Association, the New York State Department of Health sent the first in a series of “Dear Administrator” letters to the Hawthorne Dominicans’ Rosary Hill Home demanding compliance despite their religious objections. The nuns note that they have never had a single complaint filed over the treatment of its residents.
If they do not comply, the nuns face fines up to $2,000 per violation that increase up to $10,000 as well as the loss of licensing and up to one year in prison.
Hochul remains committed to compelling the nuns to comply — a position that may prove costly with Catholic voters in the upcoming election.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down anti-discrimination laws compelling speech or conduct in violation of religious values.
For example, in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania (2020), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor, allowing the Catholic nuns to refuse to provide contraceptive coverage in their health plans.
Hochul and the Democrats of New York give fascism and totalitarianism new meaning.
What is the essence of totalitarianism? The intolerance of the State for the existence of independent organizations.
This “case” likely will not survive very long as the state’s position seems in direct contradiction to the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”), and regardless of local or state law, the Supremacy Clause ensures that Constitutional law is indeed the law of the land. In addition, the Little Sisters of the Poor case gave the SCOTUS an opportunity to reaffirm the meaning of all this. If I were the judge on this suit, I would immediately dismiss it and sanction the state for trying to make such an outrageous claim justiciable.
I’ve thought establishment was a building, a church, jjc.
Nope. The Church of England is an established church, and the ratifiers of the 1st amendment wanted to make sure the federal government didn’t found a Church of America. States were allowed to have established churches, and some did.
Republicans FIGHT BACK
End Federal Aid to cities, states, non-profits and colleges
Outlaw Public Unions
Democrats need to be defunded and destroyed. STOP rewarding their failure. Fail Democrat cities across the land receive MORE money the WORSE THEY ARE!
Think Newark, Bridgeport, ct, etc
How cool!!! “GO Sisters!”
As I have stated previously on the good professor’s blog, I am not religious. But I just might have to make a donation to the good sisters for their work and their struggle against the overbearing fascist Hochul.
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.” malcolm m
To those who commented that the Dems wouldn’t dare go after Muslims in a similar situation, I have a possible explanation. From my experience of being a government “worker bee”, lefty bureaucrats don’t treat Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other non-Judeo-Christian religions as a “religion”. They treat it as a “cultural” thing, to fit it neatly under DEI guidelines. I have seen this a number of times over the last 35+ years as these bureaucrats twist themselves into a pretzel trying to justify their actions against all logic.
I am not an attorney (and if I am wrong, any attorneys here please correct me), but as I see it, Gov. Hochul, AG James, and maybe a local DA would go for the Daily Double of violating the 1st Amendment rights on two counts of Freedom of Speech with speech coercion of mandated pronouns and Freedom of Religion with forcing the Sisters to go with putting patients of different genders together in violation of their beliefs.
Are Muslim institutions immune from this Dictate?
No, they are not. The only institutions immune are Christian Scientists, because they don’t provide medical care at all. All they provide is prayer, and the state understands that it can’t regulate that. If the nuns have religious services, they can segregate those by sex if they like, and can seat “trans-women” in the men’s section and “trans-men” in the women’s section. But the law doesn’t allow them to do that for the medical care they provide, and that’s the problem. The nuns position is that they’re not doing this for money, or for fun, they’re doing it only because they believe Jesus wants them to do it, and they also believe Jesus wants them to house men and women separately.
I don’t doubt that the SCOTUS will likely strike this down. Previous rulings would seem to give a slight hint that they will. I want to see what the decisions of the District Courts and the Court of Appeals will be. Will they ascribe to the hints laid down by SCOTUS or will they turn themselves inside out in an attempt to declare this abortion constitutional. It should be interesting.
More voter’s money wasted in New York.
The Pope has been getting outside his silo recently and delving into international relations. Seems some one should get him on the record about this NY law. I wonder if he will support the Sisters or look to a some other discussion or interpretation of scripture.
GEB you may be right. But l wonder how much of a cue this Pope may take from Pope Leo l. In 452 C.E. he talked Attila the Hun out of sacking Rome.
If the religious nutbags don’t receive taxpayer money, then it’s an overreach. That said, maybe your fellow religious nutbags should be more concerned about the Archdiocese of New York paying out $300 million to even more victims. I know that was a whole four months ago, so who cares. Don’t forget to tithe.
Hey Everyone, please tell us your opinion of Muslims and what you think about their take on gay rights, trans rights and women’s rights. Do you think Islamic people are “religious nutbags”?
Odd how the left attacks Christians and not Muslims. I wonder why that is?
This is true, hullbobby, but it isn’t odd. It’s sick. The massacres of Christians in Nigeria for example are of no interest to people like Everyone. And Everyone and his/her/its/they/whatever ilk remain clueless as to the aims of Islam, a post-Christianity religion hellbent on destroying Western civilization. They believe land once conquered is theirs forever. (Yo, Spain, That’s you and the problem in the Levante). They believe land NOT yet conquered is theirs to conquer. That’s us. This is not Christian or Jewish nutbag thinking, this is Islamic teaching. In any case, for a preview of what’s coming to America and how we got there, read Michael Youssef’s “Unholy Alliance.”
Yep, the Christians were causing quite a ruckus in heaven the opposition sent the magic steed to get Mohammed and make a deal, Mary. Magic steed’s name is Barack, agent of Islam.
” They believe land once conquered is theirs forever.”
This idea is most widely recognized in Article 11 of the 1988 Hamas Covenent. Too many people refuse to listen to what their enemies are saying.
“The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be relinquished.”
Money funneled to American politicians, schools, businesses etc?
Calling millions of people ‘nut bags’ instead of replying in an articulate way totally invalidates your response and makes you look intellectually lazy.
What does affirmative action and public assistance do for women, bro?
Nutbags is an odd way to refer to people caring for the terminally ill
Sue them if your granddad died at Anzio, Axis.
Think about how Bud Light and Target handled the trans stuff. They rolled out the agenda, shrugged at how their own customers felt, and basically said: if people hate it, the market will sort it out. They lost billions. Fine. That is money. You can earn that back or go out of business and someone else fills the gap.
What these politicians are doing is the same mindset, but with our rights. They roll out their ideology first and treat the Constitution like an afterthought. If it turns out to be unconstitutional, well, the courts will tell us and we will deal with it then. That is not what you swear to do when you say you will ‘support and defend the Constitution’ and ‘bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That is treating the oath like paperwork.
Rights are not like a bad marketing campaign you can walk back after the backlash. When you trample someone’s rights, you do damage that no dollar figure fixes. The first question in their head should be: do we even have the right to do this to free citizens. You do not start with the ideology and let the courts and the people clean up the mess. You start with rights. If it fails that test, you do not do it. Period.”
OLLY,
I think they do it on purpose. Write bad laws, throw it at the wall to see if it sticks or not. When it does not, they can claim they were doing . . . something, in the name of equality . . . or something. Then those who they were pandering to, get all riled up and then we see the calls to “pack the court!” and all those other things to ensure “Republicans never win an election again to protect democracy!”
Yeah.
Upstate, personally, I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of our politicians just plain suck at the core job. There is no degree, no certification, no real licensing to be trusted with that kind of power. The formal requirements are basically ‘breathe air, hit the age number, and live in the right district.’ In return you get a six‑figure salary, gold‑plated benefits, and a staff that shields you from the real world. You do not have to understand the law, the economy, or the Constitution. You just have to hit 50.1% on election day and you are in.
So you end up with people who never learned leadership, never passed Econ 101, never cared to read our founding documents, and can barely find Iceland on a globe or that Guam will capsize from overpopulation. Does not matter. They can still write laws that rearrange entire sectors of the economy and reach straight into people’s lives. And when those laws are unconstitutional, or blow up in our faces, there is almost zero personal accountability. The only real ‘skill’ the system demands of them is the ability to sell themselves to just enough voters and donors. That is a crazy way to staff jobs that carry an oath to support and defend the highest law of the land.
I used to joke about voting requirements but it seems as if it might be getting more traction. The idea that people who live off of others have the same say as the ones they steal from is insane and I believe the founders would not have agreed with our current mess. It almost seems self evident that not only should you have to show up with I.D. but your previous year tax return showing that you are participating in society vs. taking from it. Nothing will change the current cog towards socialism without some kind of change.
Also, Taxes should not be allowed to be paid by your employer. If the citizens had to write that check every quarter, they would demand more from who they were giving it to.
Jim, you are putting your finger on a real tension, but I think the way out is not to create a ‘taxpayer caste’ that gets more voice than everyone else. The founders did use property and tax qualifications early on, because they feared that people who were economically dependent could be too easily bought, bullied, or bribed by those in power. They were not crazy to see that risk. But they were also wrong in who they trusted and who they wrote off. Over time, we have learned that tying political worth to your last year’s tax return is just another way to concentrate power in a narrow slice at the top.
To me, the deeper problem is not that ‘takers’ vote. It is that too many citizens of every income level are politically ignorant, civically apathetic, and economically dependent on government in one way or another. That is what sets the floor on what kind of government we get. You are dead right about one thing, though: payroll withholding was a political masterstroke. Once taxes came straight out of your paycheck, most people stopped feeling the pain of what they were giving up. Make people write a check every quarter and I guarantee they would suddenly start asking harder questions about where it is going.
So I would not solve this by shrinking the franchise to the ‘right’ kind of taxpayer. I would attack the ignorance and dependency that make people easy marks in the first place. A citizen who understands the Constitution, feels the full weight of what government takes from them, and does not see the state as their life support will vote very differently than one who does not. Form that kind of citizen, and you will not need a tax‑return test at the polling place to get better government.
Olly, I agree with your premise that is basically educating the voter. But the issue is, I just don’t see that happening since it takes work/effort of the people who are already on the socialist dole. On top of that, the education system is run by a certain ideology that wants to keep the society from achieving your goal. So we are left with requiring another major change, allowing parents to escape their children from the K-12 govt. monopoly through vouchers.
If 50% of the population pays some taxes how is that a “narrow slice”? Plus there’s no mechanism that would stop the voting slice from getting larger if the takers take on responsibility and start adding value to the society.
Jim, elsewhere I have often discussed the question of voting eligibility based on whether voting should be tied to income. Should a person vote who takes more than he gives? It’s a fair question that needs to be considered. I also agree with OLLY that we need an educated voter.
Jim and SM, I am with you that we may have to go very radical if we are honest about how bloated and deformed the franchise has become. We have packed it full of people who take a lot and give very little back, and who have no clue how their own government is supposed to work. If you have no skin in the game, nothing real to lose and everything to gain from more dependency, why would you ever vote for competence or restraint. You will keep voting for whoever promises to feed the habit. That is the floor of citizen formation, and that floor sets the ceiling of government competence. We are living with a political class that reflects that floor.
If I had a magic wand, I would not start by taking votes away. The system says one person one vote, but it does not say every vote has to carry the same weight in Congress. So here is the radical thought. Tie the power of that one vote in Congress to the floor of civic formation in that district or that state. In a place where citizens know the Constitution, understand basic economics, and are less dependent on the state, their representation in the House carries full weight. In a place where ignorance and dependency are off the charts, their representation counts for less until they raise their own floor.
That would flip the incentive structure. Right now, a politician can grow their power by keeping people ignorant and dependent. In that kind of system, they would only gain power by raising the civic formation of the people they represent. You want a stronger voice in Washington, you have to form stronger citizens at home. I know our current constitutional doctrine would not allow that kind of scheme right now, but it shows the direction I think in. Stop rewarding political markets built on ignorance and dependency, and start rewarding the places that actually form citizens fit for self government.
“The system says one person, one vote, but it does not say every vote has to carry the same weight in Congress. “
The system we consider broken isn’t broken; it functions in the exact manner the incentive structure mandates. To solve the actual problem, we have to decouple the negative incentives from the structure of government. Your idea has merit, but it is too complex, and I am not sure it adequately manages the incentives. Politicians will always sell dependency, so the dependent needs to be uplifted by changing their status to independent, at which time they can vote.
“SM, I think we are circling the same target from two sides. You are absolutely right that the system is not ‘broken’ in a mechanical sense. It is doing exactly what the incentives tell it to do. If you reward politicians for creating and managing dependency, you will get a steady supply of politicians who sell dependency. On that, we are on the same page.
Where I am pushing is at the same target, just from a different angle. You want to uplift the dependent and only let them vote once they are independent. I want to tilt the structure so that a district or a state only gains full political weight as it lifts its own floor of civic formation and independence. In both cases, the goal is the same. Stop rewarding a political marketplace built on ignorance and dependency, and start rewarding the hard work of forming citizens who can stand on their own feet.
The side I am coming from lives and dies on whether we can actually measure formation. That is why I am not just waving my hands about ‘better citizens.’ I am working on a real measurement system for civic formation. Tax season has me buried right now, but that project starts in earnest once I dig out. I am convinced it is measurable. We can define an output standard for what a citizen properly formed for self government looks like, and then score individuals, districts, and states against that standard. Once you have that, my side of the equation gets concrete. You take that formation percentage and use it to determine how much power a district’s or state’s representation carries in Congress. High formation, full voice. Low formation, reduced voice until they raise their game.
Your side is, in one sense, more cut and dry. You say the franchise itself should be reserved for the independent. But even there, you still hit the same problem I am working on. What exactly does it mean to be ‘dependent’ for these purposes. Which programs count. How long. What about temporary hardship, veterans, retirees. Every serious reform hits that same wall. You have to be able to define and measure the thing you are tying power to.
So to me, that is our common ground. Whether we are weighting representation by formation, or gating the franchise on independence, none of it works without real metrics. The good news is, both formation and dependency are measurable if we are willing to do the hard work. And yes, to do any of this for real probably takes constitutional level changes, not just a new statute. But if the country ever gets serious enough to amend the structure in one of these directions, that same seriousness could carry a package that hits the incentives from both sides. You want more power, you have to form more independent citizens. That is the basic move I am after.”
“Your side is, in one sense, more cut and dry… But even there, you still hit the same problem I am working on.”
Yes, in some ways, they hit the same problem, but being cut and dry is an advantage. There is little wiggle room. The problems you raise are not hard to deal with. I’ll provide a simple example: to vote, a person requires a positive income tax payment and must not have received direct financial support from the government.
“The side I am coming from lives and dies on whether we can actually measure formation.”
It is a good idea, but such a measurement can end up adding the same incentives. If you use a measurement, then defining right and wrong becomes the domain of those who do the measurement, even though doing the measurement can help provide a more informed citizenry. This sounds similar to the NYS Regents exam, where the state dictates the educational outcome.
In a sense, we already have a “formation” system. It is just not honest about what it is forming. Somebody is always defining what a good citizen looks like, and then building processes that reliably spit out that product. They just pretend it is neutral.
I am simply saying we should drag that into the open. Start by naming the outcome. In my case, a formed citizen for self government. That needs a clear, bright line definition so people can see what we are actually aiming at. Once that is set, the process is not magic or mystery. As Deming put it, every process is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. If you want a different result, you need a different design.
That is why I am not scared of measurement in principle. If the outcome is defined, and the measure is tied to that outcome, you can see right away when someone is trying to game the system for a different product. Any “formation” process that reliably produces dependency or passivity instead of capacity for self government has failed by its own stated metric.
Outcome is not a precise or easily quantified metric. One must balance many variables, adjusting for social and economic shifts. Your outcome-based approach creates a flexible metric that is useful for education, but unreliable for this use. It is too ambiguous.
What is success? The most pragmatic metric is the ratio of what one provides versus what one extracts. That is a clear baseline, leaving sufficient room for discussion toward implementation.
I actually agree you don’t start with some abstract “citizen metric” in the sky. You start exactly where you’re pointing, with the real report card of the systems we already run.
If we look at the current state of things, $35 trillion in debt, homelessness, violent crime, failing students, crumbling infrastructure, fraud, waste and abuse, drug and trafficking crises, it is hard to argue the systems are producing the outcomes we say we want. On their own terms, they are missing the mark.
So the next step is the one you name, system by system, what was this supposed to deliver, and is it doing that. If not, why not. My point is just that when you follow those “why nots” down more than one or two layers, again and again you run into how we are forming the people who design, run and live inside those systems. That is why I keep insisting formation is not a side issue. It is where the hard work always leads if you refuse to look away.
“That is why I keep insisting formation is not a side issue.”
I agree, formation is not a side issue, but it must be handled differently. It is not a usable metric.
Earlier, someone mentioned the Frankfurt School. Those professors diagnosed problems, believing that human nature was a result of capitalism’s incentive structures rather than a human’s innate biology, survival. I believe you want to engineer human existence based on individual liberty, and that is the metric you are creating. But if the Frankfurt group were in charge, they would engineer human nature in a Marxist way.
My metric is similar to the survival nature of humans and uses a mathematical method to maintain a system’s stability.
SM, I’ve really appreciated this back and forth.
You’ve pushed me to sharpen what I mean by formation, and your “provide vs extract” idea has made me think harder about how to ground any metric in a real view of human nature and system stability. We still land in different places, but this is exactly the kind of argument I wish more people were willing to have, clear, direct, and in good faith.
Where I keep ending up is here. Once government decides to tax everyone, pile up debt, and build a huge loan and grant system around one education pipeline, it is not a neutral financier anymore. It has picked a lane. It is underwriting the main formation system for the next generation. Calling the money “portable” doesn’t change that. Just like with food stamps, portability doesn’t mean the public has no interest in what kind of ecosystem it is propping up.
Your “provide vs extract” ratio runs into the same hard work you see in formation. You still have to define what “provides” and “extracts” mean. Does providing mean only taxable output, or does it include raising kids, caring for elders, serving on juries and school boards. Does extracting mean only direct checks, or also using law and regulation to grab special favors and dump costs on everyone else. The moment you answer those, you are right back to naming what kind of life and what kind of citizen a healthy republic needs.
You worry that if we talk about citizen formation, we open the door to Frankfurt‑style social engineering. I get that. But your stability metric can be captured too. A soft authoritarian system can be very “stable” and show a nice provide/extract balance on paper while liberty and self‑government die quietly in the background. So we both have to choose a north star. You’re centering survival and stability. I’m saying survival and stability only count if they preserve a people who can actually govern themselves. That’s not writing a party line for souls, it’s just taking the design of a constitutional republic seriously.
We’re not going to solve all of that in one thread, but I’m glad we’ve at least named the real fault line: not whether formation happens, but whether we’re willing to look straight at what kind of citizens our systems, and our public money, are actually producing.
” We still land in different places,”
Olly, we should not land in different places because we both agree the federal government should be smaller and focus only on the duties the Constitution provided. Educating the masses was not one of those duties. Moreover, having the federal government assume the role in imbuing understanding of the Constitution and civics only means that whoever is in power controls the education of the future. That includes Marxist revolutionaries.
I proposed an on the spot alternative, one with a potentially concise mechanism easily understandable to all. It runs parallel to your desires of a responsible citizenry. All I suggested was that those feeding at the breast of government and acting like parasites should not be voting. I leave the education part to the states where I would like them to instruct in the Constitution and Civics amng other things. We require an educated public and that was what public schools were for.
In answer to your question, what does “provide and extract” mean, though I don’t think I ever used those words I will answer since I said something that is similar. It is a simple metric to remove those on the government dole from voting having little or nothing to do with what people are doing, rather it focuses soley on how much they take from government in relationship to what they provide to society. Simply, if one takes welfare, one should focus on getting a job rather than voting.
SM, we are not actually that far apart on what is broken. I’ll put it this way. We are just looking at different parts of the line. Your fix is to stand at the end of the assembly line, check each car, and junk the lemons. That is downstream. I am talking about walking into the factory, looking at the machines and the process, and asking why every other car is coming off broken. If you fix the factory, you do not need a giant junkyard. If you only build the junkyard, the factory keeps spitting out bad cars forever.
Yes, I suggested a federal metric to limit who can vote, though that was a quick response to your comments. Both of us are very focused on the education portion which should mostly be handled by the states.
SM, let me check that I am hearing you right.
It sounds like your “quick metric” approach is mostly downstream. The federal role should be small, education should sit with the states, and the main federal lever you are comfortable with is tightening who votes by removing people who take more from government than they contribute. The idea is to protect the system by limiting political power for those who are dependent on the state.
What I am arguing for is more upstream. We both agree the states should run most education, but the federal government has already hooked itself into that world through loans, grants, and rules. Once Washington builds and funds that pipeline, I think it owes the country at least a thin concern for civic capacity: are the people coming out able to run the republic, whatever their politics, or not.
There is another piece I do not think your fix can touch. Even if you keep unformed citizens off the voter rolls, they do not vanish from the system. They still teach, staff institutions, shape culture, and raise kids. A bad formation pipeline keeps pouring weak citizens into every non‑voting lever of influence. That is why I keep going back to the pipeline itself.
Am I stating your approach fairly, and does that capture the real difference between where you are working in the system and where I am?
Not quite, OLLY. I do not wish the federal goverenment controlling the education system. That is wrong. The federal government should withdraw itself frm that task and most of its grants and loans should disappear in their present form. We are in our present position because the federal government deeply involved itself in the education system. Anything you creat as a metric for this system in the federal level can be turned into a Marxist metric with changes in power. If in the interim certain things were to be corrected, I wouldn’t mind, but if one keeps their eye on the ball, government’s involvement should be to maintain the Constitution where it pertains to the public school systems.
My suggestion was to provide an alternative metric to what you were saying in order to reduce those on the dole from being able to vote for more “dole.” It was an on the spot answer, one that on the surface seems appropriate, but one I haven’t thought much about.
Education should be a state responsibility though I believe they have an obligation to teach the DOI and Constitution along with the other basics. What better way to teach the Constitution than by demonstrating what government’s enumerated powers are and what powers are left to the states and the people. If we strictly enforce the Constitution many of the problems you perceive will be diminished.
In 1789, voters must have been male, European, 21, and worth 50 lbs. Sterling or 50 acres.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
“the people are nothing but a great beast…
I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.”
– Alexander Hamilton
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“The true reason (says Blackstone) of requiring any qualification, with regard to property in voters, is to exclude such persons, as are in so mean a situation, that they are esteemed to have no will of their own.”
“If it were probable that every man would give his vote freely, and without influence of any kind, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty, every member of the community, however poor, should have a vote… But since that can hardly be expected, in persons of indigent fortunes, or such as are under the immediate dominion of others, all popular states have been obliged to establish certain qualifications, whereby, some who are suspected to have no will of their own, are excluded from voting; in order to set other individuals, whose wills may be supposed independent, more thoroughly upon a level with each other.”
– Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 1775
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“[We gave you] a republic, if you can keep it.”
– Ben Franklin, 1787
Research the vote enabled and the vote restricted in Greece and democracy’s inception.
AI Overview
In 508 B.C., approximately 10% to 20% of the total population of Athens was enabled to vote.
That is well known. What is your point?
Jim, I think you are right about how steep the hill is, but I do not think that lets us off the hook.
Formation has to happen. The problem is the system is set up to fight it. The schools are captured by one ideology, the media amplifies that same line, and a big chunk of the population is already tied into some form of government dependency. That is a powerful current. Naming formation as the upstream cause is the easy part. Fixing it means rowing against that current for years.
So what can you do right now, inside the lines. First, make the cost of government impossible to ignore. Every paycheck and every year end should scream the full tax hit in big print, not bury it in a line of fine print. Better yet, phase out invisible withholding and make people actually send the money in every quarter. You do that and people suddenly care a lot more about what they are buying with their vote.
Second, treat civics like a real subject, not a poster on the wall. Tie graduation to real civic and constitutional literacy. If a kid cannot explain the basic structure of their government, they do not get a diploma. Tie school money to those outcomes too, so districts cannot turn the whole thing into activist training and still expect the same funding.
Third, blow open the K 12 monopoly. Let money follow the child through vouchers or education savings accounts, as long as the school can show the kid can read, do math, and knows the basics of our system. If parents can escape, a lot of them will, and that alone starts to break the dependency culture.
If the Constitution were not in the way, I would go even harder. You could imagine things like getting the vote early only if you pass a serious civics test or complete some kind of national service, or requiring a basic constitutional competence test to even get on the ballot for major office. I get that those ideas are radioactive under current law, but they tell you what we are actually missing. We hand out the full powers of citizenship and office without ever demanding proof that people understand the thing they are swearing to support.
Bottom line for me. You are right that the headwind is brutal and the people already hooked on the dole are the hardest to move. But I do not think the answer is to shrink the franchise to a smaller club of “approved” taxpayers. I think the answer is to blast people with the real cost of the state, rip kids out of the worst parts of the monopoly school system, and build as many pockets of real formation as we can. It will not flip in one cycle. But if we never start forming better citizens, we are just managing decline.
The real problem is not that they don’t know what the Constitution says, it that they simply don’t care.
Ignorance, apathy, and dependency in citizens produce ignorance, apathy, and dependency in the people they elect. The ceiling on government competence is set by the floor of the citizens’ capacity for self‑government. Madison’s warning still holds: if people who ‘mean to be their own governors’ do not arm themselves with the knowledge and virtue that job requires, the whole thing slides into farce or tragedy.
I do not disagree that a lot of them simply do not care. But that indifference is the crime on top of the crime. The oath they take is not ‘I promise to care when it is convenient.’ It is a promise to support and defend the Constitution and to bear true faith and allegiance to it. If you take that oath and then cannot be bothered to learn what it requires, or you know and just ignore it, that is not a personality quirk. That is betrayal of the job.
And the dependency runs both ways. Citizens become dependent on government for their survival and security. Politicians become dependent on keeping citizens in that dependent state for their own political survival. That feedback loop rewards ignorance and punishes independence. Break that loop, and you raise the floor on citizen capacity. Raise that floor, and you raise the ceiling on what kind of government we are even capable of having. Until then, we should not be surprised that we get rulers who neither know the Constitution nor care what it says, because we keep sending them a message that we will tolerate it.
Right!
Most of this “pronouns” legislation is being litigated by the Christian faith. “Are you going to tell Jesus himself what pronouns he can use?” SCOTUS gets amicus briefs on these cases. Might they reveal how Jews,Muslims and Hindus, for example, feel about their faith versus “pronouns”? If the Constitution means anything, religious liberty has to make a home for all of We The People. That said, “pronouns” legislation does presently look like an exercise of trying to do the backstroke through the La Brea Tar Pit.
Your cogent framework is exemplary.
“[T]he New York State Department of Health sent the first in a series of “Dear Administrator” letters to the Hawthorne Dominicans’ Rosary Hill Home demanding compliance despite their religious objections.” (JT)
The Left loves using “health and safety” as a Trojan Horse to dictate your convictions, values, actions.
First, there were the countless state and local “health and safety” bureaucrats who compelled Covid diktats. Now this: New York using “health” as a pretext to to criminalize a religious organization’s ideas and values.
Where did the modern Left get that blueprint? From the bloody French Revolution:
The Revolution’s “Committee of Public Safety” “is precisely what we want, a hand to grasp the weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal.” (Danton)
The left may see a revolution they didnt bargin for.
Fascists hate religion, since it competes with the supremacy of the state. Fascists like Hochul are no different than her forebears of the 1930s.
We should all be grateful for the New York State and Colorado legislatures, amongst others, for passing laws, and to executives and bureaucrats for excessive enforcement, that allow SCOTUS to reaffirm the principles of 1A and 2A.
Thanks and a tip of the hat
One wonders how NYS would respond if the order was of the Muslim faith? Those homeys don’t play that!
“Hochul remains committed to compelling the nuns to comply — a position that may prove costly with Catholic voters in the upcoming election.” One does not need to be a Catholic voter to be be repulsed by Hochul’s position and that of the New York State wannabe totalitarian Democrats. It will certainly be entertaining to watch this case play out during its journey to the Supreme Court.
It appears to be a contest between civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ individuals in long-term care facilities and the religious rights of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, both grounded in important constitutional principles.
To change the venue slightly, suppose the Dominican nuns were instead in the business of baking wedding cakes. In that scenario, precedents such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (which found that the state commission showed impermissible hostility toward the baker’s religious beliefs) could support the nuns’ ability to decline creating custom expressive products, like a wedding cake, that conflict with their faith.
It may be of some interest to note that Democrats have frequently supported religious and cultural accommodations for other faith communities, for example, Muslim-majority enclaves in Minneapolis (with its large Somali immigrant population) and Dearborn, Michigan.
Democrats have a hard time comprehending the plain language of our Constitution.
I disagree! They understand, they just don’t like it.
The singular American failure is the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court of 1869 “decided” (i.e. amended, as if) that secession is prohibited because secession is not prohibited and told everyone that it could not read the 10th Amendment.
Liberals are evil…
The label “liberal” in the American political meaning is a lie; another perversion of the English language to cloak the user in a tolerant, altruistic and freedom centered aura. They have shown themselves time and again to be anything but. The freedom they seek is from the constraints on government over individual liberty and security. If they gain power, they will undoubtedly pack SCOTUS marking the end of our self-governing, constitutional democratic republic.
Not only will they pack the Supreme Court, they will eliminate the filibuster, admit Puerto Rico and DC as States, re-open the borders and grant amnesty and citizenship to 20 million illegal aliens. Among other things. I’m glad I’m 90 years old.
And mandate mail in voting for all states and machine voting with the ballots destroyed within 72 hours of releasing the results. Added to your list what could possibly go wrong
Wisoldlawyer, I am possibly not as wise as you and surely not quite as old as you, but I couldn’t agree with you more. Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin saved us from the Dems going completely wild during the insanity of 2020 and it’s aftermath. They Dems tried desperately to end the filibuster, pack the Court and add two Dem states, as you stated, and only the above 2 Democrats save the nation from becoming Great Britain or other EU radically fascist countries.
I too am glad that I am old, again not approaching 90, but not exactly a spring chicken either, because the pause that Trump gave us won’t last. We are one election with the Dems taking the Senate and the WH away from ruination.
The Court is our last line of defense, think of them as a truly great goalie, and once the liberals pack the COurt with 5 Katanjo Brown Jacksons we are done.