Damnit, stretch, you’re still making the same leaps about what I have written. I bring this up because of this:
I said that some of you people seem to be here for the sake of arguing. Now, please tell me, you three-leged, syphlitic son of a mole rat, where in the hell did I ever say that I wasn’t doing the same damn thing?
On a more serious note, and to briefly answer your questions:
1.) I didn’t argue with danceswithcats because I sympathize with her. Her complaint seems less about the need to preserve the monument than it is about her opinion that the whole issue is much ado about nothing. I consider the issue a little more important than she seems to, but I still sympathize with her. Activists, regardless if they have a point or not, can be annoying. Wait a few weeks and I’m sure you’ll see a thread about the G-8 protesters that are coming to my town.
2.)I doubt I’d actively support the grass roots effort you linked to, but I wouldn’t campaign against it. I may not personally find it a big deal, but the kid’s got a point. If for some bizarre reason I became the judge hearing the case, I’d find for the kid and have the plaque removed from the police station.
3.)I haven’t a clue if there was a local voice behind the thing in Hanover. I also think it’s irrelevant.
I didn’t touch on the “who gets to decide” question because it’s too close to rhetorical.
Also, don’t think to much about the insults in my last post. It was simply semi-creative, gratuitous vitriol thrown into a dying pit thread. Feel free to tell me to fuck off - just try to phrase it a creative way. We’ve hashed over most of the salient points, and don’t have much left besides throwing amusing barbs at each other.
We’re cool. I’m not in this thread just to argue (though of course that’s fun!), I’m also here to hone my posting skills. I mostly lurk and usually I’m too late in a thread to call anybody on anything–you finally gave me a chance to post something no one esle did (though it appears that no one else cares anyway).
As far as name calling, I usually swear like a pissed-off log truck driver coming across a broke down VW bug on his road in his woods, but this morning the worst thing I can think of is comparing you to a Group Health Mail Order Pharmacy rep, and there is no way you’re that bad!
Again, thanks for responding to my posts.
PS: I know you can’t see me, but I’m a she. :flutters eyelashes: (oh crap, now I got something in my eye)
Reading another thread about Sunday liquor sales stirred thought. If the position of everyone who has cited separation of church and state is wholly valid, then how does it follow that the state can restrict or prohibit commerce on one day of the week, adhering to “Blue Laws” which are understood to have descended from religious tenets?
Those who hold Saturday as a holy day and those who don’t hold any day as a holy day are suffering from abridgement of their rights when they can’t buy and sell cars, booze, stamps, or avail themselves of many government services on Sunday.
We are a nation that is predominantly christian in religious make up. That is certainly true. Christians certainly outnumber all other religios groups by a sunstantial margin. But that fact does not mean we are a ‘Christian Nation’. That phrase has an altogether different and more sinister connotation.
Simplified, pretty much all a municipality that wants to restrict such sales has to do is show some secular purpose for those laws and they’re fine. If the law exists for no other purpose than to advance a “day of rest” or “holy day” or “Sabbath” then it’s unconstitutional but the standard of what courts will accept as a secular purpose is pretty low.
“That phrase has an altogether different and more sinister connotation.”
“That” would be something going on in your mind & perhaps others, but not mine.
To me, this nation, America, was created by predominantly christian people. Christianity is the dominant religion of this nation. Christians wrote the constitution that keeps getting quoted. This is not necessarily good or bad, it just is.
It has already been said in this thread that not all of the writers of the Constitution were Christian. And most of those that were were mindful of the dangers of this becoming a ‘Christian’ nation. But I will conceed the points of the first two sentences.
