Do they still burn witches in Centerville?

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

I hope that you recognize the above quote as being a portion of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. There are, apparently, some people who are serving as elected officials in our area who are either unfamiliar with the above statement, don’t understand it, or don’t believe it should be adhered to.

Apparently in Centerville, my own home town, our elected officials feel that it is their right and responsibility to decide how its citizens can legally practice their chosen religion. Specifically, they have an ordinance (which apparently has been quietly in place since 1985) that prohibits people from being financially compensated for providing certain religious services, and they are currently involved in a legal tussle with someone who recently opened a business that provides such services.

The law doesn’t apply to people who provide religious service or instruction in the support of older and more established faith traditions. No, the city has singled out those weird “New Age-y” religious practices like palm-reading, fortune- telling, and astrology for special regulation. Specifically, if you provide these kinds of services to anyone in Centerville and are financially compensated for them you can be punished with a $500 fine and/or 60 days in jail.

I couldn’t possibly get inside the heads of the people who thought such an ordinance was necessary or the people who are now trying to enforce it, but my guess would be that they might see these practices as “fake” and the people who purvey them as hucksters who are preying on the feeble-minded. Perhaps they even see fortune-telling and palm-reading as dangerous occult practices that might lead people into the clutches of Satan himself.

They do, of course, have every right to feel that way. In this country, however, they are not supposed to use the power of the government to discriminate against the religious practices of one group of people over another, and that is exactly what they are doing.

Some might argue that no one is trying to outlaw palm-reading and fortune-telling, that people can still legally engage in these activities as long as no money changes hands. And that is true. But it is also true that it is perfectly legal in Centerville for Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist worshippers to pay their religious officials for preaching, praying, officiating at weddings and funerals, and otherwise performing the religious duties of their faith traditions. But if a practitioner of New Age religion accepts compensation for performing the rites of their belief system, they can be put in jail.

If that isn’t partiality I really don’t know what is, and I don’t see how anyone can read the first line of this column and not immediately see how this ordinance runs afoul of the First Amendment. The really fun part is that the lady who the city is hounding for offering these services in her recently-opened business is filing a lawsuit in federal court. So, as a taxpayer, am I going to be paying the tab for the city to fight this court challenge just so I can be free of the menace of people shelling out a few bucks to have their palms read in my home town? I’m afraid that unless common sense makes an unexpected appearance at city hall, the answer will be “yes.”

Let me state this as plainly as I can as a taxpaying citizen of Centerville: this ordinance is unconstitutional, unnecessary, and just plain silly. It is not likely to stand up to a court challenge and it is (understandably) turning Centerville into the punch line of some very bad jokes. It needs to be taken off the books, like yesterday, and the city government needs to leave this business owner and her patrons alone and concentrate on keeping the streets clean and the water running.

Put the shotgun away and vote

In a country like ours, where people are free to express their opinions, there is always going to be disagreement, discord, and division. It just goes with the territory. But there are degrees to these things, and at certain times the divisions run a lot deeper than others.

The Civil War was surely the most extreme example of how divided a free nation can become. And though I’m a little too young to remember much about the 60s, it seems that was a time of great upheaval and disharmony as well, especially between the generations.

Today it feels like we are entering another period where our differences of opinion on what direction the country should be taking are driving a deep wedge between us. People are beginning to let their emotions get the better of them, and they are saying and doing some decidedly uncivilized things. The nation’s mood seems to have reached a boiling point and is unlikely to cool off any time soon.

The signs are all around us. The number of hate groups in our country has skyrocketed since Barak Obama’s election. I’m sure we all heard about the recent arrest of members of the Michigan-based Hutaree movement, a group who called themselves Christians and planned to help usher in the “end times” by killing a policeman and then bombing his funeral to add his family and friends to the bodycount. There are more of these sorts of groups forming every day, and it’s likely only a matter of time before some of them start carrying out their long-festering plans of murder and mayhem.

And here in Macon we have a city councilman/right-wing media pundit who very publicly threatened to pull a shotgun on federal census takers if they dared to show up at his door to demand that he fill out his census form. I’m sure the people who took jobs with the census agency this year to help put food on their family’s table (the “twerps” Erik Erikson is threatening to meet at his door with a shotgun) appreciate what he is doing to help make their jobs more exciting.

I do believe that there are situations where violence is a justified response to a repressive government. A good example would be when the founders of our country took up arms against Britain because they had no representation in the government that was controlling every aspect of their existence. Their only options were to live as virtual serfs or to risk their lives in the cause of freedom.

But we are in a very different situation in America in 2010. Our government is made up of people who we elected to serve our interests. Within six years we could, if we chose to, replace the president and every member of congress with new representation simply by showing up at the polls and voting. Nobody needs to die, nobody needs to get beaten up, nobody even needs to be cussed out for such a revolution to take place.

Of course that approach requires a little time, a little patience, and a whole lot of work on a lot of people’s part. And maybe it would be more satisfying in the short term to put a brick through someone’s window or to do something a lot worse, but it would also be stupid and short-sighted.

As bad as our government may be (and make no mistake, I believe we have been been going down the wrong road for a long time) it is still our government. It makes no sense to go to war against yourself.

Personally, I’m not mad at Barak Obama, or the Democrats, or “the government”, and I have no desire to pull a shotgun on anybody. The power that they have, and that they are clearly misusing, is derived from the voting public. That is the source of my frustration, and that is where the real fix to this problem has to originate.