Kermit takes on the Chick-Fil-A cows

My goodness, culture wars do break out in the strangest places, don’t they?  Now I can’t even go have a chicken sandwich for lunch without deciding where I stand on gay marriage.  I have Mike Huckabee on one side telling me I should definitely patronize Chick-Fil-A because they stand for all that is good and righteous and Kermit the Frog on the other side telling me that the secret ingredient in their chicken sandwiches is intolerance.  It’s really a lot more drama than I care to deal with when I’m hungry.

In case you don’t stay abreast (get it?) of the latest developments in the culture wars, allow me to catch you up on the Chick-Fil-A gay rights controversy.  Back in early 2011 it came to light that Chick-Fil-A’s parent company had donated millions of dollar to Christian organizations that actively oppose legalizing gay marriage.  A backlash has been slowly building against them ever since, with protests initially starting out on some college campuses and later picking up steam on Facebook and other social media.

Then last week Chick-Fil-A head honcho Dan Cathy (son of the franchise founder Truett Cathy) brought things to a boil when he was quoted in the Baptist Press as saying that his company was “guilty as charged” of being supportive of the “Biblical definition of the family unit.”  His words were widely (and correctly, I think) interpreted as saying that yes, as an organization Chick-Fil-A supports, both in word and deed, a traditional view of one man-one woman marriage and opposes the legalization of same sex marriage.

A few people took offense to that, needless to say.  Every prominent organization and individual that supports gay rights has sworn to never let a Chick-Fil-A sandwich touch their lips again.  The Jim Henson Company, which had recently signed a licensing deal with the company, has pledged to end their business relationship with them.  And the mayor of Boston has even declared his intention to keep them from opening any new stores in his city.

Of course conservative organizations have rallied to support the restaurant chain for upholding traditional Christian family values.  Former presidential candidate and current talk show host Mike Huckabee declared August 1 to be “Chick-Fil-A Day” and urged all right-thinking Americans to visit their local Chick-Fil-A and hang Kermit the Frog in effigy.  Okay, I made the Kermit part up, but conservatives are pretty riled up is what I’m saying.

Most of that is just fine with me.  This is America, and if a company wants to donate money to whatever (legal) advocacy groups they want to donate to, I say have at it.  And if anyone is offended by said company’s actions, they should certainly boycott, protest, and otherwise let that company know how full of beans they are for advocating whatever they are advocating.  Long live freedom of expression.

A few things I don’t like about the situation, though.  The mayor of Boston is a complete nincompoop for using his office to try and keep a business from coming to his city because that business advocates a cultural opinion he disagrees with.  That’s a gross misuse of his office and Chick-Fil-A should probably sue the pants off the city of Boston over his ridiculous abuse of power.

As for Chick-Fil-A, they certainly should feel free to strike a public stance on moral issues if they so desire, but they should be consistent about it.  Likely sensing a possible negative impact the controversy might have on their bottom line, they posted a statement on their Facebook page, stating that they intend to “leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena.”

I think it’s a little late for that.  The time to decide to stay out of the debate was before you donated corporate funds to conservative political action groups and proudly proclaimed you were “guilty as charged” in supporting a traditional view of marriage.  It’s too late to claim neutrality after you’ve already made Kermit cry.

Why keeping it off is the hard part

Okay readers, let’s pretend for a minute that we are all in the same room together.  If you have ever tried to lose weight, raise your hand.  Now if you’ve ever been successful in losing a significant amount of weight, keep your hand up.  Keep that hand in the air if, after losing the weight, you gained it all back and maybe put on even more than when you started.

If we were in a room together, and we were all being completely honest, a lot of the people who raised their hand at the beginning of that exercise would have kept them up the whole time.  Many of us have learned that losing weight is hard, but keeping it off long-term seems to be nearly impossible.  It turns out there is a good reason for that, and it’s not just a lack of willpower to blame.

According to a study recently published in “The New England Journal of Medicine,” when a person loses a great deal of weight their body goes into a state of shock, and the condition lasts for a very long time.  In the study a group of obese people were put on a strict, carefully monitored diet and exercise program and then received long-term follow-up counseling on maintaining a healthy weight after they reached their goal.

The story does not have a happy ending, I’m afraid.  A year after they lost weight, the dieters had regained an average of 11 pounds and reported feeling constantly hungry and preoccupied with thoughts of eating.  The scientists who conducted the study think they may have some idea why that was.

Even a year after the participants stopped dieting and they returned to a regular (healthy) diet, their bodies were behaving like they were starving.  Hormones that stimulate the appetite were noticeably elevated and those that suppress hunger were abnormally low.  A whole year after they’d lost a drastic amount of weight their bodies were doing everything they could to push these poor people to eat, eat, eat and gain back whatever weight they’d lost.

 So we shouldn’t be surprised that it is even harder to keep weight off once we lose it.  Our bodies simply refuse to accept the fact that we have reached a new “normal” weight, and it’s not something that seems to get better with time.

I realize this is not good news, but I’m not looking to make anyone depressed or suggest that trying to lose weight is a bad idea.  Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.  But there are a few points I want to make now that I’ve shared this admittedly downbeat information.

1.  We can’t consider dieting to be a temporary thing.  Fighting obesity is a life-long process, and people engaged in weight loss need long term care – lifetime care, really - to have a chance to be successful.

2.  It turns out that losing weight and keeping it off is much harder than staying at a healthy weight from the beginning.  So we need to be vigilant about keeping our children healthy.  Up to a certain age, parents control what their kids eat and (to some extent) how active they are.  This information underscores the fact that if we don’t get them started off right they will have a hard time ever recovering their good health.

3.  People who lose weight and gain it back are not weak.  They are human.  They are dealing with biological issues that those of us who have not had the same experience can’t begin to understand, and we need to cut them some slack and offer encouragement and not insults.

A closer look at school prayer and the Establishment Clause

In my last column, I issued a challenge to my readers to explain to me what the legal basis was for anyone to sue a public school system over that system having religious content as part of their graduation ceremony.  My point was that the First Amendment states that government should “make no law” that establishes religion and since there is no specific law covering what should or should not be said at a graduation ceremony, I didn’t see how a school system could be sued over the issue.

I did receive a few responses to that challenge, and they all boiled down to the same basic argument - that the Supreme Court has handed down a number of decisions over the years that judge organized prayer led or directed by school officials to be unconstitutional.  That such rulings have been made is of course irrefutable.  But unless we believe the Supreme Court is incapable of error, we have every right to examine those rulings and judge for ourselves whether they did or did not correctly adhere to what the Constitution has to say on the matter.  Let’s do that, shall we?

Perhaps the most important Supreme Court ruling on prayer in public schools was rendered in 1962 in the case of Engel vs. Vitale.  The New York State Board of Regents had in 1951 composed a short non-denominational school prayer and proposed it as an optional, start-of-the-day prayer for New York school children to recite if schools choose to do so.  One of the schools in the system that elected to have students recite the prayer aloud at the beginning of each day ended up getting sued, and at length the case made it to the highest court in the land.

The court ruled 6-1 that the school system’s encouragement of the recitation of a prayer to be “wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment.  Prayer and other overtly religious activities in public schools have been largely forbidden ever since.

So, case closed?  Well, let’s look closely at the specific wording of the Establishment Clause this judgment refers to:

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

Now, if you would, please read those first four words to yourself again.  “Congress,” it says, “shall make no law…”  As I interpret that, it is saying that the United States Congress, composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives, is prohibited from making a law that has the effect of establishing a religion.

What then, I must ask, does this amendment have to do with a school policy set by the New York Board of Regents?  To begin with, they didn’t actually pass a law.  And perhaps more importantly, the New York Board of Regents is not part of the US Congress, so (read those first four words of the First Amendment again if you need to) their actions had nothing whatsoever to do with the First Amendment.  And therefore the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to rule on this case.  In fact, they probably shouldn’t have even reviewed it.

Note that I did not say that I think the government-composed generic prayer idea was ever a good one.  I don’t.  It was a well-intentioned but completely misguided notion, in my opinion.  Prayer should never be something anyone should be “directed” to do by their government, with the words of said prayer composed by a government committee, no less.  There are so many things that are wrong with that idea I’d need a whole other column to list them all.  (I think Matthew 6:5-6 addresses it better than I ever could, anyway.)

But that is not the point.  State and local governments do a lot of things that I don’t think are wise, but the great majority of those things have nothing to do with the Constitution.  The school prayer thing is just one example among many that shows we are not really a Constitutional republic any longer, and haven’t been for a long time.

We need a Freedom From Litigation Foundation

One thing I never expected to see Warner Robins become is a flash point in the debate on the separation of church and state.  But over the last few weeks that’s what has seemed to have happened.

It started when someone from out of state who was attending one of our local high school graduations was unpleasantly surprised at the religious elements that were incorporated into the public school ceremony.  That individual has written letters to local media and the school superintendent objecting to the inclusion of prayer and religious-themed music and speeches in the graduation program and there is a possibility that litigation could follow.

Just a few days after that story broke, another church-state separation brouhaha surfaced in the International City when a letter that Mayor Chuck Shaheen had previously published in The Telegraph that included some strong religious references was protested by the activist group Freedom From Religion Foundation.  And once again there is the possibility that the situation could turn into a lawsuit for which you and I (and the other taxpayers in these parts) could end up footing the bill.

Frankly, I don’t see why these kinds of cases aren’t just summarily dismissed.  The Constitution states that the government shall “make no law” that either establishes a religion or prevents the free exercise thereof.  I do not believe that there is a law covering what the program for a high school graduation may contain, nor is there one to dictate what kind of letters a mayor can post in the local newspaper.  (Nor do I think that we have any need for such laws, by the way.)

Yet the basis of lawsuits like these is that these expressions of religion might be unconstitutional.  How can someone be in violation of laws that do not exist?  Maybe some of my readers who have a better grasp on the finer points of the law will be good enough to explain this to me.

Based on my limited research, our legal system seems to be a little confused about the whole thing as well.  The outcomes of such cases seem to be all over the map, and the same behavior that is forbidden in one state is given a judicial okay in another.  I guess it’s a good thing that our crime rate is nearly nonexistent, else these kinds of lawsuits might seem like a big waste of time and money.  (That was sarcasm, just in case that wasn’t obvious.)

Although I think such lawsuits are frivolous and ridiculous, I also believe that this man from North Carolina and the Freedom From Religion Foundation have every right to publicly protest the graduation ceremony and Mayor Shaheen’s letter.  I find it disturbing and disappointing that so much of the reaction to their complaints has taken the form of vicious personal attacks and invitations for these offended parties to “stay out of Georgia if they don’t like how we do things here.”  It is a shame that so many of us lack the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.

There’s a discussion to be had here and there are reasonable points to be made on either side.  A person should not have to leave his religious beliefs at the door when he is elected to a public office but he should be mindful of the fact that he represents a diverse group of citizens, many of whom do not share his views on religion.

As I’ve said before in this space, my opinion is that government officials ought to remain neutral on religious matters while they are executing their duties as public officials.  But that’s just my opinion about what’s right and what’s respectful to everyone concerned, and I wouldn’t try and sue anyone who disagreed with me.  If we have to settle this dispute in court the only real winners will be the lawyers and their fat bank accounts.

Read my lips: no more SPLOSTs

In the past, when I have commented on SPLOST votes, I’ve stated that since the “special purpose” sales taxes never seem to go away once they get approved our sales tax rate was likely to be at 7% forever.  I should have known better.

I was underestimating the burning desire to spend other people’s money that few politicians seem to be able to control.  In July we will get the opportunity to add another penny tax to every dollar we spend to fund a brand new regional SPLOST that would fund transportation projects in Houston, Bibb, and nine other mid-state counties.

That would raise our sales tax to 8%, but I’m not about to say I expect it will be 8% forever if voters approve the measure.  I wouldn’t be shocked if they find good reason to raise it to 9 or 10 cents on the dollar someday.  After all, what’s an extra dime on every dollar you spend, right?  You probably have a change jar at home that’s just chock full of dimes you aren’t using.

Prospects for the T-SPLOST passage may be a little cloudy though, especially where I live in Houston County.  We just renewed our county’s SPLOST that is targeted for capital improvements, and in this go-around there weren’t many road improvement projects included on the list of projects it covers because the previous SPLOST supposedly got us pretty well-positioned in that department.

And yet just a few months later we’re being asked to jack up our taxes for transportation improvements.  What gives?  Well, this is not just a Houston County tax, it is a “regional” tax, which means that taxpayers in Houston County would be paying for projects that would benefit surrounding areas.  As a matter of fact, it appears we’d be getting the short end of the T-SPLOST stick.

Of the over one billion dollars the T-SPLOST would be expected to generate over 10 years Bibb County would gobble up over $500 million of that, while Houston would reap less than $150 million.  The rest would go to 9 counties that many of us probably never set foot in.

But it might be worth it since all of this money would be dedicated specifically to improving transportation to encourage new business growth throughout the region, right?  Well, that’s only true if you think that building sidewalks and bike trails are going to attract new businesses to the area, because projects like that have been thrown into the mix of things this tax would fund.

Another point to consider is that many of us in Houston County (me included) are employed at Robins Air Force Base.  Federal government workers are currently under a pay freeze, and there has been talk of extending it beyond its supposed 2-year duration.  There have also been proposals floating around in Congress (coming from supposedly defense-friendly Republicans, no less) to do things like freeze our step increases, eliminate locality pay, and cut back the federal workforce by 10%.

And lest we forget, there are huge automatic cuts slated to be made to the defense budget in 2013 if Congress doesn’t find a way to avoid them.  No one knows what will happen if that “doomsday scenario” comes to pass, but it’s safe to say we might look on the last few years as the good times compared to what could be coming down the road very soon.

People who work on base or depend on the base for their income have been losing ground economically the past few years and that may get worse in the near future.  It does not seem to me like it’s a good time for us to absorb a major tax increase so that we can build sidewalks and buy buses for Bibb County.

I just wish there was a third option on the ballot, in addition to Approve or Disapprove.  I’d like an option that reads: “You have to be out of your ever-loving mind – NO MORE TAX INCREASES!”