Remember Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan society in his novel, The Scarlet Letter? Poor Hester Prynne violated the laws of the church, which meant that she broke society’s laws, too. At the beginning of the novel, the reader joins Hester as she leaves the safety of the town prison and makes her way back into the society that jailed her. Reading the book for the first time in the 11th grade, I had a hard time understanding how, in a free society, the religion of one group could also form its judicial system. That makes the laws of God the same thing as the laws of man. Separation of church and state was also an 11th grade U.S. history lesson, so we students figured no more Hesters could be jailed for breaking the laws of her religion . Or so we thought. We fought a war 250 years ago to separate the colonies from a king who was not only ruler of the government but leader of the church. A quick walk through British history shows what a me...
I have been angry, sad, demoralized, frustrated and now ENERGIZED ! Let’s take a deep breath …. This is the first topical blog post from the Staunton Democratic Committee (SDC). We will try to publish and discuss a specific topic weekly and detail what you can do locally and nationally to counter the threats to our democracy, personal freedoms and values. Many of these issues are intertwined so please bear with me. Where to start ? Clearly many people (including myself) are very angry about some of the most recent Supreme Court rulings such as Dobbs 1 (Roe), West Virginia v. EPA 2 , etc. But initially I want to talk about voting (including voter suppression and election subversion) and why the rest of our progressive agenda depends on 2 pieces of Democrat sponsored election legislation blocked by Republicans in Congress. Consider the current US Congress. Democrats currently have a slim majority in the House and a technical majority (the 51 st vote ...