FAIR & SQUARE

Last night I took three of our kids to the Fair on the Square. It is every Friday night in July. They can one-putt into a cup, shoot a basket, or do some other games, and they get Monopoly money. With the fake money they can buy silly Bands, plastic dinosaurs, jewelry, and other things from a selection of thirty of forty cigar boxes full of gaudy trinkets (the kind of stuff for which the Indians sold Manhattan).

A bland band plays in the octagonal gazebo.

We used to have a world-class cornet player, but he died.

Right up until he died, he could play like a million bucks. He was over 90.

Also on the square are artists selling drawings, fortune tellers, chefs with fruit pies, lotteries for 4-H, and an ice cream truck. Kids play soccer which usually degenerates into rugby.

Sometimes someone sells musty books. (I bought one by James Hitchcock last week. He's an ardent Catholic. The book is called What Is Secular Humanism? and rehearses many of my own arguments, but it's published in 1982 by Servant Books of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has in it the awful truth that Catholics have managed to maintain most of their institutions {colleges, schools} while Protestants have caved and can no longer say no to themselves. Not only did I love the book, but I immediately went online and bought another one by Hitchcock called The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life Vol 1: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses {Princeton UP 2004}).

Last night a group of five or six young men and women had a conservative booth. They were giving out the Constitution (the most radical literature in America, and the thing the current government least wants you to get your hands on).

The foreword is by Ron Paul. When Paul is voting for legislation he applies the Constitutional test, one young man said. If it's not constitutional, he won't vote for it.

"I believe it's worthwhile for all of us to tirelessly pursue the preservation of the elegant Constitution with which we have been so blessed" (3), the Paul foreword ends.

Many think there is a separation of church and state somewhere in the Constitution. In fact, it is just the opposite.

In Article VI, it reads:

"...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" (23).

As if that isn't clear enough, this again is the VERY FIRST phrase in the Amendments, or what is known as the BILL OF RIGHTS:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." (28).

The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791.

The establishment clause means that there can be no official church. You don't have to be a PC imitator to be a politician. You don't have to be a Marxist to be in any state institution (except perhaps the mental institutions or the colleges). The establishment clause came about because Madison's Virginia wanted to disestablish Baptists from government offices, and to establish Episcopalianism as the official church of Virginia. But the principle of tolerance now holds universally (batteries not included).

Not only do you not have to believe what your coworkers or cohorts believe, but you are permitted to say what you do believe (but watch it until you have tenure, and even after). You don't have to be an Episcopalian or a creep from some liberal sport of a church. You can be a diehard conservative, and yet still have the right to speak, to be elected, or to serve in any government agency.

That's the good news.

Here's the bad news. I asked the five young conservatives whether they'd vote for anyone the Republicans offered, as opposed to any Democrat.

No, they said. We would only vote for someone who backed our principles. Otherwise, we wouldn't vote, or would write in our vote, or vote for an obscure third party.

Young people are such wonderful idealists.

They didn't say they WOULDN'T vote for Sarah Palin, but did say they would want to read deeply, first.

Fair enough, on the Square.