We all have loyalty to our home states or states we’ve settled in. Though a New Yorker by birth, I currently live in Maryland and love it. Though if truth be told, I grew up mostly in Florida and at heart still consider myself a South Floridian and Hollywood, Florida, my home. However, if things got sporty, if the fit hit the shan, I’d be vamoosing it for Texas. Why?
You know why.
More proof of that, as if we needed it, is what the folks in San Jacinto County there did when faced with Yankee buttinskis who told them to take down the crosses that adorned their courthouse. Citizens gathered at a town hall to defend their right of free expression followed by county pols voting unanimously to keep the symbols in place.
It gets better.
They not only refused to take down the crosses, they illuminated them in a…in the words of the local GOP chairman, “suck a tailpipe” moment aimed at the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation who started the ruckus.
Now if you’re like me, and my condolences, it first hit you that lighting up crosses is not exactly a good PR move in the South. But these crosses are not ablaze in ignorant fury and those illuminating them are not rabid bigoted cretins vomiting up hate and their own psychoses.
What the people in San Jacinto typify are intelligent Americans who realize that our constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. That’s a concept that may play well in certain brain-freezing environs of the upper Midwest. Hardly in Texas.
So sure, put up crosses and, if the request is made, throw in a Star of David or two while you’re at it. Whether Bolshies want to admit it or not, this is a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles and remains a nation primarily of such. That does not, I repeat, does not, exclude any other faith from expression or the public sphere. It does recognize our heritage, a heritage we should be proud of.
Thus Stetsons off to the Lone Star state in this and sundry matters.
