It’s been a hell of a long slog, but New York is finally beginning to defund private schools that fail to teach basic literacy and that say fuck you to state education staffers who try to work with them. Three ultraorthodox Brooklyn Yeshivas
will be cut off from all public funds — for child nutrition programs, transportation, textbooks and other services — in what advocates suggested was a new phase of a yearslong effort to ensure all students graduate with basic skills in core subjects, such as English and math.
Schools that guarantee to produce idjits who go right onto the welfare rolls is not what the state has in mind, and it’s a really old scandal getting older by the day.
The reason why the state got involved [in hasidic education] is because of the extraordinarily high [number] of welfare recipients in the hasidic community. This is [partly] a result of large families, but mostly [a] lack of basic education… [This is] about communities that refuse to give their children any secular education that will prepare them to enter the workforce, receive higher education needed to achieve and contribute economically, or even to interact with the wider population… [As a] result, [the hasidic community denies] their children basic social and economic opportunities and condemns many of them to living on welfare.
To find a precedent for this grotesque behavior, you have to go back to ancient China, where women’s feet were deformed through binding, so that they would be more easily exploitable in work settings, or competitive in marriage.
In general, though, the phenomenon of a community intentionally disabling its own young people in order to force them to stay within the tight bounds – if you will – of the community is so perverted that it’s very hard to find any precedent at all.
OTOH we know nothing will happen as a result of the regents finally saying officially that zillions of schools in NYC and upstate NY – with zillions of students, their numbers growing insanely quickly, and most of them run by schoolboards rife with retarders – must be subject to serious investigation/review, and schools who keep retarding will be shut down/lose accreditation/lose subsidies… We shall do such things!
Look at Israel, babe. Look at England. England’s been failing forever to do something about schools that treat female students like slaves and teach islamofascism. Israel’s situation is hilarious. A corrupt ex-prime minister, desperate to stay out of jail, has just offered the following deal to the retarders in his country: Be part of my coalition and I promise never to interfere in any way with your child-retardation process. Full, fulsome government funding will be maintained for all of your efforts. Puts Andrew Yang to shame.
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Because everyone knows nothing will happen, and because almost no one – from their parents to NY State officials – cares about what goes on in Jewish retardation locations, talk is cheap. Suddenly you’ve got the ex-editor of Commentary, of all people, sweating rhetorical bullets over the dire social implications if America’s big, visible, Jewish community — which is soon to be demographically dominated by the retarders — starts looking like a bunch of skid row bums. Not a good look. Nothing to do to avert it, but lemme get myself on the record saying it’s not a good look.
Jonathan Tobin begins with paragraph after paragraph of boilerplate:
Evil secular rags like the NYT hate Jews and we are right to regard anything they write with extreme skepticism.
NY public schools are shitty too.
‘[P]oliticians and news outlets unfairly scapegoated the ultra-Orthodox for spreading COVID-19.’ Hey Tobin short memory: Google Orthodox Spreader Events, lad. (‘[M]ost [haredim] continue to live in constant poverty and go to the doctor without being able to understand their own diagnosis. The price they pay, as we have seen during COVID-19, as well as the recent polio upsurge and anti-vax sentiments … is high and will remain so unless major changes come.’)
After many we’re the victims! paragraphs, Tobin finally, gingerly, timorously, delicately, reticently, dips a toe in.
You don’t have to share the contempt for religious Jews that may be widespread in the Times newsroom to be alarmed by the fact that test scores in these subjects at ultra-Orthodox schools for boys (girls, who are expected to get jobs rather than merely study sacred texts, get slightly more instruction and do marginally better) appear to be the lowest in the state.
I like that “may.” It may be widespread. Ya think? I don’t think. I think a long-term reading of the NYT reveals just the opposite – an effort to write about religious Jews
(And hey Tobin doesn’t really mean religious Jews, does he? Reform Judaism, in which I was raised, is religious, but of course ultraorthodox Jews think Reform Judaism is an utterly profane obscene joke. In Israel, ultras spit at/shout GOYISH WHORE at eight year old Orthodox girls whose skirts are shorter than they should, ultra-istically, be. I think Tobin needs to specify what he has in mind by the phrase religious Jews. Me, I think a baseline definition of a religious Jew is a person who takes the ethical as well as spiritual tradition of Judaism seriously, which would, religiously, put the endemically corrupt ultraorthodox movement somewhere quite far below the Reform and Conservative movements.)
with the same neutrality/objectivity the paper’s journalists write about everything else. But what the hell is objectivity if you’re a yeshiva-educated ultra? The schools have surgically removed, as a cancer, anything that comes out of the empirical, enlightenment, traditions. This is what makes ultras such perfect Trumpians – it’s all conspiracies, rage, our side’s righteous lies, our side’s unique possession of the transcendent truth. (Bonus point here: One of the many reasons nothing’s going to happen to the ultra-orthodox retardation locations is that politicians are literally frightened of this group, whose … parlous… emotional/intellectual state combined with unquestioning mass obedience/action means … riots. Politicians don’t like riots, and believe me there will be riots if anything seriously disruptive is done to ultra life. Remember the mass attack on Jacob Kornbluh. That’s just the beginning. America’s ultras are way behind Israel’s, who riot pretty much continually; but mess with them and they’ll be torching cars.)
And then a little more delicacy cuz we don’t want to hurt any feelings here: APPEAR TO BE the lowest in the state. Another conspiracy? Have the Jew-haters in the NY State testing bureaucracy fucked with the results? Good to be skeptical about things like this.
Tobin sympathetically explains the ultra POV:
They believe that the issue here isn’t so much poor education as the refusal of the secular state … to accept the desire of the ultra-Orthodox community to opt out of society.
Two points here:
If you want to opt out of society, you don’t get to take society’s hard-earned tax dollars. You’ve opted out of that.
You might want to opt out of society, but society can’t opt out of you. You live among us, you vote in our elections (why?), and – wait for it – we have laws. We have laws against beating kids up and defrauding the welfare system and assaulting children sexually. I know you do everything you can to hush up your bad behavior, but society features people – police, journalists, social workers – who act as society’s conscience and try to make sure that children aren’t being abused, our taxpayers aren’t being ripped off, etc. etc. The big glossy NYT article last Sunday draws many more eyes to your – anti-society? – than were ever on it before. Time to duck. “This is something dark. This is the willful perpetuation of social pathology at the hands of Jewish leaders.” “As Hilly Rubin, a resident of the heavily Chassidic neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., told The New York Times: ‘They could have education and still have the religion. But they don’t, and the people are suffering so much.'”
Tobin eventually says the right, obvious, sane things about ultraorthodox yeshivas, but it’s so hedged about with paranoia and knee-jerk anti-leftism (As many commenters on the NYT article note, it’s nuts to make this a left/right thing. Ultras don’t know shit about politics OUT THERE, in That Distant Evil Society. They go where the ultra-friendliest winds blow.) that it’s worthless.
… whose failed mayoral candidacy did everything but suck the dicks of each of the major ultra rebbes. As a NYT commenter writes:
One day after the story broke and I don’t see any of the major recipients of ultra-Orthodox campaign donation rushing to their defense. Contrary to what some of the commenters have written here, the ultra-Orthodox (or haredim as they are known in Israel) are neither Democrats or Republicans. They vote as they are told by the community big shots who decide based on promises made to them by the politicians. If they were in the pocket of one party, their unholy efforts would be far less effective. The fact is that the community votes as a bloc and those votes are always up for grabs.
The commenter goes on to wonder why Andrew Yang in particular isn’t tweeting that if New Yorkers had voted for him none of this religious persecution would be taking place, and the beautiful diversity that is beating kids and keeping them ignorant would continue to assume its secure, state-funded role in our great city. Not long ago, he went very public with his love of ultraorthodox ways:
The key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas…
[Yang] criticized the city for allowing investigators “to check for infractions of various kinds” in yeshivas.
… Mr. Yang has sought to appeal to Hasidic voters on issues besides education, including support for the right of parents to choose a circumcision ritual, metzitzah b’peh, which is used by a minority of Hasidic mohels and has transmitted herpes to babies…
Yeah! And what’s even better, Andrew, is that, as you know, all the babies that get blown by infected mohels die! What a way to go, huh? Helluva cultural practice — one you were happy to support.
So here, in their hour of need, with the NYT finally telling everyone what’s going on in the schools and creating a firestorm, where are you? Where’s the great champion not only of shameful schools, but clerical herpetic cocksuckers?
… as I summarized this writer’s argument about the refusal of ultraorthodox schools all over the world to comply with required state education standards – that is, to teach basic computer, verbal, and mathematical literacy, much less, for instance, empirical method, or the institutions, practices, and history of the country in which their students live.
The writer offers a welcome acknowledgement, from within the haredi world (he heads a hasidic boys’ school), of the bullshit nature of the arguments haredim make about the high quality, by any standard, of their children’s education. He notes that in reality
many hours are spent singing songs, listening to stories, and repeating material that has already been learned. In high school, meanwhile, most of the day is devoted to unstructured learning. This, for many students, consists primarily of socializing while absorbing a tiny amount of material...
[M]ost ḥasidic schools offer something like 90 minutes a day of secular studies to students ages six to twelve, the quality of which varies widely, but is mostly well below average; and these pupils then go on to high schools that provide no secular studies at all.I can tell you, as someone who attended mainstream ḥasidic schools, that by the age of fifteen I had forgotten almost entirely the smatterings of English and mathematics I had learned in elementary school and had to start again from scratch.
As I say, such honesty about – well, about what we already know, but about which haredim lie – is welcome. Yet instead of proceeding to offer suggestions about how the closed, hostile world of the haredim might be induced – more sensitively and successfully – by state education representatives to open up enough to educate their children in even minimally non-haredi ways, the writer suddenly goes on a tear about evil liberal conspiracies to “dismantle” haredi life entirely.
[The question is] whether the liberal state is willing to let a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of the liberal order grow up in its midst. From the perspective of the state, and those loyal to it, there are reasonable grounds to prevent that. What is not reasonable, however, is the sort of liberal triumphalism that imagines that, under the pretext of implementing minor or neutral reforms, Ḥasidim will simply be intimidated into dismantling their own social order...
Liberal order here means everything – everything – that is totally “antithetical,” the writer rightly points out, to the haredi way of life. Totally. Personal choice, autonomy, the use of reason to make decisions which are right for oneself and not necessarily the group (haredim, for instance, notoriously vote as an almost solid bloc; in the last election, almost 83 percent of them, as instructed by their rabbis, voted for Trump, the highest percentage of any voting group). The haredim represent a totally solid rejection of everything modern liberal democracies stand for. Full stop.
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Eli Spitzer even goes on to acknowledge that for haredi parents “preventing college is the point,” so bravo to their schools for doing a bang-up job of making successful entry to college impossible… ? Aren’t we getting a little… weird here? Has Spitzer heard of Yeshiva University? Of quite a number of other seriously religious universities in America? But even those schools won’t take you if you don’t know what a computer is and get 250 on your verbal and nonverbal SATs… tests you can’t even take, come to think of it, without basic computer skills…
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So what do we conclude from what is clearly a radical, all-encompassing, isolation and stupidization of a growing number of young people in the United States?
A country by the way which is itself quite religious?
America is the most religiouswealthy country in the world, according to a recent survey. A Pew survey found that Americans said they prayed more than any other wealthy nation surveyed. Fifty-five percent of Americans report praying at least once daily, 6 percentage points higher than the international average.
Again, in line with it being a religious outlier in the advanced world, the US has an extensive network of religious – and often very culturally conservative – universities. As its current political battles suggest, America’s conservative religious culture and legal institutions arguably dominate – they certainly hold their own – in the institutions (had a look at the Supreme Court lately?) and practices of this country. Anyone looking for a liberal triumphalism set on dismantling religious, conservative life will find herself seriously challenged in this god-fearing, abortion under virtually all circumstances outlawing, country.
Because of course the point here is that ultraorthodoxy does not represent merely (in Spitzer’s words) “a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of the liberal order.” I mean, whoa, Nellie! Ultraorthodoxy is itself an outlier in the religious life of this religious country, where massive numbers of seriously committed religious communities educate their children to a more than acceptable standard for a productive, contributing life in the modern world. We are talking here not about counterculture, but cult – a withdrawn, broadly non-compliant cult whose members often display a positive contempt for the laws of a country many of whose claims upon them they simply reject (this contempt for the civic realm is in all respects far worse in Israel). Far from the triumphant dismantler Spitzer perceives, the reality of the extremely liberal city of New York, for instance, is that the very voting bloc ultraorthodoxy represents stays the hand of one politician after another who might for a moment think of changing that sect’s appalling status quo.
In countries like Spitzer’s – England – the ultraorthodox help make possible the just as appalling educational wreckage many Muslim schools represent. Shouldn’t Muslim schools enjoy the same freedom from an evil liberal state that, for instance, wants to stop them from treating girls like dirt, assigning anti-semitic textbooks, and refusing to teach science?
Maybe it was in part in response to these appalling facts (not to mention systemic welfare fraud in some of these communities), appearing prominently in the New York Times, that the State Board of Education just announced serious new secular education requirements, along with serious penalties (loss of funding; possible closing of schools inspectors find noncompliant) for ignoring them. It’s one thing for us to watch Israel, a Jewish state, suffer demographic catastrophe because of its enormous, ignorant, and overwhelmingly state-dependent ultra orthodox population; it’s another for our proudly secular nation to underwrite such destructive collective behavior. (Speaking of which.)
Although the relevant rabbis haven’t quite called Andrew Cuomo Hitler yet, they’re getting there. And though the whole spectacle is on some level laughable, keep in mind that in Israel the ultra orthodox are quite capable of violence, and we can expect something of the same here as our country attempts to deal with a very angry reactionary force within it.
‘Younger evangelicals are clearly rejecting their evangelical parents’ politics. Growing numbers of young evangelicals and former evangelicals are questioning or rejecting the movement’s teachings on a range of social issues, including sexual abstinence (so-called “Purity Culture”), LGBTQ equality, patriarchy, racism and climate change. They are more politically liberal than their parents and are “losing interest in the culture war.”
For some time now, “younger white evangelicals have become more permissive of abortion, (even as) older ones have moved in the opposite direction,” supporting more and more stringent abortion bans.
As a scholar of religion, I have long believed that pursuing a political strategy to change the Supreme Court has deformed evangelicalism, making it a political movement more than a theological one. When evangelicals supported Donald Trump by more than 80% in 2016, some students of the movement were surprised. How could the party of “Family Values” support a man who has five children by three different women? How could they continue to support him even after hearing him laugh about grabbing women by their private parts on the “Access Hollywood” tape?
If pundits had missed the signs that evangelicalism had traded its core theological values for political gains, its younger members seem to have figured it out.
Now, many young people are rejecting the label evangelical altogether, with some declaring themselves to be exvangelicals. Having lost sight of the core meaning of their movement, evangelicals are losing their children, first as voters, then as co-religionists.’
Valerie Cooper, Duke University
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Soon Trump will command only the demographic that SPECIALIZES in being dumb, reactionary, and hypocritical: The ultraorthodox.
And since most of them – UD predicts – will be moving to theocratic Israel, in flight from American officials who might soon put real pressure on them to allow their children to go from subliterate to marginally literate, UD will now make another prediction.
Realizing that he cannot win the presidency, Trump will take his adherents to the promised land, where he will work out a power-sharing arrangement with Netanyahu and Jerry Falwell, Jr., who will already have moved his flock there.
Nesrine Malik’s description of many Middle Eastern countries applies as well to America’s haredi enclaves, where a fiercely cultivated mental and civic retardation has reduced ultraorthodoxy to an increasingly peculiar, increasingly belligerent, cult.
Because, by definition, many ultraorthodox people don’t know how to argue, UD will charitably refrain from linking to their efforts to defend themselves against the now-notorious New York Times article; she will say, however, that the origins of this group’s virtually one hundred percent full-throated support of that noted polemicist Donald Trump now become clearer to her. As do the origins of their outsize presence at the January 6 rally and even at the insurrection. No one should be surprised that violence is the last refuge of the illiterate. It’s the only voice they have, I guess.
In 2018, former officials of the [Central United Talmudical Academy, famous for its one hundred percent failure rate on a very simple standardized exam,] pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government’s Child & Adults Care Program of over $3m in reimbursements for school meals that the school had never served... This is classic American graft… [T]ax evasion and welfare fraud are an open secret... When Jews break [the law] so blatantly, it reflects badly on all of us.
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The classic example is Lakewood, NJ; but it’s pretty much everywhere, cuz when you deny the legitimacy – nay, the very existence! – of any entity outside yourself, whatever IS out there exists only to be exploited. Laws? The ‘laws’ are their bogus godless laws. We’re the only godly location in the universe; we answer only to God, who speaks to us and us alone through our rabbis; and if our ‘crimes’ are hurting the heathens, so much the better.
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What almost none of the critics of the [NYT] article I have read mention is that this story is really about corruption: the corruption of city and state political figures and yeshiva deans who have duplicitously taken money from state coffers without abiding by state regulations. And the politicians who have looked the other way and ignored non-compliance, assumingly to cultivate Haredi favor in the voting booth. As much as this a Hasidic story, this is also a New York story of political corruption.
… R. Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar rebbes today, is quoted in the article as saying “The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all. We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.” And yet his schools readily accept state funding. It is this corruption that merits a featured essay in the Times.
… proceeds, and will proceed, no matter how many front page New York Timesarticles try to shut them down. Yeshivas dedicated to debraining generations of ultraorthodox Jewish children- entire high schools score ZERO on basic literacy exams – are straight out of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist Ubu the King, the 1896 play where debraining machines first appeared.
Ubu shows the boys his debrainer and points out its features.
UD Says: Enjoy the ruckus about Jews who debrain their children. It’s going to get very noisy as it begins to dawn on taxpayers what they’ve been paying for at the ultraorthodox yeshivas. Some good writing will come out of it. Some high-level thinking about the limits of toleration in a liberal state will appear. You’ll learn something. Nothing will change.
Well, they’re on the warpath. No Pasarán!! they cry; the enemy shall not pass through our sacred gates! So-called Jews who make a PEEP about our way of life (we’re looking at you, Jonathan Tobin) are traitors and will be dealt with as such (remember Jacob Kornbluh!)
A haredi prof at a Brooklyn law school really gets it said:
When asked whether he was concerned about the lack of secular education in many Hasidic schools, [Aaron] Twerski replied, “We make the trade-offs, not the state.”
Haredim to New York:
DROP DEAD
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Nu, so what next?
Nothing. Some violent all-male demonstrations in NYC and upstate. They’ll never be pushed to the wall, so if they were smart they’d shut their traps and do nothing. But who ever said they were smart? They’ve been yeshiva-retarded. They will scream and smash and let out their sexual frustration all over town, and then, on the absurdly slim chance they are, in ten years or so, called to account, they will settle down to cheating on the standardized exam.
You thought Varsity Blues was something. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
World’s best job: Sit around your entire career futzing with proposals for reform of ultraorthodox education knowing nothing will ever happen. The ultimate sinecure.
These [groups have also been allowed to be exempt] from the obligation to vaccination — [which] they are skirting based on their religious beliefs. Paying them to undermine public health [along with paying them to undermine education] is another wrong we can no longer tolerate for the health of the rest of us. Measles and now polio. No no no.
Another one:
As a public health physician since the 1980’s, I can also note that the disregard of the schools for vaccination requirements are a (large) part of the peril highlighted by yesterday’s polio disaster declaration in New York state, and the detection of polio in the waste water of multiple NY counties, the latest Nassau. The US school age vaccination rates for polio in the US approach 94 %; rates are much lower among yeshiva students, contributing to silent spread of an almost eliminated infection in the US.
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Systemic welfare fraud is something else we allow them.
The article also talks about teachers violently abusing their students. It appears to be endemic. We know that rates of sexual abuse are high in these communities as well.
No one cares. Nothing will change.
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Tell you what. I’ve been studying and following the ultraorthodox scandal, in the US and Israel, for years. I fully admit that I just do not get it. Israel’s ultras are routinely violent against the state as well – street riots galore. No one cares. Nothing will change.
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I will say this: The NYT piece is a brilliant, even exciting example of fearless investigative journalism. The one hundred percent outraged, very lengthy comment thread, full of readers describing themselves as absolutely shocked by the educational gutter the article depicts, tells you what? It tells you that all that’s ever been needed for ordinary taxpayers to be sick with disgust over a scofflaw, rapidly growing, hopelessly welfare dependent subculture in this country is for our paper of record to find the guts to write about it.
Once again, nothing will change. But talk about making the situation graphic. A final comment from the thread:
I never thought I would see a major news publication actually have the audacity to describe the situation accurately, bluntly, and plainly.
Many of New York’s ultraorthodox true believers can hardly wait to leave this world of sin. But for them there’s an extra verse to the gospel standard:
And I won’t be alone
When I fly to that throne
I’ll sneeze and spread disease.
Let’s leave this world of sin
Where we have too long been
And to heaven have the keys!
Trump’s most solid voter bloc (a huge majority of America’s ultraorthodox will ultra-enthusiastically vote for Trump) has “embraced” his “views on masks and the pandemic.” “No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks.”
To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God. “I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”
“There’s rampant COVID denialism and misinformation … in the community,” one person familiar with the situation said. “People are not getting tested and are refusing care even when sick. This is deeply distressing.”
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[I]f the outbreak spreads further in the Orthodox community, it could begin to take hold elsewhere, with even more serious consequences. If the city’s overall positivity rate hits 3 percent, that would trigger a new [citywide] lockdown, including the closing of public schools.
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“In the absence of our doing the right thing, we will need to be in a lockdown type situation, as occurred in Israel because they haven’t been able to control the spread of the virus.”
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“It took them seeing deaths – and unfortunately that community saw many deaths – it took that to change,” he said of the decision to close schools and synagogues in March and April. “When it gets to that point, it’s already too late.”
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The fanatics among the haredim of Israel and New York are ignorant, sadistic, and suicidal. Add to that, now, homicidal. The sane among this sect have never been able to control the insane, and governments fear looking bigoted. So take a deep breath, New York.
Quebec is now ground zero for the fight between state and sect, having recently passed Bill 21, which bans all religious clothing and accessories among certain public sector employees in the workplace, and also having begun a Superior Court trial in a case brought against the province by an ex-hasid for educational neglect. Fiercely secular, Quebec followed France (which it sees as a model in the matter of laïcité) in banning burqas and niqabs from much of the public sector; Bill 21 extends this government constraint of religious expression (let’s be generous and agree that the burqa/niqab have something to do with religion – even though it’s more persuasive, it seems to me, to characterize them as pre- or even anti-Islamic and tribal) to things like hijabs and turbans and crucifixes on people who are working in the state sector. The ongoing Superior Court trial reveals that although Quebec claims to be quite secular, it’s not vigilant in secularity’s defense: If the complaints at the trial stand up, the government was perfectly aware for decades of the Tash cult, which kept its children in abysmal ignorance.
Jewish cultistsall over the world, including the United States and of course notoriously in Israel, practice appalling educational malpractice, and although the court cases and school inspections and for real and we really mean it this time national education standards keep coming, the cultists persist in turning out unemployably ignorant people whose lifelong dysfunction our welfare payments support. No doubt the outcome of the Quebec trial will be a concession on the part of the province that they certainly fucked up in letting Canadian citizens raise their children according to thirteenth century standards; but without severe and unremitting penalties (school closures; unpleasant financial implications) nothing will change.
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And as to the business of believing horseshit — the sort of thing the professor quoted in this post’s title mentions — well here’s how ol’ UD feels about that.
Our current vice-president doesn’t believe in evolution. Millions of Americans don’t believe in evolution along with him. Pence is leading the coronavirus effort, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally disbelieved the germ theory of disease.
The vice president thinks smoking doesn’t kill, condoms are “very poor” protection against disease, and the best way to curb an H.I.V. outbreak is through prayer.
Mehdi Hasan, whose opinion piece on the burqa I linked to up there, thinks Muhammed flew up to heaven on a winged horse. Plenty of competent, upstanding citizens who went to good colleges believe a crapload of horseshit. UD has some pretty weird articles of faith – or call them intuitions – herself, come to that… I mean, not as weird as the stuff I’ve been citing, but pretty weird.
So what. It’s the essence of personal liberty in the pursuit of happiness within a liberal democratic state that you can dabble in the alchemy of your choice on your own time as long as it doesn’t put anyone in danger, and as long as you fulfill the basic duties of a citizen. Mike Pence’s entry into the age of reason might all be a ruse, but as long as he keeps up the pretense of being one of us I don’t care. We’re onto ye olde private/public distinction here; and the position you take on Quebec’s Bill 21 will ride on whether you regard the outward exposure of your inward, arguably anti-democratic, and often anti-intellectual, beliefs to be damaging to the education of citizens of a secular state, or as undermining the authority and identity of a secular judicial system.
