The Binary Circumstance

While at the Bite of Seattle yesterday, some guy from a group called Direct Democracy handed me a leaflet. It spoke directly to the problems we’ve been having with city government on Bainbridge.

Washington State Constitution - Article I Section I

Political Power: All political power is inherent in the people, the governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and are established to protect and maintain individual rights.[emphasis mine]

RCW 42.17.251 (1992cl39)

The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created. The public records subdivision of this chapter shall be liberally construed and its exemptions narrowly construed to promote this public policy.

I wonder if anybody down there at City Hall has ever read the Washington State Constitution, which I’m quite sure the elected officials have been sworn to uphold.

Andrew Sullivan quotes Michael Oakeshott:

"[G]overning is recognized as a specific and limited activity; not the management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises. It is not concerned with concrete persons, but with activities; and with activities only in respect of their propensity to collide with one another. It is not concerned with moral right and wrong, it is not designed to make men good or even better; it is not indispensable on account of the "natural depravity of mankind" but merely because of their current disposition to be extravagant; its business is to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.

Sullivan adds his comment:

A reader reminded me of this passage which I hadn’t read in a while. A pretty good summary of the conservatism of doubt. But how alien to contemporary Republicanism!

The notion of government as merely a peacekeeper rather than teacher or moral authority is alien to contemporary liberalism, too!!!

Positive Atheism has a page devoted to quotations that reveal President John F. Kennedy’s (JFK’s) opinions about separation of church and state.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote – where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference – and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
     I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish – where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source – where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
– John F. Kennedy, address to the Ministerial Association of Greater Houston, September 12, 1960, from Albert J. Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty … Neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test – even by indirection.
– John F. Kennedy, address to the Ministerial Association of Greater Houston, September 12, 1960, from Albert J. Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

He had a lot more to say on the subject.

""I’ve done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts
the other stuff." - Ned Flanders, from The Simpsons.

More quotes from The Simpsons.

(Thanks, Skip.)