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The New York State Senate sometimes considers weighty matters like taxes and budgets.
On Tuesday, it focused its attention on yogurt.
Specifically, it took up a proposal to designate yogurt as the official state snack. Yogurt production happens to be a booming industry upstate.
But
in Albany, no matter is too small to provoke disagreement. And honoring
yogurt, it turned out, was too much for some lawmakers to stomach.
One
senator, Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, suggested the designation
might be inconsiderate to people who are lactose intolerant. Another,
Gustavo Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, wondered if yogurt could count as a
snack if it were consumed at breakfast time.
Alternative snack ideas were raised. The distinction between Greek yogurt and regular yogurt was clarified.
“Almost 7 o’clock and we are here discussing yogurt,” said Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., a Bronx Democrat.
The
yogurt proposal was the idea of a fourth-grade class, according to the
bill’s sponsor, Michael H. Ranzenhofer, a Republican from western New
York. “This is really democracy in action,” he said.
Ms.
Krueger suggested the state should more thoroughly seek to gauge the
snack-related sentiments of its residents. Mr. Ranzenhofer said elected
officials needed to show leadership.
Most senators agreed: The Senate voted 52 to 8 in favor of yogurt. The bill’s fate now rests with the State Assembly.
Stop scratching on holidays
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
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scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
A Big Win for the Prayer Lobby
IF
you listened to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court and his
fellow conservatives on the bench this week, you might think the
court’s 5-4 decision in the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway was no big deal. So what if a town in upstate New York typically opens its council meetings with prayers that acknowledge “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross”?
If
you listened to the people who shepherded the case as it ascended the
judicial hierarchy, however, the decision represents one of their
biggest victories to date. It “wasn’t just an answer on prayer — it was
an answer to prayer!” read a statement
by the Family Research Council. The council is one of a host of
organizations guided by the religious liberty advocacy group the Alliance Defending Freedom that backed the defendants with legal resources.
To
understand why the case’s backers were so cock-a-hoop, you must first
know something about the long game being played by the religious right.
The goal is to get back to a “soft” establishment of religion in America
— that is, a system in which formal guarantees of religious freedom and
the official separation of church and state remain in place, but one
religion is informally or implicitly acknowledged as the “approved”
religion of the majority and a legitimate basis for public policy.
This
was more or less the situation in the United States during the first
half of the 19th century. In 1811, the New York Supreme Court upheld
a conviction for blasphemy (the archetypal union of church and state)
on the grounds that the state had an interest in punishing offenses to
the religious sensibilities of the Protestant majority. Back then,
nativist Protestants imposed their version of the Bible in public
schools, while Catholics rioted in protest and placed their children in
parochial schools.
Through
the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the judicial thinking on
church-state issues evolved, and the “soft” establishment became much
harder to justify. The United States Supreme Court introduced the “Lemon
test,” for example. Named for a 1971 case the court heard, this
required that legislation concerning religion should not result in
“excessive government entanglement” with religious affairs. The Supreme
Court also increasingly took
the view that government should abstain from any activity wherein a
reasonable observer might perceive it to be endorsing religion.
Today, groups like the A.D.F. — which also represents
Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation in its challenge to the
contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act — are deeply unhappy
with the reigning jurisprudence on church-state separation. It would
seem that they wish to undermine the Lemon test, which they consider
“burdensome,” as a staging post to restoring a soft establishment of
Christianity in the United States. This is where Greece v. Galloway
comes in.
The
first order of business is to remove objections by swiping aside the
idea that soft forms of establishment exist at all. Here, the Greece
decision delivers, substantially.
Continue reading the main story
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“Offense,”
Justice Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion, “does not equate to
coercion.” Justice Clarence Thomas, in the part of his concurring
opinion joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, drew out the key implication:
“To the extent coercion is relevant to the Establishment Clause
analysis, it is actual legal coercion that counts — not the ‘subtle
coercive pressures’ allegedly felt by respondents in this case.” In
other words, religious observance counts as “establishment” only if you
are compelled to kneel by law.
A
second element of the plan for undermining concerns based on the First
Amendment’s Establishment Clause is to reinterpret public acts as
personal expressions of speech by private individuals. Thus, when the
minister appointed by the municipal government of Greece bids “all
rise,” the Supreme Court majority tells us, this is not an establishment
of religion because the words are not uttered by public officials. And
when the town leaders respond with a sign of the cross, that isn’t
establishment either, because, just then, public officials are acting as
private individuals.
Another
prong in the assault on the Establishment Clause is to use neutrality
among religious denominations as a wedge for inserting the (presumed)
majority religion into state business. In theory, “neutrality” means
giving every sect an equal shot at officiating prayer at Greece’s
council meetings. In practice, the town government has unquestionably
identified itself with what it takes to be the majority religion in the
area.
In
his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dismissed concerns
about the blatantly sectarian tilt of the town’s proceedings, which were
led exclusively by Christian ministers for nearly a decade, by pointing
out that Jews make up a mere 3 percent of the local population and
alleging that other non-Christian groups are no larger.
A
final, crucial part of the strategy is to substitute history — or, more
accurately, a particular mythologized version of history — for legal
analysis. Here the A.D.F. and its allies have hit pay dirt in the Greece
decision.
Justice Kennedy invoked an earlier, highly problematic decision in the case of Marsh v. Chambers
to suggest that the usual legal tests were “unnecessary” because the
“history supported the conclusion” that the prayers were compatible with
the Establishment Clause. It is, however, preposterous to say that
something is constitutional simply because it’s been done in the past.
The
“history” here sustains a myth that early America had a single religion
of “Christianity,” when, in fact, it was bitterly divided into
antagonistic sects from the start. And many of America’s founders —
James Madison, for example — were firmly opposed to such precedents of
church-state entanglement as congressional chaplains.
The
assault by the religious right on the Establishment Clause has been
unfolding for two decades, in a number of landmark cases. Under cover of
pursuing “religious freedom,” it has already succeeded in inserting
fundamentalist religion into parts of America’s public education system.
With Greece v. Galloway, it has now expanded the reach of this novel
and destructive interpretation of the Establishment Clause. It is part
of a project to “restore” a version of America that never was, and never
can be.
Katherine Stewart is the author of “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.”
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