{"id":3066,"date":"2014-11-03T22:22:58","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T04:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3066"},"modified":"2014-11-03T21:27:31","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T03:27:31","slug":"public-officials-promise-to-pay-for-missionary-position","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2014\/11\/03\/public-officials-promise-to-pay-for-missionary-position\/","title":{"rendered":"Public officials promise to pay for missionary position"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Ed Brayton<\/a> for pointing out this story from KOCO<\/a> about a public schoolteacher from Blackwell, Oklahoma who will soon be traveling to Africa to do mission work. Not medical work in the Ebola hot zone, mind you, but religious\u00a0mission work in faraway<\/a> Rwanda. It’s already been noted how ridiculous it is\u00a0to act\u00a0like “Africa” is all one massive intermixing population all at\u00a0equal risk of contracting this terrible\u00a0disease, in articles like this one at HuffPo<\/a>. This depth\u00a0of geographical ignorance borders on\u00a0xenophobic, among other unpleasant things.<\/p>\n

What has been overlooked (so far as I’ve yet seen) is that the public school in question<\/a>\u00a0has promised\u00a0to pay for three weeks<\/em> of self-imposed quarantine, thereby indirectly appropriating public funds to further the Christian religion.<\/p>\n

\"img_stkpic_7mnk6z_554x5000\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Needless to say, it is plainly\u00a0unconstitutional<\/a>\u00a0in Oklahoma for “public money or property” to be “appropriated,\u00a0applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of . . . any priest,\u00a0preacher, minister, or other religious teacher.”<\/p>\n

While I’m generally in favor of more support for our public schoolteachers, the last thing we need to be doing is paying out state monies to\u00a0facilitate off-duty\u00a0religious mission work. It comes down to this:\u00a0Who should cover the costs and risks of undertaking international mission work, the church or the state? The answer is perfectly\u00a0straightforward,\u00a0and it’s been\u00a0written into our state constitution for exactly\u00a0as long as Oklahoma has been a state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Ed Brayton for pointing out this story from KOCO about a public schoolteacher from Blackwell, Oklahoma who will…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,32,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-oklahoma","category-politics","category-movement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}