When you get your new, blue Tennessee license plates, you can ask for one with “In God We Trust” on it. It doesn’t cost any more and the print is so tiny, you can’t even see it from 20 feet away, but the state of Tennessee has helpfully made it quite easy for you to tell if the car in front of you is driven by a god-fearin’ Tennessean or a heathen: On the “IGWT” plates, numbers are to the left of the center logo and letters are on the right. On the secular plates, the letters are on the left, numbers on the right.
So if, say, a vehicle with license plate BRK-1234 makes an illegal turn from the center lane, it’s probably because he’s going to hell eventually, anyway.
In May, Tennessee counties were surveyed to see which plate their drivers preferred. Some rural counties were more than 90 percent IGWT-ers. Conversely, drivers in big-city counties like Davidson (86 percent) and Shelby (74 percent) favored the secular plate. (Of course, after the incompetent and delayed roll-out of the new plates in Memphis, Shelby Countians can probably be forgiven if they’ve lost their faith.)
All this begs the question: Why is the state mixing religion with license plates? The godly plates are free, so there’s not even a financial reason for it, as there is with other specialty plates you can order.
The answer, of course, is that Governor Bill Lee and our GOP-dominated state legislature would like to push their brand of Christianity on everybody, in any way they can. One has only to look at Lee’s years-long insistence on getting Hillsdale College charter schools established in Tennessee — with our tax dollars, of course.
Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, you may recall, outraged Tennessee educators in August by saying in a speech that teachers are the “dumbest students from the dumbest colleges.” Lee, who was at the speech, nodded calmly, and has yet to criticize Arnn for his remarks.
In response, local school boards in the state have vigorously opposed the granting of charters to Hillsdale, but Lee loaded up the state committee that approves charters with cronies and Hillsdale supporters, so the odds were good that they’d get approved.
That all changed this week, when Nashville television reporter Phil Williams (who’s been all over this story) found a video of Hillsdale professor David Azerrad mocking the achievements of African Americans, including George Washington Carver and the NASA mathematicians in Hidden Figures, saying that putting them in history books kept more deserving white people from being written about.
I wish I were making this up.
Governor Lee, let me remind you, has said of Hillsdale: “I believe their efforts are a good fit for Tennessee.” No, they are not, you mouth-breathing cheeseball. Hillsdale is a racist Christian-nationalist academy whose students’ academic scores are anemic. Last Thursday, Hillsdale withdrew its applications in Tennessee, due in no small part, one assumes, to the racist video being uncovered.
Perhaps, the state can take a lesson from New York. In mid-September, The New York Times broke a story about that city’s Hasidic schools, which get funding from the state, much like what Lee is pushing for in Tennessee. The story revealed that Hasidic schools were flush with government money, but that male Hasidic students were getting only five or six hours a week of secular learning (math, English, history, etc.) and spent 90 percent of the time learning Hebrew and studying religious texts.
The Times also found that rabbis routinely hit students with rulers, belts, and sticks wrapped in electrical tape, and that parents often “tipped” rabbis $100 to keep their boys from being abused. Hasidic boys’ scores in the state’s standard tests were the worst in the city. The state had let the issue slide for years because Hasidic Jews are a monolithic voting bloc that can swing elections in several districts.
There is a reason our Founding Fathers established the separation of church and state. In this country, you have the right to practice any faith you choose, but taking tax dollars to prop up the teaching of religion is patently unconstitutional.
It’s a slippery slope, and it’s wrong. Kind of like providing free specialty license plates for that guy who just cut you off and gave you the finger. Was that you, Governor?
