As this excellent editorial recites, some of the more "pushy" Kaysville city council brothers in Mr. Mac suits have informally decided to close down recreational opportunities for kids of all religious persuasions on Monday nights in Kaysville, in order to accommodate the L.D.S. "family home evening."
We incorporate here a few key paragraphs of today's magnificent pro-liberty editorial:
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, the government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; ..." City governments must be neutral when it comes to religion. They should neither promote nor prohibit religious observances.
If a family, LDS or not, believes that Monday night -- or any other night -- should be set aside for worship or obedience to the doctrines of their faith, they have a choice to make between recreational sports and adherence to their religious philosophy. But they must not depend on the state, or in this case the city, to make that choice for them, because it is an impingement on the secular freedoms of their neighbor who does not share that belief.
It is precisely this sort of well-intentioned intrusion into the lives of non-Mormons in Utah that fosters resentment and furthers the cultural divisions within our communities.
"Halleluja," we say. Make that a "double, we add, in honor of the upcoming New Years' Eve Holiday. We also wonder why L.D.S. families in can't incorporate Monday night sports/recrearation activities into a true family gathering. Your blogmeister springs from a family of hockey players. Some of out best family-bonding experiences sprang from local week-day sports events, with young family members occasionally (and always wrongfully) cooling their heels in the penalty-box.
We can't doff our headgear fast enough to congratulate the Standard-Examiner today.
Whereas we often criticize our home town paper for it's seeming mealy-mouth attitude toward certain local municipal totalitarian types who wear the trapping of the L.D.S. faith, it's nevertheless encouraging to witness the Standard-Examiner standing up for "what's right" today.
On another note, we learn from this morning's Std-Ex edition that another Emerald City career attorney will be flying the City Hall Chicken coop.
Andrea Lockwood, another city attorney with zero apparent recent courtroom experience, has now reportedly been appointed by Matt Godfrey to don a dark judicial robe, pound a gavel in a courtroom in Emerald City's Kangaroo Court, and extract revenue from we lumpencitizens.
God help Judge Lockwood if any experienced trial attorney shows up in her courtroom to make an objection. God help any pro-se litigant who tries to do the same. The rules of evidence and procedure are complicated enough for seasoned litigators. We think she'll soon find herself way over her head. We don't envy her in this, and in fact offer our sincere sympathy.
Having said that, we congratulate Ms. Lockwood for this latest career move. After a distinguished career in city government, she moves out of the limelight, just as the corrupt Boss Godfrey empire comes tumbling down. Very smart, wethink.
Comments are invited, of course.
Update 12/30/06 5:37 a.m. MT: The Standard-Examiner is truly a wonder to behold when it embarks upon one of its infrequent crusades. In that connection, read today's guest commentary on this subject here.
24 comments:
Many religions have lifestyle restrictions and, in general, their followers abide by these without expecting nonbelievers to do so. The most obvious examples that immediately come to my mind are Orthodox Jews practicing in the US and the Amish. The tolerence that allows them their beliefs is extended by them to society in general.
There is a difference between "freedom of religion" and "freedom from religion." Both should be important to all of us.
Shame on the Kaysville Council!!!
BTW, LDS families can spend "Family Night" in any activity they wish!! It's the being together that counts...as Rudi so succintly pointed out, the family that scraps together, shares a penalty box, and that's a bonding experience.
Rudi,
In a bit of a hurry this afternoon? The name is Lockwood, not Lockhart; your link to the S-E news article is broken; and the article clearly states that her first position with the city, from 1980-85, was as a prosecutor, which would have given her considerable courtroom experience.
Rudi:
It was a good editorial. Now and then, and in fact a surprising number of times over the past year, the editorial board of the SE has produced a soundly reasoned, liberty-affirming editorial. This was one of them. Being the good card-carrying New Deal Liberal and ACLU member that I am, I couldn't agree with their stand in today's editorial more.
Thanks for the "Lockwood" correction, Dan. We've fixed it in the above post, we think. Indeed we posted the upper article "on the fly." There are MANY "big doings on our plate this week; and we confess we've been somewhat preoccupied.
As for our newest JP Judge's actual combat experience in the mid-eighties...
Trust me; remembering & applying procedural and evidentiary rules minute-by-minute after a 20-year gap ain't like riding a bike.
And the sitution is complicated by the fact that the poor gal is now suddenly running the whole show in her own courtroom. Experienced trial lawyers will mangle her. In Pro Per defendants may not benefit from the best judicial experience, shall we say.
We don't mean to put the knock on her either. We applaud her for her sideways career move. We think she's smart AND ethical. Working under Godfrey in his crazed economic development frame of mind must have cost her MANY hours of lost sleep.
We hope she'll feel fulfilled on the Kangaroo Kourt bench. Something in us though says she'd hoped for more.
I think everyone is missing the point: What government buildeth, government controls. The real problem is that the people have no self-reliance - they expect government to provide everything for them. Why don't private individuals band together and buy the land to build a park and charge fees to use it? Because nobody wants to anymore. Government is already doing it for them, and, since it can tax the citizens, it doesn't have to compete on price or service. I have seen examples of citizens banding together to buy/build something that an individual would hav e a tough time building on their own. It has worked well... until government starts competing. But, that's what the citizens want, I guess. Sell your birthright for a mess of pottage, and then complain when someone starts controlling the "birthright". Hey, it's not your park. It belongs to the government. They can do anything they want with it. OK. Rant over.
"Hey, it's not your park. It belongs to the government. They can do anything they want with it."
Here's the fly in the ointment, anonymous:
WE THE PEOPLE own the govermnent.
Ergo, whatever the government owns, it owns in the names of WE THE PEOPLE.
Ergo, the government is ultimately compelled to do what the people want.
The government isn't some kind of separate entity like ENRON Corp.
END OF RANT
Nice try, though.
Perhaps you should brush up on your political science, dummy, before you start lecturing smart people on subjects you obviously don't understand.
So now Lockwood is retired from Ogden City and gets full retirement and then draws down another $97 grand plus.
The government's elected officials have got the gravy train over the rest of us now.
Jest:
Like most things, it's not that simple. If the legislature establishes that people can retire after 30 years o on the job... or less sometimes for say policemen... then they have the right to retire. Period. Usually, those provision are put in to attract people to the jobs involved [like policeman for example] or to other jobs because people could be making far more working at similar jobs in the private sector.
Given, then, that the legislature has established the 30 or 20 year retirment rule [whatever it might be], the question then becomes this: X has retired. X has done this job for 30 years. X has more experience and knowledge about the job than anyone else we could possibly hire to do the job. So, would the public's best interests be served by hiring someone new, with little or no experience, or hiring the recently retired X with tons of experience and know how?
But I agree, there seems something just not right about someone retiring and then returning to the same job at full pay. Legal, certainly [as things now stand], and there are arguments to be made infavor of it, but it just does not, somehow, seem right.
But I'm not sure how to craft a law that would fix the problem without creating new ones. A flat ban --- once you retire from working for the STate of Utah, say, on full retirment pay, you can no longer work for the state --- might create a whole host of new problems. For example, Utah's school age population is soaring and within a very few years we are going to be in the midst of a massive teacher crunch. At that point the state might very much want to entice retired experienced teachers back into the class room. A flat ban would prevent that.
So while I agree that it does not seem right to rehire recent retirees for the same job, or even work in the same department, crafting a solution that would not create new problems is going to be difficult. But I agree something needs to be done. The retire-rehire does look like double dipping to many [though strictly speaking it is not], and it does serve to undermine public trust in government. If for that reason only, something, I agree, needs to be done. The problem is, what. And how.
Lockwood isn't retiring is she? Did I miss something? I thought she was just moving into a new City position. She'll likely retire in a few years, I suppose, since she's been w/ the City almost 30. Good move on her part to finish out her career, if she can stick it out--she will likely be able to retire at the higher rate the court will be paying her.
The Salt Lake Tribune published a strong editorial on the double-dipping issue on December 18; and there was a a spirited discussion on the KSL website earlier in the week, for those readers who are interested in this issue.
hey, monotreme--
You haven't checked government pay in Utah recently...It is much higher than private enterprise pays..get the $60 grand wages being paid Bill Glasmann and others overseeing construction of the Rec Center plus the $90 to $100 grand being paid RDA employees such as Brown, Harmer, McConkie, etc.
And how about Godfrey's asst., Patterson, and Mark Johnson who also get perks like vehicles and gymn memberships and WeightWatchers goodies..
Taxpayers are paying big bucks for these guys and now that Lockwood has gone across the street believe me it is all being paid to guys...there are no females in sight in Ogden City higher echelons of dictatorship..
You need to brush up on your knowledge of government at the state level, also..everybody in Salt Lake County who is elected is above the $100 K level.
Why are we paying the president of Weber State $250 grand a year and the president of the University of Utah around half a million plus a house and all kinds of goodies..
Get real.. the only ones on the low end of the scale are the cops out trying to catch the bad guys.
Mono and Miss Leladale:
Mono: Thanks for the info. Another idea in use in part in Louisiana is this: you qualify for a pension after twenty years but you cannot receive it until you reach age 60. Thus eliminating the temptation to take it early and double dip, or just take it early and work somewhere else, not for the state. The relatively early qualification time [twenty years instead of twenty five or, as is sometimes thirty] provides an incentive to work for the state, but the no payment until sixty years of age rule eliminates the incentive to retire early and work someplace else.
In Louisiana, they have ... or had... a problem with teachers reaching retirement [I don't recall the number of years, let's say 25 for the sake of argument], retiring from public schools and immediately taking a much lower paying job in the private school system.... which they can live on because they are also getting retirement pay from the public system. It created [without intending to] an incentive for some of their most experienced teachers to jump the system to the private schools as soon as they qualified for retirement, which for many was at about age fifty.
Miss Lela: I presumed we were mostly discussing classified civil service state workers, not political appointees, or as they are sometimes called, "non classified" workers. The substantial salaries you mention generally go to people who are not going to be holding those jobs for anything like long enough to qualify for a regular state pension. They are appointed by Mayors, for example, and generally leave office on a change of administrations. We can certainly question, on a case by case basis, whether the pay offered to any particular person is justified or not or is a result of political cronyism or not, but we need also to keep in mind that if you want to draw highly qualified and highly skilled people into key jobs, you have to offer enough to get them. Other people, in the public and in the private sphere, are bidding for them too. That often means, especially where they are political appointees [English translation: have no long term job security] offering substantial salaries and benefits.
As for the pay for university administrators.... well, for nearly all of my working life, I've been a faculty member at public universities [in three states] and my guild oath therefore requries me to grumble at least twice a week about "the damned administration" and to grouse about "over-paid administrators." And lord knows I have.
But... on the other hand... public universities need good administrators. Being a universitey president or chancellor is not an easy job to do well, and doing it badly can damage a university for a long time past the tenure of the administrator. And there are a lot of public universities out there bidding up the price for administrators with proven track records. So again, you have to take the market into account.
What makes you think the Ogden city employees getting the big bucks are really qualified or is it just more government payola for political support in order to get support for an agenda? It doesn't have anything to do with good government.
Regardless of how long an employee stays on the job, at this time government is competing with private enterprise in the pay arena and tax payers are picking up the tab for the payola.
miss leladale,
Let's not exaggerate. According to the Deseret News, WSU President Millner's salary is $173,897, and the U's president makes $316,011.
It sure is funny how yall hate government employees. Yall think they get money for nothing. But yall think its OK to sue the government and live off the government; especially after yall vote for REPUBLICANS.
Anon:
Sure is funny how you don't seem to notice that there is a pretty broad range and variety of opinion posted here on WCForum.
Randy Noorlander is not only the 'father most wish they'd had', but the coach many of us wish our kids had had!
What a thoughtful, generous, articulate man!
All of his suggestions should be heeded by the Kaysville CC posthaste!
Sharon:
I liked his point about the Kaysville mayor/council acting without inviting any kind of public comment or input. Cities ought to respond to complaints that are purely very local in origin... if five people on a block call up to complain that there is a pothole in the street that is routinely devouring delivery vans, that's enough to act on. But changing a policy that covers the entire town without seeking public input [and no, even a dozen parents who don't want to practice on Monday's calling to complain does not constitute "seeking public input"]is just plain wrong. It's bad government.
What it also is, I think, is the "arrogance of power" exercised in the smallish pond of Kaysville. That's an occupational hazard for office holders at all level, to confuse what they want, without actually asking, with what "the people" want.
And the Mayor and council of Kaysville can tap dance around this all they like. The policy was changed to suit the practices of the LDS Church members who live in Kaysville. Denying that, as the Kaysville spokespersons have tried to do, makes it plain to me that (a)honesty with the public is not a matter of concern to them and (b) they know damn well they're trying to impose a particular religious practice on non-members, they know it's wrong, and they think they need to disemble to cover up.
Cur...good points as usual.
However, "The policy was changed to suit the practices fo the LDS Church members who live in Kaysville....." is only partially correct.
It was changed to suit the WANTS of a few 'do-gooders' who happen to be LDS.
These folks give the rest of the church a bad name. But, aren't there those arrogant types in every organization?
Hey...don't send your kidlets to practice if it offends those 'spiritual sensibilities'! Most families don't even convene for supper or whatever til about 6:30 pm.
The Kaysville Council needs some members with clearer heads methinks.
Of course, WE are graced with a mayor who thinks HE can control almost every thot and and practice in this town.
Power corrupts....and absolute power corrupts absolutely, eh?
Sharon:
Yup. Kaysville is an example of what I think Rudi likes to call "the nanny state." [I hasten to add that Kaysville registers, and votes, reliably Republican time after time.] In the Nanny State of Kaysville, the city government believes it can and should tell people they should spend one night during the week at home with their kids rather than out and about doing things with their kids, and that they can tell people what night that should be. Gosh, I am getting old. Why, I can recall when Republicans believed that how you raised your children and what went on around the dinner table and after dinner [baring child abuse] was none of the government's damned business.
For a professed (gasp) Democrat, you sure do know about Republicans...even that good (most are, you know) Republicans still think gummint should stay out of our personal lives...'barring child abuse', of course.
I think that you need to remember that choosing a religion doesn't negate citizenship. Are religious people suppose to stay silent rather than express opinions that as citizens they have every right to? I think that its important to remember that by not changing monday night activities to another night you are asking a large portion of the Kaysville population to make the very choice that you do not want to make. Both sides are valid and deserve respect and consideration to come to a better situation for all. Petty attacks on our neighbors are destructive and can only ruin the great community we have in Kaysville.
Anon:
You have it, I think, a little backwards [if I read your post correctly]. It seems to me that those who, as a matter of religious choice, wish to observe in their families Monday Family Home Evenings do not want to have to make a choice between upholding what I presume they look on as a religious obligation on the one hand, or permitting their children to attend a team practice on the other. Well, adhering to a religious faith and its requirements often demands making sometimes uncomfortable choices. Kind of goes with the territory.
However, insisting that public policy be so arranged that people of a particular faith do not have to make that choice seems to me to collapse, unquestionably, the separation that ought to exist for the benefit of all of us, between the exercise of civil power on the one hand and religious precept of one particular faith on the other.
There might well be reasons to close the public gyms on Monday. Lack of use, for example [though that seems, manifestly, not to be the case in this instance]. But closing them to residents of all religious persuasions, including none at all, to accommodate the religious doctrines of the members of one faith, seems to me to be a very unwise exercise of government authority. In Kaysville or anywhere else in the USA.
People in Kaysville are and must continue to be free to choose, if they wish to, to follow their religious convictions. They are not free to change public policy for all residents of Kaysville to accommodate their particular religious beliefs and practices. To practice or not to practice on Monday is and should continue to be a matter of private choice on the part of parents, not a matter of public coertion on the part of the Kaysville Mayor and Council.
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