Trump's will

 Some voters get excited when somebody who's "not a politician" runs for office. It's refreshing to hear someone say that solutions to their problems are easy, or that "government can be run like a business." Normal politicians are very careful what they say, lest they lose voters. So they strike voters as liars, or at least tricky.

But people like Donald Trump make grandiose promises. Everything will be simple. After a while, even some Trump voters will have noticed that he hasn't delivered on much. But there is a subset of Trump voters who will never learn.

Recently, a Trump voter who was fired by DOGE wrote an open letter to Trump on Facebook. It included the following:

    "Each time I voted for you, it was because I knew you'd make things right and you'd fix the wrongs. I'm counting on you to make this right too."

There is a note of childlike faith in the letter. Surely somebody made a mistake, and when Trump finds out, he'll fix it.

Indeed, there are many voters who have unquestioned faith in Trump, like faith in a god. I think I'm correct in predicting that this plea to the president will not end successfully. As with the attitude that praying to God is effective, some Trump voters have come to believe that Trump loves them, and will care for them. This letter to Trump is a prayer.

People with a strong faith in God continue to believe, even if their prayers don't get the result they were hoping for. They make excuses for God. "Maybe I didn't have enough faith." "God has a plan I don't understand." The final copout is that "It's not God's will."

The simple answer is that their prayers don't work because God doesn't exist. In the case of Trump, at least he exists. The problem is that he doesn't love his flock. Getting this woman her job back is, simply, not Trump's will.

The DOGE wrecking crew's methods

 DOGE is advertised as an entity dedicated to making government more efficient. Their first attempt to "cut out the dead wood" is to fire any Civil Servant still under a probationary classification, i.e., all the newest hires. I have thought of their methods as analogous to a brain surgeon using a hatchet.

A person dear to me has just been fired by the DOGE vandals. She had been at her job for nine years, but in a sad example of bad timing, she had decided to leave her nonprofit and enter the Civil Service. So, this senior person with many years of experience got caught in the "probationary" trap.

Instead of the brain surgeon simile, she likened DOGE's method to "a complex math proof taking up a whole blackboard; you ask someone for the solution, and they proceed to simply erase the entire board and walk away."

Elon Musk should not have this kind (or any kind) of power over the federal government. I wish the United States had a mechanism for calling "no confidence" votes. I think civil servants would show up in droves. The Trump regime is only getting away with this stuff because the majority in both houses of Congress are either complicit or cowardly.

Anti-Christian bias? Where? What are we talking about?

 When our founders were writing the Constitution, they made some good choices, some bad. The First Amendment was one of the best things they did.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....

America lucked out when that amendment was written. There were several competing religious beliefs at large in the colonies. The two largest were the Church of England (Anglicans), which held a majority in the colony of Virginia, and the Puritans of Massachusetts. In Britain, the Church of England was officially upheld by the government. The Puritans were persecuted by the Anglicans because their beliefs ran counter to the official dogma.

So, the Puritans went off to find someplace where they could worship unmolested. They chose the Netherlands, where the government was more tolerant of religious differences. It turned out, though, that the Puritans found the Netherlands a bit too tolerant. (When I was in first grade, the teacher told us that the Puritans left Holland because their children were learning Dutch, but I suspect that it was more that their children were learning dangerously liberal ideas.)

So, the Puritans set off on the Mayflower, and started their own colony in Massachusetts. They found this ideal: they knew what the true religion was; they could live together in peace, because, they thought, they all agreed about what the truth was. And other religions need not apply in their colony. There was plenty of room elsewhere.

Fun fact: The Anglicans sent missionaries to Massachusetts to try to lure the Puritans back to Christianity.

But, in the case of religion, there are always disagreements, and that was true in Massachusetts. The Puritans tried to shut upstart religions down. They had no time for what we would call religious freedom, except for themselves.

By the time of the writing of the Constitution, many things had changed. The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment had created a different religious idea that caught on among many of our founders: Deism. Benjamin Franklin was a Deist. Thomas Paine was, famously, a Deist. Aside from the Deists, Anglicans, Puritans, Quakers, and Catholics, there were small congregations of evangelicals. The evangelicals, rightly, feared persecution by the larger religious groups, and so they formed a coalition with the Deists, and that is how we got the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

I will stop for a moment and repeat what I have often said: The separation of church and state is the only guarantee of religious freedom. Evangelicals understood this in the Eighteenth Century.

Evangelical religions are much stronger nowadays, and they seem to have forgotten that the Establishment Clause protects the freedom of religion for large churches and small.

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If I seem to have digressed from the title of this piece, I'll dive in now.

In what way, or ways, is there anti-Christian bias in 21st Century America? I look around and see a country where Christians go to church on Sunday without any fear of interruption by government authorities. Churches are not taxed. Churches go about their various activities in the community in perfect freedom from government. Any church can display a nativity scene on its property at Christmas time. Churches can advertise their beliefs with crosses and brightly lit signs. Nobody stops them. The churches are considered to be good for the communities they are in. Individual worshippers may also display their faith on Christian holidays, or at any time of the year in their own yards.

Now, what about the prohibition of religious symbols on public property? Many people will tell you that that is an example of anti-Christian bias. No. That is not the government interfering with your religious rights. That is the government protecting your, and everybody else's, religious rights by not choosing one religion over another. That is the government protecting religious freedom.

No, I'm afraid that what these Christians are looking for is the kind of religious "freedom" the Puritans practiced. Their claim of anti-Christian bias is a stratagem for establishing Christian rule. That is un-American.