Bloggus Interuptus: Matrimonial Edition

Friends, you may remember that last year the lovely lady K agreed to marry me. The time for us to make good on that promise is upon us! And we just bought a house! So, I’ll be stepping away from FtS for the rest of the month.

See y’all in June!

Friday Review: ROSFest 2013

Last weekend, for the third year running, I trooped up to the rolling countryside of central Pennsylvania for the Rites of Spring Festival, aka ROSFest. Held at the lovely Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, the festival showcases the more melodic side of progressive rock. This was kind of an odd year for me, as there wasn’t anybody on the bill that I was completely ecstatic about having a chance to see – no IQ or Phideaux from prior years. In fact, going in I didn’t know a lot about many of the bands, but I was sort of intrigued by them. Would I find an unknown gem like Sanguine Hum or Tinyfish. Let’s find out!

First, a graphical note – your humble narrator screwed the pooch this year and left his camera at home, so none of the usual pictures of the Majestic marquee setting out each day’s schedule. I already feel your scorn and am remorseful about it.

Friday kicked off with Bolus, a four-piece (on stage, at any rate) from Canada. Aside from a couple of YouTube clips I didn’t know anything about them going in, but I liked their brand of energetic, tuneful, neo-prog. As with so many newer bands these days they occasionally lapsed into a metal riffage territory, but not so much as to ruin it. On their 2013 release Triangulate the band’s only a three-piece, but the live show had a fourth guy featuring mainly on keyboards (a Korg M50, to be precise – represent!), with some occasional guitar. The keys were so prevalent that I was surprised at their near total absence on the album. I also liked the bass player’s MacGeyver’d bass pedal setup (MIDI pedals into a MicroKorg?) – it literally made my hair move when he put a foot down!

Headliners for Friday night were the famous Flower Kings from Sweden. I’ve got a kind of an odd history with the Kings. I really love the Roine Stolt solo album that gave birth to them, but I don’t find their output all that interesting most of the time. I’ve called it “chicken soup for the prog lover’s soul” before, because it sort of hits all the right notes (so to speak) of classic symphonic prog, but doesn’t really thrill me. Having said that, they’re a stalwart of the “third wave” of prog that emerged in the 1990s, are a damned fine group of musicians, and I was glad to be able to see them live.

The first full day of music began with Jolly, a four-piece from New York City. There is a good story to this band. Their studio (and the drummer’s apartment) was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, which would have been bad enough anyway, but (a) the band had just finished a new album and (b) were getting ready to hit the road supporting Riverside. Luckily said drummer saved his computer (with the album on it – this is the 21st century) and their fans rose up to support them so that the tour went on (is going on, actually) without a hitch. Very cool. Musically, Jolly pumps out a tuneful near-prog in somewhat the same vein as Bolus, but with a much heavier, more metallic edge. Not really my thing, but they do it well – the road work they’ve done shows. Another nice touch – if you buy their current album The Audio Guide To Happiness - Part 2, you get a free download of the last one, The Audio Guide To Happiness - Part 1, so you can get the whole concept in one sitting.

Prog metal is not my favorite of the prog neighborhoods. I’ve got nothing against heaviness itself, but the “balls and chunk” metal riffing has never been my thing. So I was apprehensive about Sweden’s Pain of Salvation, given their stellar prog metal pedigree. I was more than pleasantly surprised by their set, which was one of the most diverse of the weekend. Yes, there was the prog metal riffing, but it was interwove with lots of effective dynamic shifts. The band carelessly skipped through a whole host of experiments with different styles, which I always admire. Some didn’t work (the disco tune and the quasi-rap one left me cold), but how can you not love a band that trots out a lounge/jazz/reggae version of Dio’s “Holy Diver”?

Believe, from Poland, turned out to be a good palate cleanser for Saturday evening. Amidst a day of fairly heavy music, their brand of solid, melodic neo-prog played well. They reminded me a lot of IQ and Camel, not to mention fellow countrymen Quidam. Guitarist Mirek Gil took lots of opportunities to stretch out and solo, getting fierier and more intense as the set progressed. The band had a violinist, but she was buried in most tunes, but it was a nice touch when she was more prevalent. Good, nice tunes, but nothing spectacular.

Fairly early in their headlining set Saturday night, Riverside bassist/vocalist Mariousz Duda joked how at first they were the “Polish Porcupine Tree,” then they became the “Polish Dream Theater.” As for now, maybe they’d become the “Polish . . .” – he let the answer hang until the keyboard player ripped off the first couple of riffs from Deep Purple’s “Perfect Strangers.” The Porcupine Tree comparisons were once valid (the Dream Theater ones not so much), but Riverside has forged their own path over the past decade. They’re heavy, yes, but not really in a metal way, but more in a thick, wall of sound kind of way. If anything, these days they sometimes seem like Spock’s Beard’s heavier Polish cousins. Regardless, they were excellent, easily surpassing my expectations. I had three of their five albums going into ROSFest and figured I wouldn’t need any more. I completed my collection on Sunday morning.

On a side note – this was the tenth edition of ROSFest and Riverside was the 100th band to take the stage at the festival. Congrats to George and everybody who puts on the fest for reaching that kind of milestone.

Sunday morning at ROSFest is dubbed the “church of prog,” since, well, it’s Sunday and all. Typically, the band chosen to kick off Sunday gives an energetic performance to help most people shake off the cobwebs of the partying done the night before. Dream the Electric Sleep – a great name and, since they hail from nearby Lexington, Kentucky, almost a local band for me – took the opposite approach. The slid into their set, opening with a pair of longish, spacey sounding tracks. More of a slow warming than a brilliant sunrise. To their credit, the first track had a similarly spacey quote from “Amazing Grace” to start off. I like DTES’s mix of space rock, jammy stuff, and even post-rock (if you squint a bit), but was disappointed by their presentation. Simply put – they need a fourth guy in the band. The power trio setup was augmented by a Macbook that handled not only the occasional intro or atmospheric sample, but also acoustic guitar, synths, and backing vocals. Seriously, I hope the Macbook had a union card, at least.

The key word to describing the set by Moetar (from prog hotspot Oakland, California) is “short.” As in the fact that many of their songs were conspicuously short. I’m not talking about a lack of stereotypical prog epics, I’m talking about a bunch of 2-3 minute tracks that barely get going before they’re over. Still and all, they pack an awful lot into those short bursts, probably too much. The music is really busy, with lots of lightning guitar and piano riffs, augmented by matching vocal lines (think Zappa or Keneally unison vocals, but performed by a powerful female vocalist). Fantastic musicians, but the end product left me a bit cold. The newer tracks seemed a little bit more well developed, so maybe in a few years they’ll really be hitting it out of the park.

Japan’s Asturias is the brain child of multi-instrumentalist Yoh Ohyama – it exists in the form of an acoustic chamber ensemble, an electric rock/fusion band, and the label for Ohyama’s more individual efforts (he’s the “Mike Oldfield of Japan”). It was the electric version that brought the house down at ROSFest. They ripped through a set of smoking instrumental prog, laced with streaks of fusion. As with Believe they had a female violinist (the violinist from Believe is even of Japanese extraction, I think), but she was much more front and center in the sound, providing a nice counterpoint to the guitar and keyboard leads. On top of all that, each band member addressed the audience as some sort of English as a Second Language assignment (guitar player’s response to a random shouted comment – “I don’t speak English”), each of which underlined their enthusiasm for playing half a world away from their home. Simply put, they were great.

Sunday’s headliner was Shadow Gallery, truly a local band, a prog-metal outfit who only played out live for the first time a few years ago. I understand how happy fans were to get to see them, but they’re not my cup of tea (it’s not just prog-metal, it’s cheesy prog-metal), they were running late, and, by that time, I was beat, so I just packed it in. No idea how they’re performance came off.

Going into ROSFest this year I didn’t really expect any “wow!” moments. It’s to the fest’s credit that I still got a couple and, even outside of those, the rest of the lineup was uniformly solid. Barring something untoward happening, I’ll be back in 2014 for the fourth time running. Hopefully, next year, my seat won’t disappear into the ether after I bought it!

Friday Review: Under the Dome

The situation in which regular people find themselves basically stripped of civilization and the comforts of our modern world is a classic fictional trope, from the English school kids of Lord of the Flies to the few survivors of some planetary disaster in The Road or A Canticle for Liebowitz. Generally, those stories take people who may or may not have any prior relationship to one another and throw them into a world of anarchy and chaos.

Stephen King’s Under the Dome turns that trope on its side in two crucial ways. First, the characters in the book are all from the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill, population 2000 (in the off season, as it is in the book) and thus not only know each other but have a complicated web of alliances, bitterness, and business interests (legit and otherwise) connecting them. Second, although the titular dome throws life in Chester’s Mill into utter higgledy-piggledy, there’s no anarchy or absence of leadership. In fact, what’s so terrifying about what happens in Chester’s Mill is that the political machine that’s run the town for years functions perfectly once crisis hits, which leads to apocalyptic disaster.

Overseeing this mess is “Big” Jim Rennie – used car salesman, obnoxiously loud Christian, and gargantuan meth dealer. If Under the Dome is supposed to be King’s meditation on the United States after 9/11, Rennie is the stand in for Dick Cheney as the power behind the throne. Although Rennie is the second of three selectman (one is actually a selectwoman) who govern the town, he wields all the actual power. The analogy doesn’t quite fit – nobody ever voted for Cheney directly, while Rennie had won numerous elections to maintain his seat. If anything, Rennie seems to be King’s warning that, while we focus most of our attention on national politics, the office holders with the most power to really fuck things up are locals and we ignore the low-level political offices at our own peril.

Having said that, to the extent that King is trying to do something more than tell a compelling, terrifying story, he misses some opportunities to explore some interesting grey areas. For example, once the dome comes down, new cops are quickly recruited to brace against chaos and lawlessness. It would have been interesting to see one or two good people in these positions, honestly dealing with the competing concerns of security and liberty. Alas, since Rennie is the one doing the choosing, the new cops are all his henchmen (including his murderous son) and proceed to do precisely what you’d expect henchmen to do given that kind of power.

Another missed opportunity is the lack of any exploration of the Chester’s Mill body politic. The novel’s cast of characters is impressively large and King does a good job of working them all together, even if the individual characterizations are pretty shallow. However, they divide neatly into the obviously evil – Rennie and his flunkies – and obviously good – the couple dozen citizens who oppose him. King isn’t really interested in the rest of the unwashed masses, which is a shame because they’re largely the ones who voted for Rennie again and again. Why had they? Why were they so willing to believe any bullshit story he told them? After all, Rennie’s claim to power is that “the town” is behind him, but “the town” remains nebulous and unexplored.

As for the dome itself, it’s a wonderful literary invention. Although the word “dome” and some of the initial interaction with it would bring to mind the giant glass bowl dumped on Springfield in The Simpsons Movie (with which Under the Dome shares a passing similarity), it’s not a solid barrier. Instead, it’s a somewhat permeable force field of some kind, through which plot devices like speech, heat, and (in a very limited way) air can move but people, vehicles, and explosives can’t. It effectively seals the town off, but allows for some contact with the outside world.

To his credit, King doesn’t just plop the dome down and let it go all McGuffin on him. He provides an explanation for it, one that drives the final hunk of the book. Unfortunately, that explanation is neither all that interesting logically or dramatically. It leads the end of the book to be a real let down.

We tend to think the best of ourselves, that when faced with crisis we’ll rise to the occasion and do the right thing. Truth is, some folks will do that, while others will use the anarchy to enrich themselves (in different ways) and still others will simply be passive observers, numb from the shock of their world going to shit. King grasps that. So long as Under the Dome focuses on life under the dome, it’s a pretty compelling read. Bigger explanations, not so much.

The Details
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Under the Dome
By Stephen King
Published 2009

A Formula for False Confessions

The new Sundance Channel series Rectify revolves around man released from death row after 18 years, following a conviction for a crime he (most likely) didn’t commit. The scientific evidence, at least, says that. But one barrier to his return to the community is the talk, not all behind his back, that he must be guilty because he confessed to the crime. Whether that turns out to be true in that particular case is anybody’s guess (although I think we’ve already been tipped to the fact that he’s innocent), but we know now that such a “common sense” conclusion is often wrong.

Which is not to say it’s common. According to this report from the National Registry of Exonerations, 15% of false convictions include confessions. For homicides, the number rises to 25%. While that’s nowhere near the percentage of cases that involve false eyewitness testimony (43% of all cases), official misconduct (42%), or good ol’ fashioned perjury (51%), it’s still a significant number. At the very least, “but he confessed” should never be enough, standing alone, to convict someone of a crime, much less execute them.

But why does it happen? Not every person who falsely confesses is tortured or what have you. David Harris, a law professor at Pitt and writer on “why law enforcement resists science,” provides one potential answer, in an interview over at Psychology Today. It focuses on the “Reid technique,” the leading method for police conducting interrogations. It was developed in the 1950s and it science deficient, as Harris explains. But more than that is the goal of the technique:

The Reid technique for interrogation is not a process designed for the discovery of facts and evidence. Rather, it is a multiphase process, to be used when the interrogator has already concluded that the subject is guilty, and therefore simply needs the confession out of the person to confirm the guilt and prove it.

The interrogator determines guilt through a phase of interaction before interrogation, in which the officer ascertains guilt or innocence through asking basic questions and observing behavior.

However, as Harris explains, the bases for that determination of guilt are also built on sand. The result is a system that, while not designed to generate false confessions, isn’t designed to generate accurate confessions, either. The confession itself, regardless of its veracity, is the desired end product.

There’s something to be said for training police officers to be able to get suspects to talk who otherwise wouldn’t, to get them to hang themselves using their own words. If nothing else, it makes for gripping cop shows on TV (see Homicide: Life on the Street and it’s frequent scenes in “the box”). But the broad focus should be on ensuring the truth and accuracy of the resulting confession. False confessions don’t do anybody any good and can, in too many cases, put innocent people in a world of hurt.

Hunter Becomes the Hunted

When we hear a news story about a person being freed from prison years after being wrongfully convicted of a grisly murder, often there’s a perverse punch line to the whole sordid affair – the prosecutor responsible for the case, responsible for a ruined life and an innocent person spending years in a cage, is now a judge. Not only does the miscarriage of justice not impede a prosecutor’s career, in most cases it seems like a boon.

Which is what makes what happened in Texas a couple of weeks ago so amazing and important.

On August 16, 1986, Christine Morton was brutally murdered in her home near Austin, Texas. As often happens in such cases, Christine’s husband, Michael, was treated as a potential suspect from the beginning. He was arrested in September and convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison. Morton spent 25 years in a cage before DNA testing confirmed what he had been saying all along – that he was innocent. He was formally acquitted in 2011. For a detailed, fascinating, and chilling account of Morton’s saga, see here and here.

Ken Anderson, who was the lead prosecutor in Morton’s case, is now a judge, naturally. He’s also, now, under arrest:

Ken Anderson was in the courtroom as Judge Louis Sturns issued his ruling and turned himself in afterward. Sturns said there was sufficient evidence that Anderson was guilty on all three charges brought against him for his handling of the case against Michael Morton: criminal contempt of court, tampering with evidence and tampering with government records.

‘Mr. Anderson consciously chose to conceal the availability of the exculpatory evidence so he could convict Mr. Morton for murder,’ Sturns said. ‘This court cannot think of a more intrinsically harmful act than a prosecutor's intentional choice to hide evidence so as to convict a defendant facing a murder charge and a life sentence.’

At issue in Anderson’s case are two pieces of evidence collected by police that pointed to someone other than Morton as the killer. One was a report of a suspicious van in the area at the time of the killing, while the other was a report that Morton’s young son, who was at home when his mother was murdered, that a “monster” hurt his mother, not his father. As Judge Sturns concluded in his findings of fact, this was:

evidence that showed Mr. Morton did not murder his wife.

In addition, Judge Sturns concluded that Anderson knew about this evidence and failed to turn it over to the defense or follow up on potential leads:

[t]he sheriff’s department and Mr. Anderson quickly concluded Mr. Morton was responsible for killing his wife, and so curtailed further investigation of the murder.

Anderson’s failure to disclose evidence forms the basis of the criminal charges against him.

Will they stick? It will be interesting to see. One problem that’s already been raised is the statute of limitations. The original trial judge is dead, which may harm Anderson’s ability to defend himself. And, of course, the entire point of statutes of limitations is to prevent someone needing to defend themselves years after an event when memories have faded, physical evidence has disappeared, and witnesses have died or disappeared. Regardless, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to argue that Anderson’s conduct was ongoing so long as Morton was still in prison, which might squelch any statute of limitation problem.

Even if Anderson escapes conviction, the very fact that he’s being dragged into court for prior malfeasance is a step in the right direction. If he doesn’t wind up in jail, he will, at some point in the future, have to face the voters (judges in Texas are elected). Then the ball will be in their court – will they reward a man who sent an innocent man to a cage for a quarter-century with another term? If they do, it will say all too much about how this system got to the place where it could make such mistakes in the first place.

Friday Review Special: Yessongs & Tales From Topographic Oceans

An occasional series in which I revisit classic albums that, like me, turn 40 years old this year.

Yes had a busy year in 1972. They followed up the success of Fragile with Close to the Edge, which many regard as their masterpiece. Following that, they set off on tour. And, oh yeah, they had to hire a new drummer, when Bill Bruford ran off to follow Bob Fripp’s pied piping into King Crimson. Enter Alan White, formerly of the Plastic Ono Band, who had only a limited time to get up to speed on the band’s back catalog.

He’s not gone anywhere since, which is really something, when you consider the years of lineup change tumult that lay ahead for the band.

The band’s first release in 1973 showed the fruits of White’s efforts (mostly – Bruford appears on two tracks). Yessongs isn’t just a live album, it’s a massive live album (three LPs in its original gatefoldy glory – one of the few LPs I owned in my youth) that, perhaps more than any other of the era, captured what the band was all about at the time. Hell, you get every bit of Close to the Edge, along with just about every notable track from Fragile (“South Side of the Sky” excepted, sadly) and The Yes Album. The performances are almost all more muscular and rock a bit harder than the studio versions, without being completely different. If you knew nothing of Yes before now, Yessongs would be the perfect introduction to the band’s early glory years.

As for what they produced in the studio in 1973, not so much.

Upon departing for pastures Crim, Bruford explained that, after Close to the Edge, there wasn’t much for the band to do, in his mind, aside from Close to the Edge Part 2. In a lot of respects, he wasn’t wrong. Close to the Edge featured the band’s first true epic, with the title track stretching across the entirety of side two.

Tales from Topographic Oceans took that epic quality and turned it up to eleventy. Instead of one LP there were two, and instead of one epic there were four, one covering each album side. There were no singles or crass attempts to garner radio play. To top things off, the four tracks were inspired, not only by a book on an Eastern religious leader, they were inspired by a footnote on page 83!

If the band deserves an A for effort, the final grade for the finished product drops to about a C+. There’s an awful lot of excellent music in Tales. I’m particularly fond of most of “The Revealing Science of God - Dance of the Dawn,” but it’s probably a few minutes longer than it needs to be. In fact, the same can be said for every track. Had Tales come out in the CD era it might have made a killer single long disc. As is, it’s an effective time capsule of prog’s commercial heyday.

Tales became sort of a Rorschach test for progressive rock. To fans, it was everything that makes the genre great – it was ambitious, unconcerned with commercial potential, and provided extended interludes of purely musical bliss. To detractors, it was everything that make the genre an abomination – it was pretentious, overblown, and lacking in warmth or compelling musical ideas. It’s far from Yes’s best work, in my opinion, but it’s certainly their most audacious.

Details
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Yessongs, by Yes
Tracks:

1. Opening (Excerpt from "Firebird Suite") (3:45)
2. Siberian Khatru (8:50)
3. Heart of the Sunrise (11:26)
4. Perpetual Change (14:08)
5. And You and I (9:55)
6. Mood For a Day (2:52)
7. Excerpts from "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" (6:35)
8. Roundabout (8:33)
9. I've Seen All Good People (7:00)
10. Long Distance Runaround / The Fish (13:45)
11. Close to the Edge (18:41)
12. Yours is No Disgrace (14:21)
13. Starship Trooper (9:25)

Tales From Topographic Oceans, by Yes
Tracks:

1. The Revealing Science Of God - Dance Of The Dawn (20:27)
2. The Remembering - High The Memory (20:38)
3. The Ancient - Giants Under The Sun (18:34)
4. Ritual - Nous Sommes Du Soleil (21:35)

Both released 1973

Players:
Jon Anderson (vocals)
Steve Howe (guitar and vocals)
Chris Squire (bass and vocals)
Rick Wakeman (keyboards)
Alan White (drums)

with Bill Bruford (drums) on a couple of tracks on Yessongs

The First Amendment Takes It On the Chin – Twice

The First Amendment rarely fares well when it bumps up against public school personnel. Whether it’s the Free Speech Clause or one of the religion clauses, teachers and administrators have real trouble finding the line that separates constitutional from unconstitutional conduct. Sadly, two recent events in West Virginia have provided vivid demonstrations of the problem.

The first, even more sadly, emerged from my alma mater, George Washington High School in Charleston.

Principal George Aulenbacher allowed an abstinence-only “speaker” named Pam Stenzel to come to the school. The assembly, at which attendance was mandatory, was paid for:

by a conservative religious organization called ‘Believe in West Virginia’ and advertised with fliers that proclaimed ‘God’s plan for sexual purity.’

It doesn't take a First Amendment scholar to know that arguments for “God’s plan” about anything doesn’t have any place in a public school. If there’s a basis for abstinence only education in schools (I’d argue there isn’t, but that’s for another day), it needs to be one divorced from anyone’s concerns about gods, or the lack thereof, and based on objective, verifiable facts.

Even worse, Stenzel’s shtick is abusive and confrontational:

Stenzel has a long history of using inflammatory rhetoric to convince young people that they will face dire consequences for becoming sexually active. At GW’s assembly, Stenzel allegedly told students that ‘if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you’ and ‘I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.’

This piece at Salon has more background on Stenzel, including her reliance on bogus statistics and facts. Her routine includes some other gems:

While talking about the importance of only ever having sex with one person for your entire life, she says, ‘If you have sex outside of that context you will pay. No one has ever had more than one partner and not paid.’

Thankfully, a GW senior, Katelyn Campbell, objected to the whole assembly, refused to attend, and contacted the ACLU. But to truly take the cake for this awful affair, Aulenbacher threatened her for speaking out:

The high school senior alleges that Aulenbacher threatened to call Wellesley College, where Campbell has been accepted to study in the fall, after she spoke to the press about her objections to the assembly. According to Campbell, her principal said, ‘How would you feel if I called your college and told them what bad character you have and what a backstabber you are?’

The fine folks at Wellesley College, as expected, were not not fazed by Aulbacher’s clumsily bizarre attempt at retaliation. After botching the Establishment Clause premise, Aulbacher then went ahead and violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Free Speech Clause by trying to punish Campbell for publicly objecting. At least that attempt fizzled and died.

So, while my alma mater’s principal was failing the Establishment Clause (with a Free Speech chaser) in Charleston, a teacher in Logan was flunking the Free Speech Clause.

A middle school student wore a NRA T-shirt to school. This upset at least one member of the school staff:

White said that Marcum had been wearing the shirt without causing any problems from homeroom at the beginning of the school day through fifth period, and was confronted by one of the school’s teachers while getting his lunch. When Jared refused to remove or reverse the shirt, the teacher began to raise his voice, and it caught the attention of students eating their lunch, White said.

Marcum was eventually arrested and taken away by police after refusing to remove the shirt. White said that when police told the teen they were going to arrest him, he stuck his hands out and said, ‘Fine.’

Now, as the Supreme Court has said:

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years.

And that was in 1969. I agree with Eugene Volokh that a policy banning T-shirts like the one this student wore is most likely unconstitutional. It doesn’t even really seem like a close call. Thus, there was no basis for the teacher to ask the student to remove the shirt, much less for him to be arrested (?!) for doing so. It was fine for the teacher to approach the kid and ask about his shirt – free speech is a two-way street, after all – but any escalation seems to be the teacher’s fault, not the kid’s. One would expect a teacher to have better control of his/her emotions than a middle school kid, for fuck’s sake.

I don’t envy teachers or school administrators. Riding herd over hundreds of kids everyday raises problems on a regular basis that I’m sure I could never dream of. And, sadly, First Amendment jurisprudence in some areas isn’t as clear as it should be. But there are some pretty damned clear lines that can’t be crossed, with don’t bring people into a public school to push their version of God’s will and kids have a right to express themselves being two of them.

That either of these situations flared up, much less became nationally-recognized news items, is evidence that somebody needs to stay after class and do some remedial work.