Nobody cares about the Minnesota State Senate. It’s doubtful that even Minnesotans care much about it, apart from its members and the people who get paid to dream up daft proposals for them to make laws out of. One such bill was suggested by Republican Senator Dan Hall, who proposed that every public school in the state be allowed to display the motto “In God We Trust” above the schoolhouse doors, if they so desired, so students could have something to buoy their faith in case they got caught in a school shooting.
Correction--Senator Hall's office has informed this column that proposing putting the motto over the schoolhouse doors had nothing to do with preventing school shootings--only prayer can do that. He did it to grub votes among the pious.
Another Senator, Scott Dibble, suggested that the motto should be modified to “In Allah We Trust,” since Allah means the same thing as God.
Senator Dibble was being sarcastic, since he obviously knows that nobody that voted for Senator Hall thinks “God” and “Allah” mean the same thing. That did not keep Fox from going off on him in a big way, probably to avoid mentioning that the President’s bagman was peddling influence fifteen minutes after the votes were counted in 2016, which news also broke last week. Fox tried to school Dibble in history by saying that “In God We Trust” has been recognized as the nation’s motto for over 200 years, because it was written in the “Star Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key in 1812.
Right now, you’re singing the national anthem in your head and wondering “Where’s the part about trusting God?” Well, it’s there, in the fourth verse, of the SSB. A lot of you didn’t even know there was more than one verse to the song, because one verse is all we’re accustomed to hear being sung, because baseball games are long enough as it is. And the beer is too expensive, too.
But we are not alone. Our patriot ancestors started ignoring the fourth verse, as well as the second and third, of the Star Spangled Banner the moment Key finished scribbling them down.
What Fox choses to ignore is that IGWT has only be on the money since 1956, when Eisenhower was President. The Nation survived every war since 1812, the Great Depression and Prohibition without formally trusting in God. When the slogan was emblazoned on the money, many people were trusting God to keep separate bathrooms and seats on the bus for black people and for the us not to follow the French down the rabbit tunnel of Vietnam. Turned out God couldn’t be trusted to do either of those things.
Should we have another slogan on our money? “Six of one, and a half dozen of the other” has a nice ring to it. Or “One dollar—try and collect all eighty trillion of them!”
But what Minnesota should put above its school doors is yet undetermined. Whatever it is, it won’t make any difference to the schoolchildren of the state. They’ll ignore it, just we all ignore signs we see every day, and won’t trust God any more than any batch of brats in any other state. What it will accomplish is to secure the church vote for Senator Hall and the atheist-agnostic-Muslim-Jewish etc. vote for Dibble. Is that really worth Minnesota spending a million bucks on paint and varnish?
The truth is that trusting God to do anything, even something reasonable, like letting your in-laws catch the flu so they can't go to your party or making your BMW payment for you, doesn’t make it any more likely to happen, because God, as has been foretold since ancient times, is shady as shit.
And so is Fox News.