I started out the article below very differently, maybe a bit too emotionally. Now I want to be more direct and frank. We, at present, are about 330 million people living in the United States of America. Every one of us are taxpayers or future taxpayers and, most of us, the direct descendants of direct taxpayers...meaning, for over a century our families have been paying for everything that goes on from building to governing our cities, our states and our nation. It's a lot. So, here, I've got to be blunt...churches do not pay into that system. Instead, the nation, all fellow citizens, regardless of faith or creed or belief or station in life or way of life, for centuries, have allowed religions to take the money they make and invest it 100% into their own efforts. Efforts that have allowed religion to own skyscrapers, to head universities whose alumni, in turn, run our cities...single congregations sit, today, in cities and in small towns with more wealth than the entire remainder of the populations of those cities and towns. This said, what I am saying below to Oklahoma's State Board of Education is that the rest of America has to... no, that America has to have spaces that are public...entirely public. Open, welcoming and with no coercion, no partisanship in any way, no confusion about it being an American space open to ALL Americans. The majority of American spaces, and especially schools, must be affiliated with ALL Americans.

 

If the OSBE were telling the families of Oklahoma that they are placing vouchers in our schools to pay families' electric bills, student loans, mortgage payments, grocery and clothing bills and advocating for the state to raise parents' salaries to livable wages for the next century...that would be helping Oklahomans.

 

Instead, OSBE wants Oklahomans to accept the idea that a single group of Americans who for 4 centuries have been gifted with nonprofit status and allowed to accumulate vast wealth and influence already at great sacrifice from fellow Americans... now seeks to control everyone's America. 

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OSBE, religions are centuries in arrears on paying up for the building of hundreds of thousands of public schools...your congregations voted for nearly a century, in Tulsa alone, to block TPS from building schools for Black children. In response to Brown v Topeka, members of your congregations purged Oklahoma's public schools of nearly all of its Black teachers and closed nearly all Black schools in rural, in short, the heart of, Oklahoma. Our cities will still be battling with the repercussions of those efforts when our classrooms open this summer in 2024.

 

Placing Bibles in the state's classrooms will not bring back the opportunity that Oklahoma once had of becoming the most American of states.

 

Refusing to accept children for who they are when they walk through the doors of our public schools, refusing to focus on education instead of indoctrination risks rendering, eventually, all Oklahoma schools, public and private, unconstitutional.

 

Even American 3rd graders understand unconstitutional means "Un-American."