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Two parties live in this town.  Each of us belongs to one or the other.  We cannot belong to both.
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The schism is as wide as the gulf that separates our spiritual beliefs.
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I'm speaking, of course, of the issue surrounding the Ten Commandments monolith, Commissioner Karen McCulloh and Donald Rose.  Rose is one of the party circulating a petition for a recall vote on McCulloh.
The petition is due Friday and with it 2,237 signatures of bona fide Manhattan voters.
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How immense could a schism be when you can look up the names of members of the divided parties in the same phone book?
McCulloh was one of three dissenting voters who elected to move the monolith from City Hall property last spring. Since then, she has been denounced in a number of ways by citizens who have looked up her number.
"I have had people call me and say, 'You've always voted right, but now God says you're bad,'" McCulloh said Friday after learning the verdict of her lawsuit, which was turned down.
Rose, on the other hand, said he had received no threats and was not afraid of anyone.
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Rose said he believed in the power and intelligence of the voters.
"I say the electorate is really pretty smart when you really get right down to it," he said.
He said his contention is there are times when the City Commission makes the mistake of voting on significant issues by itself, when the public should be given a fair chance to vote in a referendum.  Wal-Mart was an example of a decision that could have been put to public vote - the Ten Commandments issue was another.
"There might well have been a way to put the vote to the people of the city of Manhattan," he said.
Rose said McCulloh's failure to vote to accept free legal advice for the city and to move forward with a legal defense of the Ten Commandments constituted misconduct.  Rose said if he were a commissioner, he would have acted differently.
"I would have abstained, myself, if I were in her place," Rose said.
He said the public wanted to press forward with a defense of the monolith, and her decision - with two other commissioners - to move it, proved she was really not representative of the voters.
"Our public servants and our elected officials need to make sure that they have the public good in mind when they make their votes and that they are responsible to the electorate," Rose said.
Responsibility to the electorate is not the only responsibility of an elected official.  This is not news to the people of Kansas in July 1866, Edmund G. Ross received a senatorial appointment by the governor to replace Sen. James H. Lane, who had committed suicide.   The governor chose Ross because he felt he needed someone with backbone.
Ross was the deciding vote in 1868 not to impeach President Andrew Johnson, going against the assumption by many since Ross was a Republican, he automatically would consider Johnson guilty.
Douglas Schoning, a retired junior high social studies teacher, said Ross' decision was not well received by his constituents.
"This was so unpopular that Ross did not survive politically in Kansas from that point on," Schoning said.
To this day we have not had a president impeached and convicted - in the end, that turned out to be for the best. Hindsight has taught us the circumstances surrounding the impeachment were sketchy at best.
"The impeachment stuff was very, very questionable," Schoning said. "It was kind of an ex post facto sort of thing."
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Symbols are valued because of what they represent, not because of what they are.  The American flag might be a piece of cloth, but what it represents is so important there is a constitutional amendment in the works banning its destruction.
When the Ten Commandments monolith starts being buried by flowers and cards that read "Jesus loves you," the message is sent it is not just representative of ethics, laws or government. It is not purely ecumenical.  It is representative of a specific way of thinking.
This happened last spring.
That is why the monolith is being moved to the Manhattan Christian College - a fact that almost made Rose reconsider his aggressive pursuit of the petition.
McCulloh said she voted the way she did because she was trying to protect the rights of the religious minority in Manhattan.
"You simply have to have separation of church and state," she said.
She said many people cannot identify with what it is like to be a minority, but said she suggested imagining a giant red Cornhusker in front of City Hall begins to get at the Ten Commandments issue.
The petition, however, asserts moving the monolith sets up a policy for the city of Manhattan, namely secular humanism.
Secular humanism advocates the absence of religious dogma and hierarchy from daily life, that values and morals can stand on their own.  The petition claims that the absence of religious dogma from City Hall is therefore secular humanism.
Citing Hugo Black, the petition further claims that secular humanism is a religion, and that the city's measure therefore violates the First Amendment.
Rose said this is compounded by the fact that the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State - two groups who helped bring the suit against the city - have ties to the humanistick movement.
So, in a Kafkaesque twist, a policy of religious separatism by City Hall in effect violates the separation of church and state.
In the 1968 Board of Education vs. Allen decision, Black maintained that the practice of Catholic communities donating textbooks to religious schools was, in fact, the work of "powerful sectarian religious propagandists."
The reason Catholic and Jewish communities at that time established religious schools and Protestants did not was because the teaching in many public schools at that time was strongly Protestant in nature, often at the expense of Catholicism and Judaism.  What Black saw as an attempt at religious supremacy was in fact a response to the religious order already in place.
Perhaps that is what is happening in Manhattan - the dogma of majority rule with minority rights is based on maintaining a balance.  The repositioning of the Ten Commandments monolith threw that balance off.
Does an attempt to restore balance make a person anti-religious?
Rose has until Friday to get signatures.
Tick.

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