Take Gov. Laura Kelly, who recently declared a group of Sunflower satanists would not be allowed to hold a blasphemous “black mass” inside the Statehouse later this month.

The event, a mockery of the Catholic mass in which a Christian Bible and a cross will be destroyed, was scheduled to take place in the first floor rotunda, beneath the Capitol dome, beginning at 11 a.m. March 28, the last day of the Legislature’s regular session.

A cynic might say that it’s too late to dedicate the Capitol to Satan because the majority of lawmakers have already sold their souls to the devil. Or that only politicians are allowed to conjure evil in the Statehouse. But not me. I say give the devil his due and let’s take the issue seriously, not because I necessarily believe in Old Scratch but because the controversy raises serious constitutional issues.

In one corner you have Kelly, a Democrat in a red state where 70% of adults identify as Christians, according to a Pew Research Center study updated in 2024. During the past few years, her executive power has been eroded by a GOP-dominated Legislature. The pressure from the religious right to block the indoor ceremony apparently was too great for her to resist. She’s also Irish Catholic, as were governors Kathleen Sebelius and Joan Finney.

In the other corner you have the Satanic Grotto, a group of Kansas religious anarchists who would like to express their views just as other groups have done at the Capitol at every session since forever. In 2013, for example, then-Gov. Sam Brownback opened the building to eight hours of continuous nondenominational prayer. Last year, on May 2, the National Day of Prayer, speakers inside the Capitol rotunda included Brownback and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach.

The showdown between Kelly and the satanists is likely to be historic. While claiming to balance the free speech rights of the Satanic Grotto against the public interest in health and safety, she trampled on the former and was opaque about the latter.

“There are more constructive ways to protest and express disagreements without insulting or denigrating sacred religious objects,” Kelly chided in a statement released March 12. “However, as governor, I also have a duty to protect protesters’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression, regardless of how offensive or distasteful I might find the content to be.”

Kelly then went on to do exactly the opposite, by saying the event would not be allowed inside the Capitol, but moved to the grounds outside. No protests would be allowed inside the building that day.

“It is important to keep the Statehouse open and accessible to the public while ensuring all necessary health and safety regulations are enforced,” the statement said.

No indication was given, however, of exactly what safety or health regulations might be jeopardized by the event, or how keeping the building accessible to the public was consistent with barring a public protest for which all necessary permits had been acquired.

Michael Stewart, founder and president of the Satanic Grotto, the group planning the event, has said he will defy Kelly and hold the “black mass” inside the Capitol building anyway. If Capitol Police want to stop them, he vowed, they will have to arrest them.

Stewart, a 42-year-old rural Linwood resident, said the event would be a nonviolent protest of traditional Christian religion. He expected about three dozen members of the grotto to attend, he said.

“Ours is a direct reflection of our anger and hurt as it revolves around Christianity,” Stewart told me.

The first floor rotunda, with its cardinal points on the marble floor, is the perfect place for their event.

“We will mark the four stations of blasphemy and make sure the message we deliver is powerful and that it reminds not just Catholics, but all people, all Christians, all religious folk that we’re not the center of our universe,” he said.

The March 28 event would not be the full “black mass” the group normally observes, he said, because that would involve nudity, drinking and other activities discouraged at the Statehouse. There also wouldn’t be fire or anything used in the ceremony that might pose a physical risk to the public. Communion wafers would be destroyed, he said, perhaps by grinding them under heel, but he declined to say whether the wafers would be consecrated.

“We get this question a lot,” he said. “The Catholics have made a big issue out of this. No one in my organization has stolen anything, or obtained it through false means or lies. … The communion wafer will still represent the body of Christ, and there will be a desecration of it. We are using that to manifest Satan.”

An online petition to stop the event had gathered nearly 15,000 signatures as of March 15. The petition, hosted by the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property — a traditionalist Catholic advocacy group — asked Kelly and Topeka Mayor Michael A. Padilla to intervene. TFP’s national headquarters is Spring Grove, Pennsylvania.

“Every black mass is an act of hatred against God,” said John Ritchie, director of TFP Student Action, in an email after I asked for comment. “Just consider what satanists do during a black mass: They attack and desecrate a consecrated host, which is typically stolen from a Catholic Church. Theft is immoral and illegal. And sacrilege is worse. It’s so bad that even people without any faith find it heinous.”

Satan has no rights, Ritchie contended.

“Satanism was not and never will be a religion,” he said.

It might be appropriate to note that in 2019, the Satanic Temple, headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, was recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a religion. The Satanic Grotto is not affiliated with the Satanic Temple or other groups, Stewart said, but it is registered in Kansas as a nonprofit. Prospective members must be at least 21 and have a sponsor in the grotto.

I asked if Ritchie would debate Stewart, if given the chance.

“If a satanist expresses sorrow or compunction for his sins, I would be happy to speak with him and encourage his or her complete conversion because God’s grace can restore anyone,” he said. “But, sadly, those hardened in sin are not open to the truth.”

TFP, Ritchie said, is organizing a “large rosary rally of reparation” at the Capitol on March 28. “The victorious Saint Michael the Archangel already defeated the powers of darkness. He can defeat Satan again at the Kansas Statehouse.”

At this point, I should say that some of what the Satanic Grotto is planning disturbs me as well. Having been nominally saved to impress a girl at the First Baptist Church at Baxter Springs when I was 14 or so, and being fully appreciative of Pascal’s Wager, I would not personally destroy a Bible. It gives me a queasy feeling just thinking about it, and not just because I’m against burning or otherwise obliterating books in general. The thought of treating any sacred text badly, whether the King James or the Koran or the Vedas, gives me tremors.

But that doesn’t mean others should be forbidden from peacefully expressing themselves. The question is whether speech can be so offensive as to actually harm another. How tolerant a society is of unpopular speech is a litmus test for democracy.

Consider the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, which became notorious for picketing the funerals of dead soldiers with hateful messages about homosexuality. Somehow, the congregation believed that dead service members were God’s punishment to the United States for tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that such picketing was protected under the First Amendment, even though it causes emotional distress, because it was on a matter of public concern.

The Westboro case isn’t an exact analogy, because the Satanic Grotto does not direct its protest at a specific family or individual, but there are parallels. Stewart, the grotto president, said the goal of the black mass is to grab attention.

“This goes to wake people up,” he said. “To make them pay attention, that ultra-Christian nationalism can be stood against, that there are people who are brave enough to draw a line. I’d rather stand and do something now, to make them come and take me away. … This is just basic human rights.”

Stewart said he is an atheist and doesn’t believe Satan is real.

“We don’t believe in any punishment from God or retribution from Satan,” he said. “What we are doing is creating shared realities and manifesting ideas. Westboro did some messed-up stuff to harm people. We’re not attacking Catholics. We’re attacking the idea of God.”

Stewart described himself as a poor kid from south Kansas City with a high school education who pulled himself up through reading. He’s familiar with the works of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who died in 1947, and Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in the 1960s. One of his mentors, he said, is Darrel Ray, a Kansas City, Kansas, psychologist and current high priest of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

While Stewart is attempting to make a point about tolerance, Ritchie is having none of it.

“Freedom of speech is not absolute,” Ritchie said. “It has limits. Engaging in slander and libel, for example, can be punishable in court. Since every person has a right to his or her good name, it makes sense that the sacred Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, would also be granted the due respect and honor. … Those who yell equal rights the loudest frequently want to erase the Christian faith from our land, rip moral values out of our institutions, and provoke chaos and anarchy.”

This reminds me of the paradox that goes, can God create a rock so heavy even He cannot lift? If God is all-powerful, can He be defamed? If so, what court would hear it?

To enter into a debate about religion is to enter the invisible world of belief.

As Elaine Pagels noted in “The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics,” conversion to Christianity requires renouncing “the devil and all his works.” Pagels traces how the concept of Satan evolved from an ancient Jewish religious conflict to become Christianity’s primary adversary.

“What fascinates us about Satan,” Pagels writes, “is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human. Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and envy we identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to animals.”

Satan is also a snappy dresser, according to literature and folklore, rich and attractive and with the power to offer anything you desire, from Helen of Troy to the ability to play a mean blues guitar, just in exchange for your soul. Luckless New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone sold his soul to Mr. Scratch for seven years of good luck, in the 1936 Stephen Vincent Benét story, but gets it back when famed New England lawyer Daniel Webster pleads his case before an otherworldly jury.

Mark Twain had a different take on the devil, recognizing him in us.

“I have always felt friendly toward Satan,” Twain observed in the first volume of his uncut posthumous autobiography, as published in 2010. “Of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood, for I could not have originated it.”

In the end, I suppose, one’s faith — or one’s intellect — is either strong enough to withstand challenges or it isn’t. If it is, and your beliefs were sincere, wouldn’t God want you to spend your time feeding the poor or providing some other tangible relief to your fellow human travelers?

I will leave such questions to your own heart.

Booting the grotto’s event from the Statehouse may have seemed like an easy win for Kelly, but I can’t help but think the implications will come back to haunt her. There is, of course, the appearance of religious discrimination and the chilling effect it might have on the expression of unpopular beliefs.

But there is another danger.

It encourages deference to religion. When this happens, true believers are more likely to resort to violence to end perceived blasphemy.

Salman Rushdie, among the world’s greatest contemporary novelists, was left blind in one eye after being stabbed repeatedly in 2022 during an assassination attempt in New York. Rushdie had been hunted and in hiding for years after publishing his novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1989, which some Muslims found blasphemous and for which the supreme leader of Iran called for his death.

There are other examples closer to home.

Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Olympic Park and abortion clinic bomber, was an adherent of Christian identity, and members of the white supremacist group The Order killed Jewish talk show host Allen Berg in 1984. I wrote about Christian Identity, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the road to Jan. 6 in a previous column.

There is also the killing of George Tiller, a physician and abortion provider in Wichita. He was shot to death in 2009 by an anti-abortion extremist. Tiller was shot in the head at the Reformation Lutheran Church, where he served as an usher.

While some of us speaking their minds may make most of us feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is the cost of admission to a democracy in which free speech is valued. Failing to protect unpopular opinions weakens our democracy — and encourages the mob to shout down, or permanently extinguish, our most original voices.

The government can regulate the time, place, and manner of free speech demonstrations, but these decisions must not be based on content. Kelly’s decision to move the satanic event outside the building appears to be largely based on content. By ordering the event outside, even if her desire were to protect the public, she effectively canceled the group’s permit and muzzled their speech.

She also set a precedent that looks dangerously close to a religious test for Capitol protests. Today it’s the irksome satanists. Tomorrow, if Christian nationalists have their way, it might be anybody who doesn’t salute the flag and kiss the cross.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

Last Sunday, I drove across the Flint Hills and found myself unexpectedly awash in winter light. On Highway 177 in Chase County I passed the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and the landscape became cinematic, the slanting rays of the afternoon sun rendering the tawny palette of February in arresting detail.

All was revealed.

Every stem of dry grass, all the rolling hills, each outcropping of broken limestone was illuminated beneath an azure sky streaked with clouds. It was a moment not be ignored, so I pulled the Jeep over and sat for a few minutes, regarding a landscape made fierce by air and light.

It was all the more dramatic for its wildness. There wasn’t another car on the highway for miles. I drank in the reprieve from the recent ice and snow, reveled in the mid-60 degree weather, and counted myself glad.

I had not known how weary I had become of the affairs of my country.

You may have felt something similar during the preceding weeks and months and years, of listening and reading and watching, of holding hope in your lungs and exhaling in despair. Of peering into glass screens as if trying to scry the future. I did not want the afternoon to end. If only I could dwell in the warming sun forever, I would be happy. But I had an appointment that would not keep in a town some distance to the north, so I put the Jeep in drive and pulled back onto the pavement.

Then a thought came to me.

“Who will lead us?”

It was as if somebody else had spoken the words that rang in my head.

There is no escape from the affairs of human beings, no reprieve from the responsibility of following current events, no clemency from the judgment of history. We may take a few moments to rest some afternoon in the middle of our political winter, but if we do not return to the task it is a surrender to the wolves that fill the world.

“Who will lead us?”

We have come to a juncture in American history that is far later than most think. I am haunted by the words of Abraham Lincoln, who in his last debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858 warned of the eternal struggle between freedom and tyranny. Central to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which the candidates vied for an Illinois senate seat, was the question of whether Kansas would be admitted as a free or a slave state.

“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world,” Lincoln said, according to a transcript from the National Park Service. “They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

As a nation, we have never healed from the Civil War, never achieved the reconciliation between race and rage, never fulfilled in good faith the guarantees of birthright citizenship and Black suffrage. We have made advances and experienced setbacks, in a tragic never-ending cycle that plays out over the course of about a human lifetime, from the end of slavery in 1865 to the Klan marches of the 1920s, from the Civil Rights Movement to the final gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2023.

The rise of Trump in 2016 came with this last wave of regression, one aimed not only at historic minorities but also anybody whose skin or religion or love or gender orientation was different than the historic ruling class. Scrubbing the shame of fact from our textbooks will not remove the stain from our souls, no matter how hard we try.

But rising authoritarianism requires a scrubbing of collective memory, a sanitizing of the past to relieve the awful dissonance of fact. The generations of Americans now living are not responsible for injustices past, but it is absolutely our duty to correct the legacy of lingering inequality that has flowed from long-dead hands.

There was never a time when America was great, although we have always carried the promise of greatness within us. The tools are within our grasp to eliminate financial inequality, social injustice and cultural oppression. They are preserved in our Constitution and the rule of law, the good will of true citizens, the pilgrim souls of our artists and poets. The tools are preserved in our bone and blood and muscle, and every generation or so Americans are called up to put themselves bodily in defense of democracy — in the Wheatfield of Gettysburg, at Omaha and Utah beaches at Normandy, at Ground Zero in New York.

Those who placed their bodies on the line for democracy were also on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, at Kent State University in Ohio and in the ranks of the police officers at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Who will lead us?”

That’s the question that echoes as Donald Trump gathers ever more power to his oligarchic, neo-authoritarian rule. In less than a fortnight, Trump issued a raft of executive orders remarkable for their cruelty and unfettered by any allegiance to the rule of law.

The orders seek to end birthright citizenship, eliminate protections for transgender people and engage in the mass deportation of migrants. His nominees for important federal agencies are, nearly without exception, unqualified in all but their loyalty to Trump. He has created a quasi-governmental agency called the Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, a pun on a cryptocurrency but also the honorific for the lifetime leader of a medieval Italian city-state — and appointed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to run amok with it.

Musk, who spent $288 million to help elect Trump, has literally been given the keys to the U.S. Treasury. Musk or his associates have seized access to the federal payment systems, including those that process Medicare and Medicaid checks. Musk has also halted all work by USAID, which distributes foreign aid, and has called the agency a “criminal enterprise.”

Trump has also, in this short time, blamed without evidence DEI programs — short for diversity, equity and inclusion — for the horrific plane crash late last month that killed all 67 aboard a commuter flight from Wichita to Washington, D.C. The aircraft collided with a military Black Hawk helicopter, whose crew of three was also lost. For Trump to use a national tragedy in a craven attempt to further his political agenda shames only those who fail to denounce it.

Trump has ordered all DEI programs scrubbed from federal agencies, has pressured federal employees to take buyouts or face layoffs, and has pardoned all 1,500 charged or convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has ignited a tariff war, talked of invading Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal, and is entertaining sending violent criminals who are U.S. citizens to a hellish prison in El Salvador. He also announced during a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister that the U.S. military would seize Gaza and displace the nearly 2 million people living there.

Many of his executive actions would be grounds for impeachment. Some of his statements — including his suggestion of ethnic cleansing of Gaza — are likely sufficient to initiate removal under the 25th Amendment. Strictly, he shouldn’t even be president, because the 14th Amendment disqualifies insurrectionists. Then there’s the matter of his 34 felony convictions, which made Trump the first former, and now the first sitting, president to be found guilty of such serious crimes. Is it any wonder that his FBI nominee, Kash Patel, is a barking mad conspiracy theorist who published a 60-name “deep state” enemies list?

Yet, the American people have been slow to wake to the danger.

While protests have increased and some politicians have ratcheted up the rhetoric, there has yet to emerge a unified strategy to resist the Trump-Musk kneecapping of government. Democrats, cowed by Trump’s victory and the hammer blows of executive action, are seemingly paralyzed. Nobody has emerged as the voice of the opposition.

Meanwhile, millions of tons of food — some of it from Kansas — bound for hungry people around the globe is rotting on docks because of the freeze of USAID. Musk has access to the retirement and health care information of you and me and just about every other American. And GOP quislings like Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas are shamelessly parroting Trump’s unfounded and offensive claims about DEI being to blame for American Airlines Flight 5342.

“Who will lead us?”

I am reminded of what Helen Keller, who overcame blindness and deafness to become an American icon, told an Associated Press reporter in Kansas City in 1938.

She said she felt “a darkness without a name” in the world around her.

“I am terribly shaken,” Keller said about the rise of fascism in Europe. Although she was at heart an optimist, she said current events had left her with little hope.

Despite some parallels, this is not 1938.

The authoritarian threat is now firmly established in the White House, not from any outside menace but by our own actions. I suspect many of those who voted for Trump on Nov. 5 might have more than a little buyer’s remorse, but it’s too late for that. The machinery of government is being demolished before our eyes and the scrap turned over to the world’s richest man.

The time for action is now.

“Who will lead us?”

We can no longer wait for someone to lead us; we must lead ourselves through this darkness without a name. We must engage in peaceful protest, reasoned argument, and effective resistance. We must be civil evangels of democracy. We must come together not under the banner of any particular party, but for the “common right of humanity” as Americans. A new Abraham or Martin or John may yet emerge to guide us, but until then we must use our voices, our bodies, and our souls to preserve the tools which might someday make America truly great. To shy away from the eternal struggle is to embrace the darkness.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

While we’ve been distracted by the shambles that is American presidential politics, there’s been a change happening in our own backyards that may have a more lasting effect than who is sworn into the Oval Office on Monday.

That change is the partisanship leaching into local elections from the open-air market of national party politics.

The politicization of school boards began by 2020, when some parents became activists against pandemic-era remote classes and mask mandates. The summer protests over the death of George Floyd deepened divisions, especially in rural America, and there was an epidemic of challenges to books in school libraries.

“School board meetings in Kansas, as elsewhere in the country, have become the arena for newly elected, hyper-partisan members fueled by misinformation and narrow agendas,” I wrote in 2022. “These barefaced culture warriors claim vaccines are hoaxes, masks are ineffective, and a secret leftist plot to make white kids feel bad about themselves by teaching unpleasant facts about American history.”

Many studies have determined the COVID vaccines are scientifically sound, safe and effective and that masks work. Sorry, RFK Jr., and good luck with your new job as secretary of health.

American history?

That’s still a battleground in many school districts.

Take the Derby school board.

Derby is a nice town with miles of walking and biking paths. It’s the biggest suburb of Wichita, and it has a high school with 2,185 students, making it the fourth largest in Kansas.

In December, the conservative majority on the board voted 4-3 to ditch a proposed social studies curriculum because of an unfair “bias” against Donald Trump. The curriculum had been recommended by teachers at Derby High School, who spent a year reviewing six social studies programs and ultimately favoring one by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, an American educational publisher with headquarters in Boston.

As reported by KMUW’s Suzanne Perez, some members of the board said they rejected the $400,000 contract with HMH because of statements about anti-racism and diversity on the publisher’s website. At least one also felt the material did not accurately reflect Trump’s first term in office.

“My biggest concern … involved what I would define as bias of omission,” Perez quoted board member Cathy Boote as saying.

A retired elementary school teacher who was elected in 2023, Boote took issue with the material on Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban,” when all immigration and air travel from seven predominately Islamic countries was stopped by executive order.

“Safety was the top priority,” Boote was quoted as saying, “but they leave it sit there, with no explanation, to make you think he was xenophobic.”

Well, yes. That could be one explanation, backed up not only by Trump’s actions but also his words at just about every rally since first coming down that golden escalator. His campaigns, in 2016 and 2024, were built on a foundation that portrayed migrants and minorities as “animals” bent on destroying decent American towns. But that is my take, not HMH’s material, which apparently does not call Trump xenophobic.

For this column, I requested a comment and a copy of the HMH program from Leah Riviere, the publisher’s communications director. I received no immediate response to my email request.

But Boote and her fellow school board conservatives weren’t just disturbed by the history material. They also objected to statements on the publisher’s website that included an opposition to racism and a commitment to diversity and social justice.

For a previous story, Riviere told KMUW that the statement on the HMH website wasn’t meant to be political. The intent was to express support for Black teachers and students and other members of the publisher’s community, including its employees.

“HMH does not advocate for any ideology, political organization or agenda,” she said.

Boote, a Republican who contributed several hundred dollars to Trump’s campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission, clashed with the Derby school officials in 2022. Then, she questioned why the high school’s civics club posted online material that mostly had, at least in her perception, a liberal bias.

“My concern is the indoctrination is so deep that it’s widely accepted, with no regard to law or policy,” the Derby Informer quoted Boote as saying during public comments at a school board meeting.

Boote said school employees should follow policy and state law to avoid using their paid time or educational resources to advocate for a particular candidate or political viewpoint. She also said students should be afforded an opportunity to experience “rich diverse thought.”

Such blustering rings hollow — and hypocritical.

No high school teacher I know would engage in “indoctrination” of students to a political belief. It seems more likely to me that any “liberal bias” represented on the Civics Club Facebook page was caused by the students seeking out speakers they wanted to hear from, and not the club sponsor spoon-feeding students propaganda. Clubs are extracurricular in nature, largely run by students, and hearing from a candidate who brings in a few signs with her is far from an organizational endorsement.

But we probably won’t know for sure what happened, because the school board apparently went into closed session to discuss the matter. The Derby civics Facebook page appears to no longer exist.

On Thursday, I checked the Derby high activities page and found no listing for the Civics Club. Then I called the school office and was told by a staff member that “we don’t have one at the moment.” The staffer said she didn’t know why.

I doubt if Boote would have objected if the Civics Club speakers had swayed conservative. Or if the social sciences teachers had recommended a curriculum that included material that commended Trump for his actions during his first term in office. It is a special kind of hypocrisy to bring a school district to task for having an alleged liberal agenda — and then reject a curriculum that has been recommended by teachers who are experts in the field because it fails to conform to your political worldview.

However HMH’s material presented Trump, it would have been largely irrelevant to the program at Derby; as explained by Kendal Warkentine, co-chair of the Derby social studies department, the administrations of recent presidents aren’t covered in class.

Warkentine was quoted by KMUW by saying the HMH material was “well-written and engaging” and among the best he’d seen.

On Jan. 13, Warkentine, other Derby teachers, and some patrons asked the board to defer to educators on course materials. Kansas is among the states in which curricula is adopted by local school districts instead of being handed down by the state. The Kansas State Department of Education instead sets curricular standards that must be met.

But the conservative majority on the board refused to be swayed. After board member Mark Boline spent about 10 minutes refuting some of the comments Boote had made the month before about the HMH material, Boote said she felt “personally attacked” by Boline.

The message sent by the Derby School Board in rejecting the recommended program and refusing to budge on their decision is this: We don’t trust our teachers.

This lack of trust of experts has become a dangerous refrain in populist politics. From education to vaccines to government efficiency, it threatens to disrupt the operation of government and jeopardize the health and well-being of its citizens in the process.

“The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge,” writes Tom Nichols in his 2017 book. “It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.”

Nichols, a foreign affairs and international security expert, says that among a broad section of the American public, expertise is equated with elites and an attempt to stifle dialogue.

“Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s,” Nichols observes. The relationship between experts and citizens, like nearly everything in a democracy, is built on trust. “… When that trust collapses, experts and laypeople become warring factions.”

We have arrived at an America in which facts don’t really matter. The truth for many of us is what we feel, not what we know. If we feel vaccines are bad, as Nichols points out, then they must be. If a fact is contrary to our political worldview, then it must be wrong. We no longer live in a world of shared fact, but in a superstitious land ruled by emotion. That includes an irrational adherence to religion and a blind devotion to king (or what passes for a king) and country.

It’s as if the advances in science and critical thinking of the last few generations have been swept aside. Our politics, in many ways, harken back to the shambles, the open-air meat market in medieval towns that was about as likely to dish up sickness from contaminated or rotting food as it was sustenance.

The fault is not the Internet, although commercialization has practically extinguished the boon it could have been to news and education; it is not the fault of the politicians who manipulate us into acting against our own best interests, even though they may do so with self-serving intent; and it is certainly not the fault of the “elites” or the liberals, the migrants or the homeless, the socially disenfranchised or the otherwise different, although many modern-day demagogues would have us believe the only thing standing between us and our former supposed “greatness” are these others.

All have been wrongly blamed for society’s ills, at one time or another.

No, the fault is in human nature. Since the time of the Enlightenment we have waged a war of knowledge against ignorance, but through laziness or hypocrisy or common inattention we are periodically dragged back down into the mud beneath the shambles. How long we stay down here is up to us, but we must stand together to have a chance of standing at all.

The actions of the Derby School Board may be a glimpse of things to come. As more school districts surrender to partisan politics, there is a real danger that rural America may be faced with formerly nonpartisan boards that become, in effect, single-party machines aimed at stamping out dissent and squelching critical thought.

Derby has already reached the point where expert opinion is disregarded, teachers are disempowered, and publishers are economically punished for espousing such radical ideas as diversity and equality. The conservative majority has abandoned ideas of cooperation and service in favor of power and political self-interest.

What Boote and her conservative colleagues on the Derby school board have done is to create a climate of fear among teachers. Why risk the teaching of sensitive but needed material about current events when your board is on an indoctrination witch hunt?

When these school administrators police only those ideas they disagree with, that’s not just hypocrisy, but censorship. The say they favor a variety of viewpoints, but their actions allow only the material that matches their political agenda. Who, then, is doing the indoctrinating? It is a question of activism for me, but not for thee.

Is this the kind of school board we want in Kansas? It certainly isn’t the kind of board Derby students deserve.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

In 1929, the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte gave us “The Treachery of Images.” The work is probably better known as “This is Not a Pipe,” because that’s what it says in French beneath the depiction, against a neutral background, of the kind of smoking pipe ubiquitous in the early half of the last century. It’s an image that will be recognized by even the most casual student of modern art or popular culture. The painting is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which tells us the work is “a treatise on the impossibility of reconciling word, image, and object.”

Volumes have been written on the meaning of that painting, but my favored interpretation is in Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics.” First published in 1993, McCloud created a roadmap to understanding comics and provided a pictorial vocabulary to talk about them. Magritte’s pipe was an icon, not the thing itself, and the images we normally think of as symbols are a special category of icon — flags, religious symbols, company logos — used to represent “concepts, ideas and philosophies.” These non-pictorial icons, McCloud said, unlike Magritte’s pipe, represent invisible ideas.

With that preface we now turn to the Alito flag treachery.

At issue are the invisible ideas represented by flags flown at the homes of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, in 2021 and 2023. If you don’t know about these stories, then you must have either been in a hermit’s cave for the last few weeks, or as clueless about current politics as Justice Alito himself claims to be.

In 2021, at the Alitos’ home in Alexandria, Virginia, Martha-Ann flew for a period of days an upside-down American flag. The inverted flag had been adopted by the “Stop the Steal” election deniers, and some of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists had carried them during the breach of the U.S. Capitol. At the time of the Alito flag display, about a week after the Capitol attack, the Supreme Court was hearing a 2020 presidential election case.

In the other incident, an “Appeal to Heaven” flag was flown at the Alitos’ beach house in New Jersey. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, the Revolutionary War-era device has been co-opted by extremists as a symbol of Christian nationalism.

In both instances, Alito has attributed the display of the flags to Martha-Ann. She told a Washington Post reporter the inverted American flag was an “international signal of distress” raised during a dispute with neighbors. The neighbors apparently had displayed yard signs critical of Donald Trump. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag was also flown by Martha-Ann, according to Justice Alito in a recent letter in which he declined requests from Democratic lawmakers to recuse himself from upcoming election cases involving Trump.

“My wife is fond of flying flags,” he wrote. “I am not.”

Martha-Ann flies a variety of flags, including those for sports teams and seasonal events. Justice Alito was not aware of the upside-down American flag, he said, until it was drawn to his attention.

“A soon as I saw it, I asked her to take it down,” he said, “but for several days, she refused.”

It came down, according to the Washington Post, when in 2021 a reporter asked the Alitos about it and an angry Martha-Ann replaced it with “a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden.”

In the letter, Justice Alito said he was not familiar with the “Appeal to Heaven” flag when his wife flew it at the vacation home.

“She may have mentioned that it dates back to the American Revolution,” he said, “and I assumed she was flying it to express a religious and patriotic message. I was not aware of any connection between this historic flag and the ‘Stop the Steal Movement,’ and neither was my wife.”

The use of a historic flag by a new group does not “drain” the flag of other meanings, he asserted.

Because my knowledge of the U.S. Flag Code is rusty and my background on flags of the Revolutionary War non-existent, I turned to an expert for information and perhaps a little insight into the invisible ideas represented by flags.

Peter Ansoff is the past president of the North American Vexillological Association and has written what may be the definitive paper on the historic origins of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag. He’s also a history buff who lives in Falls Church, Virginia, about 20 miles from Alexandria. Up front, I need to stress that in my conversation with Ansoff, he did not take one side or another of the Alito controversy.

But he does recognize the power of flags to stir passion.

“That’s why I find flags so fascinating,” he told me. “They’re these pieces of colored cloth, but they stir up very strong emotion, and they generate legal cases and revolutions and all kinds of things. It’s not the physical flag, but what the flag is perceived to represent. Different people can look at it and see different things.”

While there is no extant historical example of an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, Ansoff said, it appears to have first been used on floating Continental batteries — barges equipped with guns — in Boston. The design may have been inspired by the “Liberty Tree” in Boston, an elm from which British officials were hanged in effigy during the Stamp Act resistance. A contemporary artist’s depiction of the flag seems to include a tree that looks more like an elm than a pine, Ansoff said, and the words are indecipherable. The flag may have included the “Appeal to Heaven” legend, which is a reference to the philosopher John Locke, who wrote about the right to revolt against an oppressive government.

The second use of the flag was in 1775, by at least two vessels that were part of George Washington’s cruisers, which were commercial ships fitted out as privateers. There was no Continental Navy yet, and the flags were used to identify the cruisers to one another. When one of the ships — a brig christened the Washington — was captured by the British, apparently without firing a single shot in self-defense, the flag was sent to King George III as a war prize. Ansoff said it is unknown what happened to the “Rebel Flag” after that. It might be in somebody’s attic in England, he said, just waiting to be discovered.

The third use of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag was in 1776 by the Massachusetts State Navy, although the Continental or American flag seems to have been more common. The pine tree, Ansoff said, had already been well established as a symbol for New England.

“Appeal to Heaven” was a commonly used phrase among revolutionary war leaders, Ansoff said, because of Locke’s popularity with colonial separatists.

“The context of what (Locke) was saying is that he was describing the proper function of government as protecting the rights of individual citizens,” he said. “And when the government stops doing that, then it’s the right of citizens to rise up and appeal to heaven for their cause because there is no earthly authority to turn to.”

Ansoff said he did not know if this expressed a religious sentiment or a request for divine intervention, or was simply a way of saying that all appeals had been exhausted.

The public perception of the meaning of flags can change over time, he said.

“A case in point is the Gadsden flag,” he said, referring to the yellow flag with the coiled rattlesnake and the “Don’t Tread on Me” motto. “That one has gone through a process that’s similar to what’s happening with the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag now. It played a very minor role in the American Revolution, there were only two ever made, but people latched onto it because of this idea that the government is oppressing us. This identification is not with the real Revolutionary War, but sort of a mythical war.”

As to the upside-down American flag, he said its use came from the naval tradition of signaling to other vessels that urgent help was needed because you were sinking, on fire, or had experienced some other calamity. A number of paintings from the period depict such maritime emergencies.

The use of the inverted flag as a signal of actual distress was incorporated into the 1923 Flag Code, he said, which was written by the American Legion and other non-governmental “patriotic” organizations, including the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Ku Klux Klan. The code was based mostly on a U.S. Army circular from World War I. It was adopted by Congress in 1942, but has been tweaked ever since.

The biggest change in flag law came in 1989, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that burning the American flag was a constitutionally protected form of speech.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag was popularized by evangelical preacher Dutch Sheets, a spiritual warrior of the New Apostolic Reformation, who said it was a symbol of God’s plan to restore America to its Christian founding. In 2015, he wrote “An Appeal to Heaven,” in which he promoted the flag as a symbol of Christian nationalism and urged readers against embracing “any theology or creed that allows God to lose!” Sheets reportedly visited the White House hours before the Jan. 6 attack.

Alito was almost certainly evasive when he claimed, in his recent letter, that he did not know the “Appeal to Heaven” flag had been adopted by election deniers. His denial echoed that of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, who said the flag — which he flies outside his office at the Capitol — was of historical interest and that he did not know it was associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement.

But assume, for a moment, that both Alito and Johnson are telling the truth, that they were ignorant of the flag’s adoption by election-denying insurrectionists. If ignorance is almost never a legal defense, can it be an ethical one? Shouldn’t a reasonable person expect a justice of the Supreme Court or the speaker of the House, who is second in line of presidential succession, to be familiar with the political context of our times?

The problem here is that it’s difficult to get a grip on the invisible ideas represented by flags and other symbols. They exist in the minds and swell in the breasts of the beholders. The American flag is not the country, but it is something more than Magritte’s pipe. The evolution of an object from signal (or sign) to symbol is the story of human language and our capacity for abstract thought, and we imbue a favored few symbols with the very qualities that are central to our humanity. In some religions, a wafer becomes the body and blood of Christ. In the Flag Code, when the American flag is no longer serviceable because of wear or other disfigurement, it is to be “destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.” We cremate the flag as we cremate our dead.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag, in its proper historical context, never made it beyond being a practical and literal sign to allied vessels. It is used much the same way now, in signaling sympathy or encouragement to other theocrats. Whether hanging outside an office in the House or topping a flag pole at a vacation home in New Jersey, it invites those of like mind.

Following Sept. 11, the American flag came to represent a unified patriotism and resolve felt by many of us. Those feelings were tempered among some, perhaps, by great wrongs done in the past in our name. Slavery comes most readily to mind. What emotions does the “Appeal to Heaven” flag stir in Alito and Johnson? Are we to believe none?

Martha-Ann Alito is certainly an individual with her own rights to free speech, as Justice Alito points out in his letter. But a reasonable person would conclude that she has considerable influence on her husband, even if he does not care much for flags himself. It would also be reasonable to expect Alito to recuse himself from any case involving Trump or the 2020 election as a way of avoiding any appearance of a conflict of interest.

When your spouse is involved in screaming matches with your neighbors over politics, that is a sure sign of confliction. A lesser judge would be expected to recuse, but Supreme Court justices answer to no earthly authority. Except, perhaps, in the cases of Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, their wives.

Heaven help the rest of us.

We remain, as we were on Jan. 6, at a perilous juncture in American history. So many flags! At the Capitol that day there was a symbol for every dangerous invisible idea — a Confederate flag being carried through the corridors of the Capitol, the Pine Tree flags, the Gadsden flags, modified Nazi flags, the America First flags. I suspect these flags will proliferate now that a former president and presumptive major party nominee is a convicted felon. No political grievance will be left behind. Every loathsome invisible idea drawn together in one place, an insurrection of incoherent ideologies, all representing a failure of imagination, a weak grasp of history and contempt for democracy.

It is time to leave all of these lesser flags behind. Keep your garden and novelty flags, the butterflies and the jack-o-lanterns, your state flags and those of your favorite sports team. But abandon the use of minor historic flags as signs of current political intent. We must come together under one flag, the American flag, flown right-side up, and put aside these invisible ideas of competing allegiances.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.