(Ohio) State Employees Told to Take Religious References Out of E-mails

[LiberalHeart]

COLUMBUS (AP) -- A state agency has warned its workers that they must stop attaching religious postscripts to their e-mails. An administrator in the Ohio Department of Taxation sent an e-mail to employees Tuesday telling them that proverbs, personal advice, and religious references have no place in business e-mails.

http://www.wtol.com/Global/story.asp?S=5216258

(Although this happened Tuesday, it didn't surface publicly until today. This is happening in Ohio, where religion rules -- and is being used on both sides of our governor's race this year -- so it struck me as a moment of enlightenment in a state agency.)

[YOY]

1. As an Ohioan let me tell you

Religion does not "rule" Ohio. There are far more conservative states with far more bible beaters.

Cleveland is actually pretty liberal as is Columbus.

Cinci is another story...

[LiberalHeart]

4. I'm an Ohioan too. What I meat by "rules" is...

...that religion (My god is bigger than your god type stuff) is what the politicians use to campaign against each other, and it's the appeals to the religious conservatives that are used as wedge issues to get voters fired up (as with the gay marriage issue in 2004). If Blackwell and Strickland had to take religion out of their campaigns, I'm not sure what they'd talk about.

[OzarkDem]

9. I can give them some suggestions

Jobs

Economy

Health Care

Environment

Education

Cleaning up government

Getting rid of term limits

Fair and open elections

etc.

[LiberalHeart]

12. Please move here and run for office. You've got my vote...

[Don Claybrook]

2. I just read a New Yorker article r.e. Blackwell, Ohio

and a couple of whacked out megachurch preachers. You have crazy people there (yes, yes, there are crazy fundies everywhere I've ever lived too, it's just that yours seem better organized at the moment).

One of these guys was blaming any perceived insolvency of Social Security on Roe v Wade. He actually said that millions of potential consumers had been murdered, thereby hurting Social Security and presumably the rest of the economy.

So hats off to the state agency with the guts to enforce an actual separation of church and state. I'm sure they'll fix that little "problem: in short order.

[partylessinOhio]

3. What a mess we have in Ohio. Both candidates for governor are pushing

their "religion."

I vote for separation of church and state.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. What this tells me...

Is that a lot of state employees have gotten their jobs after being vetted on the sly for their religious beliefs and fervor.

And that ain't right.

[OzarkDem]

10. Probably correct

And those who are religious zealots have probably been encouraged to show it at work in order to get promoted.

The handwriting is on the wall in Columbus - a Democratic governor is likely going to be their next boss. Lots of the crooked, corrupt and otherwise ethically afflicted are jumping overboard. And the few who aren't GOP hacks may be starting to assert themselves.

Encouraging, but there will still be a long overdue purge when Strickland takes office.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Does this mean no more invitations to "Protestant Prayer Breakfasts"?

The University of Toledo sends these out to its faculty on a regular basis. The first time I got one was a real "WTF!" moment.

[LiberalHeart]

13. Start "Satanist Sacreligious Snacks" and see how long it survives

[eppur_se_muova]

14. I'd really love to, but...I might see how I long I'd keep my job, too.

(NOT that it's a particularly good job. Not at all.) Fortunately, I'm leaving. Glad to be going.

[Cobalt-60]

17. Sounds Tasty

When's the first one?

[Bill McBlueState]

15. I'm a UT alum

And I always found it odd that, while there are a ton of religious student groups on campus, two of them -- one Protestant and one Catholic -- seemed to enjoy a sort of "state church" status within the university. They got access to the mass e-mail lists, had deans and faculty show up at their events, and operated out of their own buildings that looked like they were built with state money. I belive the Protestant group was the Interfaith Center and the Catholic group, of course, was Corpus Christi University Parish.

[eppur_se_muova]

16. Ayup. Things haven't changed much. Interesting that I have more Muslim

students than I have had anywhere else. (Large population of second- and third-generation Lebanese and Syrians, mostly, AFAIK.) I can't help but wonder how they feel about having the admin so openly endorse Xtianity, while spending their tax and tuition $$$.

[Redstone]

7. Good.

Redstone

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. Governments should never be used to push anybody's agenda to Armageddon.

[yardwork]

11. Ohio didn't used to be like this

I grew up in Ohio in the 1960s and 70s, in a very red, very conservative, very fundamentalist Christian part of the state. But what I'm seeing and hearing out of Ohio is new these past decades.

There seems to have been a highly-organized movement (I suspect KKKarl Rove) to tie politics to religion at every level in Ohio. I would guess that bushco has been planning this for many years, and 2004 was the official unveiling of this new approach - scare all the Christians into thinking that if they don't support bushco they're going to hell, and then rig the voting machines to make sure that the slight majority who vote Democratic in spite of the scare tactics get discounted.