Pennsylvania has decided to 'optionally' allow school districts to place the National Motto "In God We Trust" in all public schools.
Pennsylvania is often a state of schizophrenia politically -- bluest of blue in sections and redder than red in others.
Since the GOP controls the legislature, they control the maps for gerrymandering and have secured their seats very well. (They are currently trying to make it more difficult for normal folks to get into office by reducing by about a third the number of seats in the state legislature.)
But the GOP is really scared right now.
GOP Governor (and Jerry Sandusky foot dragger) Tom Corbett is circling the drain politically. Nationally they are placing flowers on his political coffin.
The brilliant campaign waged by Democrat Tom Wolf to quickly and efficiently dispatch a corps of political veterans has to have the state's GOP legislators wondering if their gravy train will be stopping in November for good. Wolf has a potential for very, very long coattails.
What does the GOP produce really well? Dog whistles. Look at the timing. Telling the redder than red local school boards they can add God into the classroom is a political ploy. We have all summer to order the signs so they will be paid for and installed for the first days of school. Oh -- isn't September really the start of the November political season?
How convenient...
I can see all sorts of photo-ops in the red districts with GOP legislators with 'God signs' smiling at the presentations to the local high schools.
The bottom line is that the Democrats need to call this out. Not as an effort to put God in schools -- but to demonstrate that the GOP cares about neither God nor schools. The Democrats need to show what the GOP REALLY cares about.
Why not a strategy of linking the amounts of cash moved from the education system into the prison systems? Last year an educational funding crisis occurred because the GOP wanted to fund the State Prison at Graterford as opposed to the teachers in the Philly school district.
The transfer even affected the suburban Perkiomen Valley School District where the now tax-funding rich Graterford State Prison sits. Students there staged protests against the all-GOP penny-pinching school board in protest against firing good teachers due to funding cuts.
But, I am sure Perk Valley will have an "In God We Trust" photo-op there in September.
I guess all others pay cash...