Defund Movements – Religion and Politics


When I came up with the idea for penning this piece, my initial thought was that there was no circumstance in which it was reasonable to defund any entity currently funded by government.

As is sometimes the case, I sat and looked at a blank screen, not sure of exactly what I wanted to say.

Anybody who spends much time in front of a computer, sitting with a pad on a desk, or whatever, likely knows this feeling well.

Not long ago, I did a piece about stepping away. What I failed to say in that piece, is sometimes it feels very strongly like procrastination to do so.

I hate to put off that which I can do, and I’ve made somewhat a rule, that I handle ideas in the “order received.” The problem is, where I didn’t know it at the time, I was missing a fundamental piece regarding the subject at hand.

That component related to things that should be defunded.

Fortunately, a “national talker” gave me an excellent example of just such a case.

To begin with, I should say that I think a bunch of folks have misunderstood, or at least flippantly used, the term “defund.”

It’s my strong suspicion the latter is the case, since it’s somewhat hard to imagine how they could be doing the former in the case or cases where they use it.

The impetus for this article was a social media post. That’s the basis for what I write on my blog, at least as often as—truthfully probably far more than—any other thing, driving my creative process.

In this case, the concept behind the post, was that we needed to “defund” professional sports.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out, that for the most part (if not entirely) professional sports, are funded by those silly enough to watch them.

To be fair, in various places, there actually is public funding for them. An example would be in King County in Washington state, where one of the local teams (part of group of teams known nationally), decided it was going to leave the area if the state or county government didn’t put up money to build a new arena in which they were to play.

I don’t know what the end result of that particular extortion might’ve been, only that I didn’t support it; apparently, neither did the majority of residents.

Sadly, the county or state (not sure which) found another way to levy a tax to be used to pay for construction of a new facility, and did exactly that, wishes of votes entirely aside.

But when most people talk about defunding sports teams, that’s not the sort of thing they’re discussing.

Rather, they’re saying that team members for a given sport are highly overpaid. The point being that those individuals in just about every major team sports league in the United States, then attempt to foist their opinions off on their fans, who generally largely don’t want to hear it. They want the athlete in question to be good at what he or she does, and to keep their opinions on much of anything else, to themselves.

The next type of removal of monies that’s been recently in the news, has been taking resources from police departments. This cockamamie scheme is nothing short of foolishness. Most intelligent people understand that.

Of all the things government at various levels in this country is actually mandated to do, providing some amount of protection for residents and particularly citizens is one of the most important.

So when people talk about taking money away from law enforcement and other emergency service personnel, you’d be hard put to convince me the average individual would support such an idea.

Then came the social media post I talked about earlier from a national pundit. He made an excellent case for taking funding from an entity or set of them, that get substance from government at various levels.

That entity was the educational system. To be fair, I think the subgroup that most needs to be taken off the list of government funded entities where education is concerned, is post-secondary institutions.

The thing is, that isn’t something that ought to be threatened either, particularly at a federal level, it should just happen.

Of all the ridiculous things I see the national government in this country, funding colleges and universities are high on the list.

Truthfully, in my view, the federal government should neither be funding schools of any type, nor should they even have a Department of Education.

It, along with many other national governmental administrative (read here, “executive functioning”) bodies, should entirely cease to be in my view. I could enumerate a list, but frankly—though were sort of talking about defunding when it comes to those entities—that’s really a subject for another time.

I’m not sure why so many people have a hard time understanding this, but when a government funds some group like universities, there are invariably strings attached.

This is true for so many other things, that the list would seem nearly unending if I were to start to create it.

When I consider that the USDA has its hooks into day cares in my state by virtue of the fact that most of them receive food from federal (not so amazingly Department of Agriculture) programs, I see an excellent example of this.

This means that, if you want to have a competitive child care operation in my area, you must either play ball, or find a way around their mandates.

Many hospitals (most particularly university or teaching hospitals) are in the same boat. This is also true for supposed state departments, like for example, medicaid. Since the federal government funds them, it also sets parameters under which they must operate.

In my way of thinking none of this is appropriate.

So if you want to talk about defunding, forget police, fire fighters, ambulance services and other similar entities, and instead, focus on things like universities, colleges, day cares, medicaid, and so very many more—keeping in mind this list is particularly apropos for national government.

Thanks for reading, and may your time be good.


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