Lancaster Online/LNP. August 28, 2022.
Editorial: Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano’s character is revealed by the company he keeps
As the adage goes, you can learn a lot about a person from the company he keeps.
Using that measure, this is some of what we’ve learned about Mastriano.
— He transported busloads of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Widely circulated video footage shows Mastriano was on the grounds after the U.S. Capitol was violently breached by insurrectionists.
— Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign paid the right-wing social media platform Gab $5,000 for “consulting services.” (The man charged with killing 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 posted antisemitic screeds on Gab.)
— And now we know from the reporting of LNP ‘ LancasterOnline’s Walker that Mastriano’s security detail includes Scott Nagle, “who until recently was listed as a regional leader for the Oath Keepers.”
This should alarm anyone who believes in the rule of law. Why?
As Walker explained, “The Oath Keepers are a right-wing militia founded in 2009 by Stewart Rhodes, a U.S. Army veteran from Montana. The Pennsylvania Oath Keepers split from the national group in 2015, but a social media post shortly before Jan. 6 alluded to armed veterans violently resisting election results.” Rhodes and other Oath Keeper members have been charged with seditious conspiracy for their role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021 (three have pleaded guilty).
Nagle, as Walker reported, works as a firearms instructor for the United States Concealed Carry Association. He’s also a member of LifeGate, an evangelical church near Elizabethtown.
So, too, is James Emery, an Elizabethtown Area school board member “who has been photographed providing security to Mastriano at numerous events over the past year, sometimes armed,” Walker noted.
As an editorial board, we’ve lauded Lancaster County religious congregations for their efforts to unite the community, to offer comfort and sustenance to the poor and the hungry, to welcome the stranger.
LifeGate is not among those congregations.
LifeGate connection
With its soft-focus background image of grasses in a field, the LifeGate website appears at first glance to be like that of many other evangelical Christian churches. But it lays out the congregation’s beliefs in startlingly harsh terms. “We reject any notion of ‘same-sex marriage,’ ” it states. The “unsaved,” it asserts, will be “sent into everlasting punishment of hell fire.”
The church rejects “all forms of selfishness and violence — including abortion and child and spousal abuse.” As a letter writer points out today, however, LifeGate once provided financial support to convicted sex offender Gregory Dow, “even though a pastor there (Doug Lamb) was aware of Gregory Dow’s prior sexual assault conviction in Iowa, according to previous LNP ‘ LancasterOnline reporting.”
Dow was sentenced last year to nearly 16 years in federal prison for the sexual abuse of four girls at the children’s home he and his wife founded in Kenya. A federal judge called Dow’s crimes “evil” and “depraved,” and described Dow as a “missionary from hell.” LifeGate co-pastor Doug Lamb claimed Dow was a victim of a “well-planned scheme to take the Dow (children’s) home down.”
Lamb contributed $1,000 to Mastriano’s campaign in May. In a November 2021 sermon cited in Walker’s remarkably detailed reporting, Lamb said this: “If you put Christian politicians in office, Christian attorneys in office, Christian district judges in office, Christian businessmen, people truly loving by biblical principles you will bless your communities and your society.”
Many members of LifeGate clearly have taken these words to heart.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with people of faith getting involved in politics. Indeed, faith often compels individuals toward public service.
But LifeGate seems to have a dangerously Christian nationalist bent. It has that in common with Mastriano, who regularly invokes Scripture and seems to believe his gubernatorial campaign is a divinely ordained battle for the souls of Pennsylvanians.
As the publication Christianity Today explained, Christian nationalism is “the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way.”
As Millersville University professor emeritus of history Dennis B. Downey wrote in a Sunday LNP ‘ LancasterOnline column in July, Christian nationalism “blends religion with a particular patriotic creed.” It is, he wrote, “a worrisome manifestation of a self-righteous fundamentalism in the defense of an imagined American identity.”
In Downey’s view, “the proponents of Christian nationalism distort history and debase religion to serve their own interests.”
We strongly agree. Ours is a nation of not just one or two religions, but many. The founders explicitly wrote in the First Amendment that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
And, as a group of Lancaster County Christian clergy and scholars pointed out in a Sunday LNP ‘ LancasterOnline column in July, President John Adams, “a signer of the Declaration of Independence, also signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which stated that ‘the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.’ ”
The clergy members and scholars wrote: “As Americans, we can have a democracy or we can have a theocracy. We cannot have both.”
Indeed.
Link to FreePA
In 2020, Emery’s son, James “Jay” Emery-Shea, helped to lead a group whose members aimed to provide security for businesses while a Black Lives Matter protest took place in Elizabethtown. “At least one member was armed, and they stood alongside members of another militia group, the Carlisle Light Infantry,” Walker reported.
Emery-Shea told an LNP ‘ LancasterOnline reporter covering that protest that his group was the “Domestic Terrorism Response Organization” (grandiosity seems to come with the territory).
The group had a Facebook page. Walker’s search of archived Facebook records revealed that James Emery also was a member of the Facebook group, though he told Walker that he has “never had any affiliation with any kind of militia.”
Emery was elected to the Elizabethtown Area school board with two other LifeGate members last November: Danielle and Stephen Lindemuth.
Despite federal tax rules prohibiting churches from engaging in partisan political campaign activity, a political yard sign for Emery and the Lindemuths was placed on LifeGate property, Walker noted.
As he also reported, seven LifeGate members — Nanette and Seth Lamb, Theia and David Hofstetter, Dan and Stephanie Slade, and Sharon Ogilvie — won seats to the Elizabethtown Area Republican Committee in May.
Ogilvie, Nanette Lamb, Emery and the Lindemuths also are members of FreePA, an extremist grassroots group of self-described “patriots” founded to oppose COVID-19 pandemic safety measures. As Walker noted, FreePA members — and LifeGate members — are among Mastriano’s most fervent supporters.
We’re guessing their enthusiasm for Mastriano isn’t diminished by his disdain for the news media or for his penchant for gathering mostly with like-minded people. Those are strange behaviors for someone who seeks to govern a diverse state, but they undoubtedly appeal to those have joined Mastriano in his spiritual war.
“We have the power of God with us,” Mastriano said at a far-right Christian gathering called “Patriots Arise for God and Country” in April, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Another Patriots Arise meeting is planned for Quarryville in late September; the co-founder of FreePA is listed among the speakers. The Patriots Arise website asserts that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and the “Democratic/Communist Party USA has appointed a 77-year old dementia-addled white collar criminal, Joe Biden, to pick up where Hussein Obama left off.”
This is the company that Mastriano keeps.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. August 27, 2022.
Editorial: Fix unnecessarily broad, and dangerous, license plate statute
A panel of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania has ruled that police can pull drivers over with even a speck of their license plates obscured by frames, which typically promote sports teams, colleges and auto dealerships. This is an open invitation for officers to perform traffic stops based on flimsy license plates violations. The legislature must fix this oddity of the state vehicle code.
Pretextual traffic stops are highly susceptible to racial bias. A 2020 study in North Carolina showed Black drivers were nearly twice as likely to be pulled over as white drivers and more than twice as likely to be searched. When Pittsburgh City Council moved to end “secondary” traffic stops — for violations like brake light malfunctions and license plates — the city reported that more than half the drivers in traffic stops were Black, although Blacks make up fewer than one in four city residents.
Traffic stops are risky for officers, drivers and passengers. Nationwide, about a dozen police officers a year, and dozens of motorists and passengers, die in violence that escalates from traffic stops. There’s no reason to expand the range of minor offenses that could lead to disaster.
Fixing this problem should be easy. The Superior Court panel based its decision on a few words in the state vehicle code: The license plate may not be “obscured in any manner.” The rest of the language about plates refers specifically to the identifying letters and numbers, but the court argued that the meaning of these last words includes the entire plate: the visitPA.com logo, the word “Pennsylvania,” every square millimeter.
Legislators must change the wording of the law to prevent police officers from using it to abuse their authority — the sooner, the better.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. August 30, 2022.
Editorial: There’s still real work to do, Gov. Wolf
OK, Governor, it’s your turn.
We recently took the Republican-controlled state Legislature to task for continuing to chew on Act 77 and its aftermath in recent elections like a pack of dogs with a particularly juicy bone. Several lawmakers have been in and out of court with challenges to the bill that most of them voted to pass in 2019, with both the state Supreme Court and more recently a Commonwealth Court ruling coming down on the law’s side.
Move forward, we said. Focus on making laws to do things that need to be done.
This isn’t a partisan sentiment. It’s an acknowledgment that Pennsylvania has real pressures and we need the people in power to do a little less politicking and a little more problem-solving. They also need to do a whole lot of cooperating, but we all know that’s unlikely.
So now it’s time to say the same to Gov. Tom Wolf.
The governor visited Sharpsburg on Monday for what appears to be a farewell tour, playing his greatest hits and new favorites — most notably talking up his plan for Pennsylvanians who make less than $80,000 a year to get a one-time payment of $2,000 for inflation relief.
Yes, Pennsylvanians are still struggling with inflation. The cost of gas isn’t falling here as fast as it is in other states thanks to the nation’s second-highest pump tax. The price of groceries is still far higher than it was a year or two ago. Electricity is up. So is rent. So are home purchase prices and cars and just about everything. People understand.
And it’s not like most people are going to turn down $2,000 if offered. But having gotten checks in 2020 and 2021 from the federal government only to have inflation climb, its likely that fewer people are going to see that gift as a solution these days.
But that doesn’t matter because it feels like Wolf is pitching a fantasy more than a proposal.
The Pennsylvania Opportunity Program might see about 250,000 applications and cost about $500 million, the governor says. That’s a lot of money — definitely more than Wolf has in his American Rescue Plan discretionary piggy bank after he forked out $40 million to state-related universities, gave $50 million in retention bonuses to state employees and provided $6.5 million in nursing student loan relief.
While he originally pitched the program with ARP funds in February, on Monday the push was for general funds with Democratic legislators cosponsoring in the House and Senate.
Why does he think GOP lawmakers are going to do that now when they didn’t during the budget negotiations? Wolf and the General Assembly may have the most dysfunctional relationship of any governor and legislature in the country. They pass a law, he vetoes it, they go around him with a referendum, and they both end up in court.
It’s hard not to see Wolf’s pitch as throwing money like confetti leading up to the November election with its crucial gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, not to mention all of those legislative seats up for grabs. That makes it seem all the more likely the Legislature will stonewall it.
So why the road show selling it?
Here’s a thought, Governor. You have just over four months left in office and precious little of that with lawmakers in session. How about actually working with the Legislature on things that will help Pennsylvania instead of a pipe dream project?
If you are going to dream big and improbable, fix how PennDOT is funded. Put your back into reforming property tax. Find a correction to the contentious election problems that will unite people and get them to the polls.
There is still work to do. Real work. Get it done.
Scranton Times-Tribune. August 29, 2022.
Editorial: Fight catalytic converter thefts
Catalytic converters are invaluable to the environment because they convert toxic vehicle exhausts into less onerous gases. Unfortunately, the rare earth minerals that they employ for the process — including platinum, palladium and rhodium — make the devices highly valuable to thieves.
Nationally, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, catalytic converter thefts have increased by more than 1,000% over the past several years.
At least 10 states have passed laws in efforts to diminish the problem, and Pennsylvania should follow suit.
The state House Transportation Committee in May passed a bill that would help. It emulates steps that the state took several years ago to help thwart an epidemic of copper thefts. Bold thieves sometimes stripped entire houses of wiring and copper pipes while residents were away, and otherwise stole copper wherever they could find it, even live power lines.
The Legislature adopted new rules requiring scrap dealers to make a record of each copper purchase, including basic information about the seller and the origin of the copper.
Under the committee-passed bill on catalytic converters, someone trying to sell a converter to a scrap dealer would have to provide the year, make, model and vehicle identification number for the vehicle from which it was removed. The dealer buying the unit would have to photograph it and the seller, and withhold payment for two days.
Another bill would require insurers to cover catalytic converter thefts.
Both bills should pass. Making a vehicle owner whole for losses is the purpose of insurance from a consumer standpoint. And disrupting the market by requiring accountability for converter sales likely will slow the trend.
Wilkes-Barre Citizens’ Voice. August 24, 2022.
Editorial: Transparency befits dignity of state court
Pennsylvania has the oldest supreme court in the United States and all of North America, at 300 years. Founded in 1722, it predates the Supreme Court of the United States by nearly 70 years.
Such longevity for a crucial democratic institution is well worth celebrating, as the court did in Philadelphia in May. But it’s worth celebrating in accordance with a crucial principle of democratic governance — transparency.
The court conducted a one-day session in Philadelphia in May and followed it up with several days of commemorative, educational and social events, including a scholarly symposium at the National Constitutional Center that included retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
But when Lancaster Online sought financial records for the various events, it received only partial answers. It verified $147,000 in expenses and some details, including a $1,500 cake as part of a $48,387 banquet at Logan Hotel Philadelphia, and room charges for Chief Justice Max Baer of about $400 a night at an undisclosed location, but the court’s administrative office redacted some information. So the $147,000 is a minimum figure.
LNP also confirmed that the state bar association contributed $25,000 to the observance and that bar associations in Philadelphia and Allegheny County contributed $12,500 each.
Whether the court should have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the observance is debatable. Long-time good-government activist Tim Potts, for example, said the event was “tone-deaf,” given high inflation and other economic aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is no doubt, however, that the court should be transparent about its use of public money. A court spokeswoman cited security concerns for the redaction, and that would be understandable if someone sought details about the justices’ lodging prior to the event. But the Lancaster Online inquiries were about an event that already has occurred.
As part of its anniversary observance, the court should honor the principle and tradition of transparency in Democratic governance by eliminating the redactions. Baer should make it so.
END