Gettysburg's not far from where I live. The battle, of course, took place in the first few days of July. My family has a little vacation house in the mountain pass through which Lee took his army on the long retreat to Virginia. People still find Civil War bullets buried in the ground and in old trees.

On the night of July 4 and the early morning of July 5, Union forces attempted to cut off the Army of Northern Virginia in a series of small battles known as the Battle of Monterey Pass that began mere feet from the back yard, and progressed for a mile and a half down the road. Hundreds of exhausted men fought hand to hand in the dark and the driving rain, in 80 degree heat, lit only by occasional cannon fire, point-blank gunfire and the lightning for which the mountain is rightly famous.

Thousands just as weary marched on a parallel road nearby, trying to escape through the pass with a supply train over 57 miles long full of the fruits of Pennsylvania, intended to feed and equip the Army of Northern Virginia, because years of war in Virginia itself had picked that state clean. The supply train included 24,000 head of cattle, even more sheep, pigs and poultry, as well as tons of grain and hay and anything else, nailed down or not, including the nails.

At a small wooden bridge, several Union units intercepted part of the train, and some of the animals panicked and got loose. The Union soldiers were under orders to use sabres and knives to avoid friendly fire injuries, but the Confederates had placed cannon along their escape route on the way north to forage, which they used, frightening the animals. The pitched battle in the dark thus included a stampede. Hundreds died in dark hot muddy confusion, mostly Confederates protecting the train's escape, as well as wagon drivers who fell to their deaths off the narrow road over the cliff’s precipice when their frightened horses shied from the light of nearby gunpowder flashes. Pieces of those wagons are still recovered sometimes.

That train sustained the Army of Northern Virginia at least until November of that year, and allowed Lee to continue the fight.

Kent Masterson Brown gave a book talk on his 2005 work, Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign. It's a much, much, much better book than Kay Granger's.

Kay Granger's book uses incidents involving great Americans to make points that support her party's political positions in ways that pull the incidents out of context in serious ways. Her approach has all the depth of her commitment to the moderate organizations to which she "belongs", which is, like "what's left of America", "not much".

Now, I have to admit, I applied the Out-Of-School Rule of Recreational Reading to Rep. Granger’s book, as I do with anything I’m not reading for professional reasons. Read a significant portion, and if you can’t stand it, life is too short to waste on a false sense of obligation when there are so many more books in the world. (There’s actually a formula – including a graduated scale that prescribes fewer pages the older the person -- but it only applies to longer books.)

So I read the Preface.

The bad news is that other subjects in education are not being taught. It’s not the fault of the teachers. Or of the parents. Or even school boards and administrators. Instead, it’s the result of a trend. The past forty years have seen politics and political correctness dictate to teachers that they are to stay away from one of the most important subjects in education.

Oooo, the dreaded Trend! Is this anything like Industry, which is responsible all by itself for the degradation of the environment? It couldn’t possibly be people. But, as she demonstrates in her political life (paying lip service to that which she thinks will make her look like a centrist), her prose doesn’t blame teachers for not teaching, or parents for not modeling the behavior they wish their children to learn. Surely none of the citizens, as many as 40% of whom might possibly be voters, can be complicit in the decline of civic life! What is it? It must be a Trend.

The best part: Later in the book, there’s a chapter on Responsibility. Maybe we can teach Responsibility to that nasty Trend.

Well, perhaps I was hasty. So I moved on to a chapter on a subject I actually have some experience with: the one on religious freedom.

Rep. Granger focuses on the exchange between newly-elected President Jefferson and the Baptist congregation in Danbury, CT. The Baptists were upset that the state of Connecticut was using tax money to support the Congregationalist church. Jefferson replied in a letter that included his famous phrase “a wall of separation between church and state”. Rep. Granger goes on to say:

To this day, many Americans believe the phrase is found in the Constitution. It is not. Or in the Declaration of Independence. Not at all. Instead the words first appeared in a simple letter written from a thankful president to some of his staunch supporters.

Indeed? If Jefferson, whose correspondence with Madison during the Constitutional Convention was instrumental in the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, wrote a “simple letter” on one of its most salient points, then the Federalist Papers were simple editorials. Rep. Granger pushes Jefferson’s words into the realm of casual remark even though he offers a statement on the meaning of an Amendment to which he had a meaningful authorship contribution. Never mind that he was writing as President to a group who wrote to him to exercise their official right to petition the Government concerning their grievances. Rep. Granger shows that she lacks a grasp of the significance of the principles in these historical events. Fortunately for her, ignorance is no barrier to publishing, because of the other provisions of the same Amendment upon which Mr. Jefferson made his comment.

Rep. Granger claims that mere remarks affirming the separation of church and state don’t hold the same significance as those officially ensconced in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, even when made by one of the Founders himself. Yet later in the same chapter, she uses George Washington’s addition of “so help me God” to the Presidential Oath of Office to support her assertion that the Founders actually intended to support civic, as opposed to public, religious expression. Washington's phrase is not included in the Constitution, either. (The Constitution specifies that the President may swear or affirm, thus recognizing people who may not wish to take an oath before God, or who may not believe there’s a God before whom to take an oath.) Which is it, Rep. Granger? Are extra-Constitutional statements and commentary superfluous except when they support your point of view?

Rep. Granger also pulls Martin Luther King, Jr., into her discussion. She claims him as proof that separation of church and state as practiced, which means not forcing prayer on the unwilling and not forcing the majority religion on the minority, is unhealthy. She claims that this practice would have barred Dr. King from his civic work, which is nonsense. Dr. King’s Christian beliefs doubtless informed his philosophy and his behavior, but so too did his close study of Gandhi, a Hindu. Dr. King was not attempting to force people to pray; he sought equal treatment and equal opportunity for all, including those of differing religious persuasions, as he memorably said in his “I Have A Dream” speech.

Rep. Granger’s book displays a shallow grasp of history, inconsistently applied, partisan objectives for which I forgive her because her object is political appeal to the Right, and a cloying sentimentality.

I brought up the book challenge when Rob mentioned burning tattered ideals because I saw a connection. My personal experience of the religious tolerance exhibited by the people whom Rep. Granger courts is demonstrated quite nicely by attempts such as this to silence people whose religious or moral principles are different from theirs. Church-state separation advocates are not talking about forbidding prayer in public places, but of not inflicting prayer using government-funded facilities and equipment at government-funded events upon people who don’t wish to pray. Likewise, I am not talking about forcing people to read a book about gay penguins, but of including it in a public collection for people to use if they wish. Rep. Granger’s understanding of the issue of religious freedom is uninformed. If she wants to preach her version of idealism, wherein the majority is allowed to crush the minority, she should walk in my shoes for a month, where the actual ideal is expected to be practiced every day, for everybody.

Perhaps the reason the discussion of the book became a discussion of gay penguins is because gay penguins are more interesting than Kay Granger's book.