There is a funny little game out there somewhere called “Pass the Pig.” It’s kinda cute – instead of throwing dice, there are two little pink rubber pigs you toss out on the table.  Depending on how they land, you score points for a “leaner,” an “oinker” or other things, depending on how the pigs land. I bought it when my grandson was about four, so we’d have a game he could play, but even my mom - then in her late eighties – got a kick out of sitting in on a game of  “Pass the Pig.”

I hadn’t thought about the game in years. Life has marched on. Ethan is eighteen now, and Mom has passed on. But as we took our twice monthly trip to Paducah for cheap gas and cheap smokes, I realized Tina and I had developed our own little game of “Pass the Pig” with an entirely different meaning. 

On the highway between here and Paducah is a little turnoff you would never notice unless you needed an emergency pullout as we once did. I think I had set the butts in the ashtray on fire and we were choking, so we stopped to put the fire out. We decided, since we were there, to get out and read what the little concrete marker said. I expected the grave of a child – you sometimes see those out in the west.

But instead it was a marker for a pig who is buried there. His name was King Neptune, and from 1941 to 1945 he was auctioned off hundreds of times to raise money for the war effort – World War II. No one questions the righteousness of that war. We didn’t fire a shot until someone bombed our territory. Some people call it the last righteous war. Maybe it was – I don’t know.

But back to King Neptune. It was only intended that he was going to be auctioned once. It was assumed he would then be butchered and provide for some family’s table all winter long. Somehow, the farmer who won the bid decided to give Neptune back to those who auctioned him so he could have another shot at life. It just evolved into a local tradition that whoever won the bid for King Neptune would return him to the auctioneers, and King Neptune kept traveling through the region being auctioned off. In four years he raised fourteen million dollars for the war effort. He was awarded the Navy Cross for putting his bacon on the line for his country so many times.

Once we read that, it became our custom, when passing the final resting place of that particular pig, to tender him a respectful military salute – which we do, every other weekend, both coming and going. It’s sort of a collective symbol of respect for all those we know who put their bacon on the line for this country. 

            Tina and I both had ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War. I had one in the War of 1812. We both had numerous ones on the wrong side in the Civil War – but that’s okay, when it was all over and the nation slowly healed they continued to serve – from the Spanish American War to World War I to World War II – both our fathers were in that one. Tina’s father was also in Korea; Tina was in Vietnam. As a personnel management specialist Tina had to send young men and a few young women to Desert Storm with a heavy heart. We both have had friends die in Vietnam and Iraq I. We’ve said goodbye to college students from here who didn’t get to come back from Iraq II. We respect those young men, we’re sad they have to go, and even sadder that some of them won’t be coming back. I never served in the military. I was awfully tempted when, as the single mom of four teenagers, I took a night class at college – which occasioned a letter from the Army National Guard offering me “two wonderful weeks at summer camp.”

            We love our country, and we serve it in the ways that are open to us. We fight for what is right; we look for what is positive. We took to the campaign trail against George W. Bush twice, and we’ll do it again if we have to. I don’t think he’ll succeed in getting a shot at a third term, but we’ll go down fighting if he does. We’ll keep fighting every move that is designed to deprive someone of their rights, because we know what it means to be deprived of your rights.

            We’ll try to not lose our cool when irrational responses to our viewpoint of Bush set our teeth on edge. Our disapproving of Bush does not automatically mean either that we thought it was a good thing Bill Clinton got a blow job in the White House or that it was a good thing when Ted Kennedy ran from responsibility at Chappaquiddick. There’s just no correlation, but that’s the accusation we get.

            We’ll keep believing in an America that our founding fathers envisioned:

“Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.” (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 363.)

“No man complains of his neighbor for ill management of his affairs, for an error in sowing his land, or marrying his daughter, for consuming his substance in taverns ... in all these he has liberty; but if he does not frequent the church, or then conform in ceremonies, there is an immediate uproar.” (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 364.)

“To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.” (Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Green Mumford, June 18, 1799. From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 341.)

"I know," Jefferson had written, ... "that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his [George Washington's] secrets & believed himself to be so, has often told me that Genl. Washington believed no more of that system [Christianity] than he himself did." (Paul F. Boller, George Washington & Religion, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, p. 85. Jefferson's comments were written in his journal, Anas, in February, 1800, according to Boller, p. 80.)

“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.” (Thomas Jefferson, "First Inaugural Address," March 4, 1801; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 364.)

“The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.” (Thomas Jefferson, as quoted by Saul K. Padover in Thomas Jefferson on Democracy, New York, 1946, p. 165, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 48.)

“In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.” (Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Horatio Spofford, 1814; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 371)

United States Constitution

The First Amendment
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."
 
Article VI, Section 3
"...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
  
John Adams (the second President of the United States):

Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli (June 7, 1797). Article 11 states:
"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
 
From a letter to Charles Cushing (October 19, 1756):
"Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.'"
 
From a letter to Thomas Jefferson:
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
 
Additional quotes from John Adams:
"Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions, Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?"
 
"The Doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity."
 
"...Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."

James Madison (the fourth President of the United States):

Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments:
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise....During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."
 
Additional quote from James Madison:
"Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."
  
Benjamin Franklin:

From Franklin's autobiography, p. 66:
"My parents had given me betimes religious impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself."
 
From Franklin's autobiography, p. 66:
"...Some books against Deism fell into my hands....It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quote to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations, in short, I soon became a thorough Deist."
 
 Thomas Paine:

From The Age of Reason, pp. 89:
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of....Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all."
 
From The Age of Reason:
"All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
 
From The Age of Reason:
"The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion."
 
From The Age of Reason:
"What is it the Bible teaches us? -- rapine, cruelty, and murder."
 
From The Age of Reason:
"Loving of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has beside no meaning....Those who preach the doctrine of loving their enemies are in general the greatest prosecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches."
 
From The Age of Reason:
"The Bible was established altogether by the sword, and that in the worst use of it -- not to terrify but to extirpate."
 
Additional quote from Thomas Paine:
"It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible."
 
 Ethan Allen:

From Religion of the American Enlightenment:
"Denominated a Deist, the reality of which I have never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian."