Jennifer Canady's stolen "teacher" valor, part 2: anti-teacher, anti-public education nepotism, enforced by a private religious oath
Canady's employer requires her to consider the Bible as the "only infallible authoritative Word of God," under pain of punishment. That has far-reaching nepotism and public policy implications.
Here’s part 1.
Jennifer Canady has taken a private religious oath to the Lakeland Christian School that supersedes the oath she will take to the public if she’s elected to the Florida Legislature. If she violates that oath on your behalf, the LCS board will fire her.
That is the core civic lesson of the Bill Mutz incident: the very political LCS board openly seeks to dictate to the public through coercion of elected officials affiliated with it.
This is a civic question, not a religious one. And voters should consider it.
The oaths that Jennifer Canady and Bill Mutz take in their private lives to private religious power are none of my business or concern — until they seek to represent and wield power over me in civic and legal life. Then they’re very much my concern — and yours.
To his eternal credit, Bill Mutz understood that he could not morally and ethically serve two masters as Lakeland mayor. One of the oaths — the public or the private — had to go. To his further eternal credit, he chose the diverse public he twice asked to elect him, not the dogmatic religious politburo trying to control him.
Jennifer Canady, asking for your vote, but subservient to the private LCS oath, has not even acknowledged that a choice confronts her — much less picked the public.
Google “submission to husband” in the “infallible” Bible
The consequences of this LCS oath stretch far beyond the LCS contempt for gay people.
Indeed, here is the first bullet of the enforceable “statement of faith” that Jennifer Canady must obey under pain of dismissal and ex-communication from LCS:
We believe the Bible to be the inspired and only infallible authoritative Word of God. (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21-22; 1 Thessalonians 2:13; 2 Peter 3:16; John 5:39)
The public policy implications of considering the endlessly translated and interpreted Bible as the “only infallible authoritative Word of God,” under pain of banishment from LCS, are legion.
But let’s just try googling “biblical verses about submission to husband.” Here’s 100 of them.
One example, from Ephesians 5:22-24:
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Jennifer Canady’s private religious oath requires her to believe and act on this verse as “the only infallible authoritative Word of God” — under pain of institutional punishment from LCS.
I didn’t write the Bible or the LCS oath; and I didn’t excommunicate Bill Mutz over it or choose to pursue secular power under its thumb. So don’t shoot the messenger. The public Jennifer Canady wants to use as her vehicle to higher office has a right to know just how Biblically submissive she expects women to be — and how willing she is to wield official power to enforce it.
Lakeland Christian has already demonstrated how willing it is to punish those who violate their earthly oath to it.
By coincidence, a Canady volunteer caught me on my porch yesterday. I asked about the oath; and he didn’t have answers. He’s just a volunteer, after all. But he did say Canady was coming behind him and he would ask her to chat with me. That did not happen.
If she had come by, I would have told her: I don’t want to be ruled by Lakeland Christian’s statement of faith. And I don’t expect my wife to submit to me.
Nepotism + submission + hatred of public education and local government
In Canady’s case, the basic entitled nepotism of her campaign makes this Biblical infallibility question even more important — especially when considering the future of public education and teachers.
Her husband Charles Canady, as chief activist justice of the activist Florida Supreme Court, essentially abolished local school boards — and local government — as entities independent of state government in 2019.
Really.
Local districts filed suit against an appallingly bad education law — one which led directly to the charter school corruption and failure in Jefferson County and helped accelerate the ongoing DeSantis teacher strike in Florida.
Canady and crew ruled that elected local School Boards (and other local governments) have no standing on behalf of their citizens to challenge the constitutionality of any law the Legislature passes — with a few minor exceptions. I wrote about that here:
Moreover, in the same opinion, the unelected judges ruled that state government has unlimited power to intervene in the affairs of elected local school boards and local governments. The passage that follows is from the article I wrote in 2019 about it. The italics are a quote from the Supreme Court opinion. My analysis follows:
The Florida Constitution therefore creates a hierarchy under which a school board has local control, but the State Board supervises the system as a whole. This broader supervisory authority may at times infringe on a school board’s local powers, but such infringement is expressly contemplated – and in fact encouraged by the very nature of supervision – by the Florida Constitution.
There's obvious "some animals are more equal than others" in that wording. But particularly note the lack of wording in the part in bold. The empty space between "at" and "times" is profound.
Is it "some?" Is it "all"? Is it "many"? There is no standard of legal infringement proposed by the court. And every infringement is presumed constitutional until proven guilty, under the "standing" ruling. In most cases, only private citizens can sue to get clarity. As a result, in a practical sense, this means state government infringement must be individually challenged on its own case-by-case merit. That's completely impractical. And we can expect activist political judges to endorse all the infringements anyway. I see no evidence, at all, to the contrary.
Thus, the courts make it clear here that your School Board is little more than 5 or 7 people you're paying $40K/year and health insurance to take the public blame for Tallahassee's decisions and record.
To recap: Jennifer Canady is subject to an enforceable private Biblical oath that requires her submission to her husband, who is a powerful government official happy to destroy public education and the independence of local government. That sounds jarring to write; I admit it. And yet, it’s true.
Admittedly, Jennifer and Charles Canady would serve in different branches of government. So who knows how the submission questions comes into play, practically? But “checks and balances,” not “submission,” is the point of having multiple branches of government.
Again, Jennifer Canady should publicly address this, not timidly hide from it while sending out dishonest mailers pretending to be and do what her husband has helped Richard Corcoran, Ralph Arza, and others destroy. When you know the background, this is just gross and contemptible:
Breaking the raw, coercive political power of Lakeland Christian School’s board makes Lakeland a better city
For a very long time, Lakeland Christian School has been a seat of civic and economic and secular political power in our city. Many, many people in Lakeland’s ruling class have close connections to it — or the churches that feed it.
And that’s fine, as long as the oaths to the public come before the oaths to Mike Sligh and the LCS board. But Mike Sligh and the LCS board challenged that. They attacked Lakeland citizens through their mayor.
And now, thanks to Bill Mutz, who politely and gracefully refused to be strong-armed, Lakeland Christian is a less powerful political force than it was a few days ago. It has less power to rule me, who has no connection to it, than it did a few days ago.
I want to make it less powerful still.
But I have no interest in making it less religious or less private or less free to be rigid about its oaths. That is the essence of a healthy relationship between the civic space and religious space — a healthy respect for each other, not shaped by dominance.
A city with a healthy relationship between private religion and public conscience is a strong city. Defeating Jennifer Canady and the aggressively political board of LCS — and the looming threats of their private oaths — would make it stronger still.
Indeed, just putting her — and them — on notice that we’ll be monitoring her oaths for her entire political career, win or lose, is helpful.
The troubling habit of running a prominent official's spouse or child for these positions bothers me greatly. See Kelli Stargell as another example
I was equally troubled by the Bushes and the Clintons. We do not have dynasties in America. Full stop.