“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” – Declaration of Independence
So are the words of our nation’s Declaration in which our argument for independence from Great Britain is elucidated.
In modern society these “political bands” aren’t foreign or even national, they are provincial, petty, and only skin deep. Tempest in teapots all amount to nothing more than “Whiteness” noise.
As reported by the New York Post, “A liberal church on swanky vacation island Nantucket nixed its Fourth of July readings for the first time in 25 years in “political protest” over the Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling — and its congregants’ “whiteness.”
“Our cancelling the 4th of July celebration this year reflects … an on-going process within the congregation to better understand our own whiteness,” wrote Nantucket Unitarian Universalists (NUU) and the Rev. Erin Splaine of the Second Congregational Meeting House Society in a letter published by the Nantucket Current on Thursday.
The Nantucket Unitarian Meeting House has held public readings of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in Nantucket on the Fourth of July for 25 years, never once in that time did cancelling the event due to skin color seem anything more than absurd.
It is no less absurd today, but absurdity is no barrier to progressive liberals and certainly no reason not to court controversy and attention.
A church whose aim is to win converts to Christ, instead seeks to reinforce a fallacy of secular teaching which presupposes that the skin color of an individual disposes them to racism despite their being no evidence in their behavior or actions to support it. For them “whiteness” is the new “original” sin.
The Right Reverend Splaine, not content with her illogical premise, offers the following as grist for the lunacy mill, “For those of us who are white, the experience of the Rights and Privileges conferred by the Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights, and the Constitution of the United States have, for centuries, been tragically, often violently, and unequally applied to fellow citizens who are not white”.
Thus, we find ourselves on the horns of the dilemma, white folks received the benefits of independence while non-whites did not. This, of course, is not true. By self-infliction our nation suffered the stain of slavery and by unclean hearts some promoted a two-class system in the antebellum South which ushered in the Jim Crow era.
But if “rights and privileges conferred” weredenied to some temporarily, they were not denied eternally.
Those very “rights and privileges” to which the good reverend refers still exist and are “conferred” upon all. Skin color is no more a barrier to employment, education, success, politics, or the ballot box than wings are to being a bird.
Penguins and ostriches have wings, can’t fly but are certainly birds. White skin or brown skin doesn’t change the inherent humanity of the being it is stretched over. The body’s largest organ can’t control higher thinking, nor subconscious bias, no more than the useless wings of flightless birds can lift them into the air.
“Whiteness” is the modern transgression that surpasses all other sin. It justifies any kind of restriction or reparation. The Rev believes an imperfect history of a country populated by imperfect citizens should prevent celebrating the anniversary of its birth. Her logic suggests those citizens are somehow “whiter” today than they were two hundred and fifty years ago.
This is a big bite of Eden’s fruit picked in that heavenly garden so many years ago, now held by a lesbian pastor who encourages it to be swallowed whole in the form of a sin without knowledge or action.
Sin and the forgiveness are essential to Christian teaching and yet Reverend Splaine can see the former in assigning blame for an unchangeable superficiality and yet not the latter.
Splaine is mired in an adherence to the human not the divine.
Disagreeing with her premise is not to question Splaine’s or anyone else’s spiritual beliefs as they are a matter for each of us and our creator, not the media or the postulations of others. I can say without doubt that God loves Splaine as much as any other person and that His Son climbed on a cross and endured a brutal death for her salvation.
Her proclamation of concern regarding “whiteness” has no biblical or theological underpinning. There is no Book of Caucasian, no prophet of the Old Testament lamenting the innate racial bias of God’s children predicated on skin color.
So, if the reverend’s objection is not religious in nature, then what is it? It’s political. It covers the blathering of presumed bias with a pastor’s vestment. A mean political maneuver without merit and absent morality. A made-up claim to whitewash a political diatribe as a new commandment.
In previous years, local leaders in Nantucket and the island’s chamber of commerce promoted the event on social media platforms for all to attend to celebrate the holiday. Splaine’s letter stated that she would not “engage” with anyone concerned with the cancelation on social media, saying those concerned could make an “appointment” to speak with her, claiming social media “is not the place for important, tender conversations.”
Of course, “important and tender conversations” are better conducted publicly and in the media.
Splaine’s five minutes of fame are nothing more than “whiteness” noise. A bland background sound with no meaning and no purpose.
Stephen Piccirillo © 2026
