A few weeks ago I received a letter from NYS Senator Mike Martucci. It was written on NYS Legislature letterhead. So, it seemed to be important and, yes, it should have been as he was using tax dollars to distribute this to every mailing address in his district.
The letter was sent to inform us that he and Senator Felder were sponsoring a bill in Albany that would prevent any city from requiring a permit to sing our National Anthem or recite the Pledge Of Allegiance.
Hmmm? I really didn’t expect that we all would need a permit to do that? Mike goes on to explain that the bill is based on an incident at the 911 Memorial where a group of North Carolina students were stopped while singing the National Anthem and were told by a security guard that they needed a permit to do that.
Mike’s letter: “Can you imagine? A permit to sing our National Anthem in a public place? You and I know what that is -- nonsense!”
Heck yeah, Mike. We all would agree with you, Mike. Great job. Except after some of us do some research and find out what actually happened in April 2016 when this took place, maybe not so much.
Yes. A security guard did stop a group of students from spontaneously singing the National Anthem at the 911 Memorial. However, within a very short amount of time, museum officials publicly responded that the guard’s actions were wrong and that the museum staff would receive correction training to avoid any future incidents like this. They did not support the guard’s actions and apologized to the students.
There is no permit required to sing the National Anthem and I can safely assume that we can all safely recite the Pledge Of Allegiance without fear of receiving a summons.
Get to work on actual issues, Mike. Stop using your valuable time to accomplish nothing more than nationalist chest beating. Also stop using my hard earned tax dollars to do soft campaigning for yourself.
Bob Linguanti
Warwick
