In March of 2023, I was part of a group of Republicans in Nashua Ward 7 that organized to hand out fliers promoting Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) to our local public elementary schools, Dr. Crisp and Sunset Heights. Dr. Crisp has been recognized as one of the lowest-performing five percent of all schools in the state for the second year in a row. At Dr. Crisp, the vast majority of the parents are poor immigrants, and we wanted to provide these families an opportunity for their kids to escape from their failing school.
The Children’s Scholarship Fund organized a parent information night about EFAs in Nashua. We printed fliers for the event and handed them to the parents as they picked their kids up from school. We were delighted to help the NH Department of Education and the Children’s Scholarship Fund get this information to parents.
In December 2023, our Ward 7 state rep Catherine Sofikitis filed CACR18, a constitutional amendment to remove the tax-exempt status of churches and religious organizations. When she presented the bill to the NH House Ways and Means Committee on January 9, 2024, she testified that she was upset that churches were promoting EFAs, which she believes are harmful to public schools.
There were no churches involved in our promotion of EFAs, but she has fallen victim to the Democrats’ reliance on stereotyping their political enemies with the Alinsky rule: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” to win political victories without having to do the hard work of understanding those on the other side. She is so immersed in a political bubble that she doesn’t understand who the political opposition is.
She assumed churches are behind all the conservative politics in New Hampshire and wants to strike at the heart of that. She doesn’t realize that conservatives are diverse in New Hampshire. They are Christians, blue-collar workers, small business owners, immigrants from communist countries and other totalitarian countries, former Democrats fed up with the extremism of that party, and many other categories. We come from all walks of life. It would be impossible to shut us all down. But she is so frustrated that she feels she has to do something.
In her testimony, she said that Christians should not be in the public square.
the churches shouldn’t be meddling in the government’s stuff. It’s just you know you stay in your church. You pray and you do what you do, you do you, and the government will do the government
Not because I don’t understand and respect what faith-based groups do in the state of New Hampshire but I just want people to stay in their own sandbox and stay in their lane
She accused us of telling parents that their children attend a “nasty school, a failing school.”
And at the polls and at other times when we have meetings up at that school people who are of the homeschool crowd and the ones who want the public school vouchers tell all the parents this is a nasty school, it’s a failing school, and I want you to know where you can get free money and you can take your children out of this failing school.
We don’t tell parents that. The parents know well the problems at their children’s school and the test results prove that Dr. Crisp is a failing school.
She complains several times in her testimony about people in her ward who aren’t being represented.
And I’m not here to disrespect anything and I know that my knowledge of these things is not deep but it’s just my feeling that since I’ve got to Concord seven years ago that it seems to me that my people in my district are not being represented here. And so this is just an ask that we all consider that people who have words that divide us are very hurtful to people who don’t have the political power to speak for themselves.
But her Democrat voters have her as representation. Republicans in Ward 7 are the ones lacking representation. Nashua Republicans don’t have any political power in the NH House. All of our 27 state reps are Democrats. Ward 7 has a Democrat state senator as well.
The irony of the following statement caught my eye in regards to the time she called Moms for Liberty “Assholes with casseroles, Taliban in a minivan.”
I made an obscure comment about Moms for Liberty. I had hate mail from Florida. And I just want people to stop. You know if your first reaction is something from your stomach out through your mouth then this is not a policy thing. It’s an emotional thing.
She is the one who is not controlling her emotions.
In her testimony, she states, “Stop dividing us up, and let’s all get along for the people that we were elected to represent,” but she is one of the reps who kneeled for the national anthem during a House session. That is extreme divisiveness.
At a previous committee hearing, she said, “I want to be brutally frank. There is not one person of color on this committee — not one. Racism matters,” but she fails to acknowledge that she and her fellow Democrats were successful at keeping Avalon Lewis, a black immigrant from Barbados, from being elected as a state rep from Ward 7. He could been the person of color on that committee that she complained was missing.
Related: That Racist You Are Looking For Might Be In Your Mirror
CACR18 was voted 20-0 by the Ways and Means Committee as inexpedient to legislate, put on the consent calendar, and killed by the NH House. Good riddance to her attack on churches and religious organizations.
There is a whole lot more in Rep. Sofikitis’ testimony that is troubling. Read her testimony here and watch it below.
