Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

Photo courtesy of here.

Is it news to find out that an employee for a City agency is sending religious emails on the company dime?  Is that appropriate use of time funded by tax dollars?  Recently, an employee with the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) sent an email blast to everyone she knew, calling for a boycott of dollar coins.  Why might someone demand a boycott of currency?  She thought the new coins did not say the phrase “In God We Trust.”

Later, this employee went to Snopes, and discovered that the whole story was an urban legend—so she sent out another email ending the boycott.  One must wonder if this employee was on Snopes during company time, too.

See a full size of the email here.

In the interest of fairness, we decided to redact the sender’s name.  As you can see, though, she sent this through her CMHA account to her Yahoo! account, presumably carbon copying her network—one of whom did not appreciate the apparent misuse of time and forwarded the message until it ended up at The Cincinnati Beacon.

On the one hand, perhaps everyone has sent an email while at work.  On the other, the religious content of the message highlights and parallels the frenzied pitch religion has struck in our culture with the upcoming presidential primaries—with people basing their votes on how candidates respond to the question of evolution, or whether the Bible is literal fact.

Another strange aspect of this story is the idea of calling for a boycott of currency.  Undoubtedly, there are people who received this email, believed it, and didn’t follow up through Snopes.  These people may actually be out in the world boycotting coins.

What might that do to the economy, if it were to happen on a wide scale? 

Thank you for reading (and printing from) The Cincinnati Beacon.