Why Did the Mint Surrender to Morons?

Yesterday I got sent an e-mail from a friend with the subject line “Do NOT accept the New Dollar Coins!” It had been forwarded several times, so I worked my way down through the headers and finally got to the meat of the issue. The email reported that these new Presidential Dollar coins (issued in 2008) did not have In God We Trust on them! (Insert End-of-Civilization-As-We-Know-It fanfare here.)

I’m a skeptic, so I went downstairs and pulled the Jefferson coin out of a pile of change. Sure enough, on neither face did we have In God We Trust! But as I flipped the coin over, I noticed something interesting. It didn’t have millmarks on the edge the way a quarter does. It had lettering!

So I pulled on some glasses—my arms not being long enough to focus on such tiny print—and what do I see? In God We Trust! We also had E Pluribus Unum and the date. Crisis averted! The official US motto was on the coin. Apparently civilization wasn’t in jeopardy after all.

I figured I’d blog about that internet hoax mail, but I wanted to have a graphic to accompany the post. I went over to the US Mint website and pulled up their page about the Presidential Coins. I figured I could snatch a quick shot and we’d be done.

Then I saw it. Starting in 2009, the coins have In God We Trust on the face!

I find this to be an outrage.

No, it’s not because I object to that motto (adopted in 1956) appearing on the coins. What has me teed off is that ignorant morons who can’t read, and most likely have never seen one of the coins, much less actually held one, pitched such a hissy-fit on the internet and in mail that the Mint surrendered and put the motto back on the face of the coin. They abandoned a very cool and elegant solution, now further cluttering a coin face that had be a very clean design before.

And they surrendered not because they had done anything wrong, not because they had left the motto off in the first place, but because it wasn’t positioned obviously enough to satisfy the whims of people who see the absence of God anywhere as an attack on God everywhere!

I’m sure some folks will figure this post is an attack on religion. It’s not. It’s an attack on falsehood. People got wound up because of emails that circulate lies! I would have had no problem if folks had circulated a call to petition the Mint to move the motto to the front of the coin because they wanted it more obvious. The fact is that it is on the coins and folks got worked up because they were told it was not is what offends me.

It is this same lack of critical thinking—anyone could have done what I did to verify the email’s claims—that allows quackery like homeopathy or claims that Satanists murder kittens at Halloween to persist. (Just wait for the storm of those stories on local news stations that have nothing better to report in the coming week.)

If we don’t use our brains to point out lies to the unwashed illiterates who believe everything that someone else reads to them from the Internets, we deserve the world we get. Contrary to popular opinion, just because it appears on the TV, just because it appears on the Internets, doesn’t make it true. And every time we ignore this stuff and dismiss it as idiocy without taking a shot at correcting it, we let the lunatics take over the asylum.