Hutzell: Eastern Shore secession? Go on now, go, walk out the door.

Tom Hutchinson has discovered himself to be a secessionist.

After raising the Mardelva banner in the General Assembly, the Republican delegate called on the Eastern Shore to quit Maryland.

The idea failed in the State House, but lots of folks told him they liked it when he got back to his familiar haunts in Cambridge.

“I’m walking around town, going into the Legion, stopping by Portside,” Hutchinson said Friday, “and people are hugging me and praising me and thanking me that I stood up for the Eastern Shore and that my message was, ‘We are disenfranchised over here.’”

We’ve heard this song before.

It’s the latest in a long chorus about a Maryland divorce. It grows loudest when the shore or sometimes the three western counties fail to get their way in Annapolis.

Then someone looks at the state’s smashed-crab geography, decides this is tyranny and sings of departure.

“I lived in Baltimore City for 20 years, and now I come over here and I just see how the Western Shore politicians want to tell us how to live over here,” Hutchinson said. “And that’s really disingenuous to me.”

This time, though, it hits differently.

It’s a dangerous moment, one filled with a dread that MAGA faithful and the rest of us can no longer share the same national space.

Into this came last week’s vote on a state constitutional amendment to change the rules for redrawing congressional boundaries.

If voters approve it, Gov. Wes Moore and the Democrats will likely create a map that carves the shore between districts. That would make it harder for a Republican to win, and that’s disenfranchisement in Hutchinson’s mind.

“What I’m seeing — the hurt that people have — I mean, people are viscerally mad and upset at the governor and the General Assembly for what they’re trying to do,” he said.

So, he raised the Mardelva flag. It’s a red-and-white bottony cross — Maryland Confederates carried the symbol onto Civil War battlefields — with a blue crab at its center emblazoned with stars for the departing counties.

The name is an anagram of Delmarva, a region encompassing all nine Maryland counties, Sussex County, Delaware, and the two counties on the Virginia shore, Accomack and Northampton.

Commonly associated with fried chicken — Delmarvelous — and car dealerships, you seldom hear it as a cry for freedom. You will now, at least from Republicans through the November elections.

The Mardelva flag was first raised by the late state Sen. Richard Colburn Jr. in 1998. That was an equally messy fight, one focused on getting the shore to stop dumping its chicken manure into the bay.

“Many Easternshoremen are dissatisfied with Maryland state government,” he said at the time. “I hope you take this very seriously.”

No one did.

Colburn — as a young journalist, I covered the Easton grocery store manager as his career started in Annapolis — was many things. One was being clever enough to imitate his elders.

His attempt mimicked one from four years earlier, when state Sen. Walter Baker proposed ditching Maryland.

It was a symbolic middle finger to Gov. William Donald Schaefer and the General Assembly, who banned assault pistols and large-capacity magazines over Republican objections.

That failed cry for dissolution built on state Sen. Bob Bauman’s 1972 campaign for a 51st state. The Talbot County Republican wanted the people to decide if Maryland was one state or two.

He claimed it was a cultural thing. The real cause was Gov. Marvin Mandel’s redistricting map. It put Bauman and state Sen. Fred Malkus in a cage-match district, and the Dorchester Democrat was ridiculously popular.

Mandel also redrew congressional lines, creating the first district to jump the bay. When Congressman William Mills died in 1973, the Bauman-Malkus fight moved to a special election.

Bauman won, but his career imploded in 1980 when he was arrested in a federal sting targeting gay pickup spots in D.C.

He copied a 1964 attempt by state Sen. Harry T. Phoebus, who lived in the Somerset County hamlet of Oriole. He wanted out after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that legislative districts must contain roughly equal populations.

One of the one-man, one-vote decisions, it broke the disproportionate political power held by the shore’s historic white elite.

“The shore is the finest place in the world, with the finest people in the world,” Phoebus told the Associated Press, “and it shouldn’t be broken up or added to.”

He was repeating an idea ... well, you get it.

Delusions of a 51st state, though, always bump up against reality.

Taxpayers west of the Chesapeake pay for Eastern Shore schools and hospitals. The two-thirds of us living around Washington and Baltimore pay for roads and social services that benefit the rest.

We help pay for buses on Coastal Highway in Ocean City and campaigns to prop up aging downtowns. This year, we paid $3.25 million for bridge and sewer system upgrades in Hutchinson’s Cambridge.

Nobody expects gratitude. That’s what our democracy is — stronger through unity.

Secessionists sing of farewell to fool their constituents, who are forgetful of history and the benefits of belonging. When Hutchinson and others wave the Mardelva banner, they fail to grasp the cross’s true meaning.

Sewn into the Maryland flag along with Union defenders’ black and yellow, it symbolizes bonds renewed and the power of forgiveness. It is a reminder that what unites us has always been greater than what divides.

So I’ll leave you with a final bit of history and song, this one from 1978.

That was the year Gloria Gaynor became immortal, singing about departure.

Go on now, go, walk out the door

Just turn around now, ‘cause you’re not welcome anymore

Sing, Gloria, for those who think it’s politically expedient to threaten something greater than the sum of its parts.

Weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye?

Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?

Oh, no, not I

I will survive.