The separation of church and state protects the church from the state at least as much as the state from the church. Christians should fear a "Christian" state.
Note that you can't see the black hole in this image (an optical HST image). The black hole was identified through microlensing of the object labeled "source", followed by subsequent astrometric observations. The black hole is the lens, which is not seen in these images because it's too faint.
In the best case, the detection is at the 2.4 sigma confidence level (less than the usual 3 for reasonable confidence and will below the 5 required for strong confidence), and if previously suspected issues with the instrument are true, the detection could disappear completely.
I do not have a strong confidence in this result. (But at least they didn't publish it in Nature, in which case you would absolutely know it's wrong...)
If you are located at the same latitude, you will see the same stars but at different times (like time zones). But if the separation has a north-south component, you will be able to see different stars from each other, because the stars hidden over the horizon to the north and south won't rotate into view because the rotation is east-west.
I'm sorry. I won't try to justify or condemn you, as I'm sure you've done that plenty yourself. What an awful world we live in.
Have you managed to deal with this? Do you have someone to talk to?