I’m getting really tired of ignorant bigots and haters in this country justifying their beliefs and feelings towards their fellow man as “religious freedom.” This past week’s drama in Arizona, which culminated with Governor Jan Brewer’s veto of a two page anti-gay discrimination bill, is the latest in a string of anti-people bills, drawn up on state levels by gun toting, right wing Christian groups.
Make no mistake, Governor Brewer, does not deserve any credit for vetoing the anti-gay bill. Mrs. Brewer is nothing more than an opportunistic bigot who has pretended the past few days to have to “study” her two page bill of discrimination, disguised as “religious freedom.” Thanks for doing the obvious, Governor, but awarding you with doing the right thing is the equivalent of giving me a medal for not kicking a homeless man in the balls, after pretending it was a moral and legal struggle to reach that decision. Governor Brewer is a pathetic piece of shit, and she milked this supposed tough decision for all the media it was worth.
The proposed law would have given business owners the right to refuse to do business with people whom their religion viewed as sinners: specifically, the law was inspired by a florist who didn’t want to do business with a gay couple getting married. In this supposedly civilized and advanced country that we live in, the laws governing business and employment have protections built in to prevent people from being discriminated against because of race, gender, and religion. So a restaurant can’t refuse to serve a mixed race couple. Black people don’t have to sit at the back of the bus. You can’t refuse to hire someone because they’re a Jew, a Scientologist, an atheist, or a woman. These common sense, basic laws have not always been met with open arms. Because of a deeply segregated South, we had to have federal Civil RIghts laws, and we have federal agencies that oversee the enforcement of fair labor practice.
Somehow though, enough right wing Christian bigots still hold enough sway in pockets of the country to actually get elected officials to sponsor unconstitutional bills that discriminate against the gay community. Although there hasn’t yet been the federal legislative equivalent of the Civil Rights Act to address specifically the rights of sexual orientation, the principles that protect us from discrimination based on race, religion and gender are already deeply ingrained in our laws. The number of states who have legalized gay marriage (17 and rising) reflect society’s emerging values and consciousness regarding same sex couples, and national polls show a majority of Americans now supporting gay marriage. The tide has turned so much in the past decade, that a sitting U.S. President has now been able to say he favors legalizing gay marriage. Candidate Obama, along with Candidate Kerry, were only comfortable supporting “Civil Unions” a few years ago. President Obama now says his views have “evolved” which really means that our society has evolved to the point where we can actually call it marriage instead of just a civil union, without too much backlash. Federal courts have increasingly ruled against states that have attempted to ban gay marriage as well, although the partisan Supreme Court has ducked the final decision to call it a constitutional right for same sex couples to marry.
With gays now allowed to serve openly in the military, and with mainstream society and entertainment embracing the gay and lesbian community with open arms, the homophobic minority is pushing back with every tactic it can dream up, from the religious groups in Utah that poured money into a California ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in the state, to states attempting to amend their constitutions to specifically ban it. As with Arizona’s newest attempt to allow businesses to refuse service to gays, it is usually done with the ironic and inappropriate guise of “religious freedom.”
These hate mongering idiots have a warped sense of freedom; not understanding that their freedom ends when it intrudes or suppresses the freedom of another, they constantly seek to find legal ways to institutionalize their stone throwing, judgmental beliefs. Not too long back, a jackass President George W. Bush gave lip service to the religious right with an empty threat of calling for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman. His genius reasoning for this stunning display of a U.S. President’s ignorance and dislike of gays? Because all of the world’s major religions recognized it as between a man and a woman. So the former leader and brainiac President Dipshit felt justified because of religious consensus.
The good and proper, ugly bitch of a governor, Jan Brewer, is an asshole overseeing a state that appears to have a lot of good people, and a small but unfortunate majority of tea bagging crazies. She signed into law the anti-immigration bill in Arizona in 2010 that caused so much controversy and the Obama administration to file a lawsuit against them to overturn it. It’s the law that allowed the police to ask for your papers or detain you if they had “reasonable” suspicion that you were an illegal immigrant. In other words, it attempted to institutionalize and legalize racial profiling all the time for any person not Mitt Romney white. What is happening now is an extension of that type of discrimination, this time inspired by their so-called good Christian folk’s hate or fear of gay people. The new law would have also allowed and lead to of course, discrimination against races – say a mixed couple that the Klan claims9 goes against the Bible – as well as, say a Muslim with a Turbine on his head. The governor knows this full well, as do three of the state senate republicans who have now expressed public remorse for their yes vote. Some of them are acting as if they were duped, which is bullshit, they’re not stupid, but to their credit, they did admit their fault publicly and thankfully before it was too late. Governor Brewer needed political cover to do the right thing. Predictably, Brewer vetoed the bill, but not before feigning it as a difficult decision. Her veto was predicable, because the really ‘important people,’ the business class and heavyweights like Senator Sore Loser, John McCain, were putting the pressure on, as were a really large mobilized public opposition.
In 2009, about a dozen good Arizona folks attended a public protest outside their convention center in Phoenix where President Obama was giving a speech, openly wearing and displaying their firearms, apparently exercising their “freedom.” The picture at the top of this blog is of one of the protesters sporting his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Arizona law allows this “freedom,” and incredulously, gun nuts saw nothing wrong with heavily armed political protesters in public. What is it about Arizona and other fanatical communities who apparently feel safer when their citizens walk around openly displaying their murder tools, even at a public protest where the propensity for confrontation is high?
It reminds me of the stupid sons-of-bitches in Murfreesboro, TN, who made national news back in 2012, for opposing the building a new Islamic Center and Mosque by a Muslim group that had been in the city for years. I saw footage of some dumbass redneck at a protest there challenging a college student who was supporting the Mosque, saying “do you believe in Sharia Law? Do you want Sharia Law here?” The funny thing is, these gun toting religious zealots have a good deal more in common with the Taliban than they do with true lovers of American freedom and liberty. Fearing a religion based law such as Sharia Law, they attempt to impose their own brand of religious laws, based on their fearful and judgmental interpretation of Christianity. Like the Taliban, they feel better when their beliefs are backed up with guns. Freedom, to these tea baggers, means freedom for them to tell everyone else how to live their life, and freedom to discriminate in the business world and public against anyone of a different religion, race, or sexual orientation.
Former Vice President and shoot-a-friend-in-the-face, profit from war liar, Dick Cheney, famously said that we were “in the last throes of the insurgency” in Iraq, when we were clearly in the beginning. Let’s hope that these bad jokes of laws of discrimination, like the one we just saw fail in Arizona, are the last throes of the insurgency of the American Taliban, the tea bagger, Christian conservatives, who are accepting a more inclusive, free American society, kicking and screaming, with an assault rifle strapped on their backs.