Charles P. Pierce: They're Banging Those Bibles Loudly Across This Great Nation

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a56033/missouri-abortion-kentucky-creationism/


They're Banging Those Bibles Loudly Across This Great Nation

Missouri, Kentucky, and North Carolina feel the power of Christ compelling them.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jun 29, 2017

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where storm clouds are ragin' all around your door.

It's a big week for the banging of the Bible. We begin in Missouri, where the Good Christian Folks in the state legislature are tired of the ladies with their reproductive rights mocking the Lord.

Feministing has the 411:


Yesterday, the Missouri House voted to pass SB 5, a bill imposing several highly burdensome and even more unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers; for example, the bill would require abortion providers to send fetal tissue samples to a pathologist within five days. While supporters of targeted restrictions of abortion providers (aka TRAP laws) claim they're supporting women's health, regulations like these often serve no medical purpose whatsoever. In reality, anti-choice legislators use them as a pretext to impose costs and red tape on abortion clinics, forcing them to close. But SB 5 has another insidious purpose: to overturn a St. Louis ordinance that bans employers and landlords from discriminating against people on the basis of their reproductive health decisions. In other words, if SB 5 is passed, you could be evicted in the state of Missouri for having an abortion, using birth control, or becoming pregnant while unmarried. This extremely common-sense city ordinance, which St. Louis passed this spring, was apparently Too Far for Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, who took to the press to complain about "radical politicians" making "St. Louis an abortion sanctuary city."


Local politicians, and some activists, are pushing back against the notion that this new measure would allow general discrimination based on a landlord's skeevy thoughts. However, that line from Governor Greitens is quite the thing. "An abortion sanctuary city." It's wingnut conflation at its finest! And notice that the governor is using "sanctuary city" to describe a place where perfectly legal medical procedures are done in a perfectly legal manner. These people are human doomsday machines.

Abortion is not (yet) illegal in all cases, but the point of people like Greitens is to act as though it is and hope that enough people don't notice that you're essentially eliminating the right to privacy for 51 percent of the population.

Meanwhile, a few degrees east in Kentucky, there's some serious Jesusing going on in the public schools, where that kind of thing is not supposed to happen. From NBC News:


"Right now the language of the bill is very vague and the Kentucky Department of Education has not yet put together a curriculum," Amber Duke of the Kentucky ACLU said Wednesday. "The concern, though, is that you could have a curriculum that is constitutional and could be delivered in a manner that is not constitutional." The Bible class as envisioned by HB 128 is a course solely "on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament." The purpose is to "provide to students knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives that are prerequisites to understanding contemporary society and culture." It is also an elective, not a required course. "They will not be teaching about the Koran or the sacred texts of other religions," said Duke. "That would be more of a comparative religions class. This is a Bible literacy class."


There's no way this passes constitutional muster unless the new majority on the Supreme Court goes full theocrat. It's the literary equivalent of intelligent design, which also came cloaked in the camouflage of disinterested scholarship. But it's good that the state legislature of Kentucky has its eye on the ball as regards what's really important.

more...

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a56033/missouri-abortion-kentucky-creationism/

[MurrayDelph]

1. Banging them

is so much easier than opening, reading, learning, and living them.

[longship]

2. Charles Pierce is always high value.

R&