When ‘freedom’ becomes ‘freedumb’

0
603

Indiana, Arkansas – Kansas had them beat by a

couple of years. Our legislature passed a religious

freedom law in 2013, granting Kansans the right to

discriminate before it became quite so fashionable.

That was quite a year, a stellar legislative session

known for such gems as the “Community Defense

Act,” a laughable attempt to legislate morality by

throttling nudie bars; it withered before too many

people could take it seriously.

We also had Senate Bill 109, which, among other

things, was to ban cities, counties, school districts and

other public agencies from lobbying legislators; the

bill declared it a criminal act to contact or attempt to

contact a legislator without his or her permission.

That was also the session in which we heard from

the great healer, State Rep. Virgil Peck, a Republican

from Tyro, who opined during committee discussion

of a bill affecting immigrants, that one solution might

be to make sport of shooting at them from helicopters;

in an instant, Peck had pared the searing complexities

of immigration law to little more than hunting feral

pigs from the air.

And then, in the wake of the Newtown school mas-
sacre only weeks earlier, our legislature responded

to the wrenching issue of firearms regulation with

the “Second Amendment Protection Act.” House Bill

2199 declared that the federal government had no

power to regulate the gun and ammo business in

Kansas; felony charges awaited any federal agent

attempting to enforce federal gun laws in Kansas.

In two short years we’ve gone from sport-shooting

“illegals,” raiding nudie bars, and arresting federal

agents, to creating a billion-dollar budget deficit and

religious “freedom?” How does this brilliance hap-
pen?

WE elect it, that’s how.

Successive right-wing routs in three state elections

have given license to extreme lawmakers itching to

whack away at the civilities impeding life as they

want it to be; our “liberties” are threatened by laws

demanding equity or fairness, by statutes requiring

open government and full disclosure, by regulations

that protect certain segments of our society from the

cruelties and malfeasance pounding the poor, the sick,

the aged and infirm. Dominance at the polls, they

believed, gave permission to strike back, to permit

citizens and corporations to live as they pleased with-
out the intercession of law.

“Freedom” is the timeworn refrain and, as it turns

out, a catchword for intolerance. In 2011, for example,

we had the “Health Care Freedom Amendment,” a

flimsy and ill-fated poke at the Affordable Care Act, a

plan to amend the state constitution by preventing laws

that offered federal subsidies for health insurance.

The state’s “Preservation of Religious Freedom

Act” allows citizens, essentially, to skirt state or local

law if its enforcement would violate a “sincerely-held

religious tenet or belief.”

The Kansas, Indiana and Arkansas laws are of

course from the same template; the outline and most

specifics of ultra-right legislation flooding statehouses

is not the product of local initiative, but the concoc-
tion of minions at the American Legislative Exchange

Council (ALEC), a right-wing think tank that churns

out conservative dogma in legalese for rubber-stamp-
ing by state legislatures. One state’s free guns law is

pretty much like another’s. The same goes for legis-
lation addressing abortion, voter IDs, immigration,

health care, school finance and other issues.

Republican legislators have turned to ALEC for

most of their stunning, if ill-fated, legislation: A bill,

widely publicized, to prohibit the courts from recom-
mending suitable finance for public schools; House

and Senate bills which re-defined “meeting,” allowing

*

public officials new ways to bypass the state’s open

meetings laws. In 2012, you will recall, the governor

invited select lawmakers for dinner at Cedar Crest to

lobby them about the state budget. The secret meet-
ings were found out. The bills were retaliation for the

press’s being so nosy about officials conducting public

business in private. This year, attacks on the press

were continued, mostly in legislation to help cities and

counties move publication of legal notices from local

newspapers to obscure government web sites. This

was remarkable, if only in the notion that Republicans

thought it a splendid idea to put governments in con-
trol of their own information.

THE FLAP over religious “freedom” embraces far

more than the moth-eaten paranoia that citizens’ Bible

study is somehow threatened by enforcing the speed

limit, or a local ban on shoplifting. In Colorado and

Oregon, for example, the scuffle began when a local

bakery refused to provide a wedding cake for a gay

couple. The courts ruled that religion is no excuse for

discrimination; this only enlivened campaigns for state

laws that set stronger ground rules for discrimination

by religion.

But religious “freedom” serves far more than those

offended by gays, lesbians and trans genders. It

includes parents who may have unusual rites in child-
rearing, inter-sibling marriage, or the number of wives

a husband can own; pharmacists who have a problem

with certain medications and birth control; employ-
ers who object to providing insurance coverage for

employees, or at least that part that includes birth

control; hospitals, under religious ownership, faced

with conflicts in medical ethics; physicians who may

not reveal treatment options for critically ill patients,

if those options include procedures to limit or end the

ability to reproduce.

Does religious “freedom” permit an employer to

reject a job applicant because of the applicant’s reli-
gious or political preference? It’s not a big leap from

that matter to the question of skin color.

Kansas is among 32 states that have enacted, or are

considering, laws that allow discrimination based on

religious “belief.” The legislation is sometimes pared

(See Indiana and Arkansas) to lessen the risk of rejec-
tion, leaving a modified form of discrimination on the

books. After all, there is always time for a more radical

approach after the next election. Skin color, and sexual

or religious preference, can wait.

IN KANSAS we divert attention by providing certain

discriminations in our new election laws. The cover

story, from Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is that the

laws will rid us of phony voters. (We don’t have any,

and never did.) Our new laws are designed to get rid

of unwanted voters, not phony ones. That means no

coloreds at the polls, starting with the Mexicans. Proof

of citizenship for new voters, starting with passport

and birth certificate, is bound to keep the poor, the

disenfranchised, the weak, and elderly, for starters, far

from the ballot box.

“Proof of citizenship” laws are the ethnic voter

cleansers crafted by Kobach to bring purity to our

elections and crackpot candidates into office.

THIS IS how we arrive at disaster, with voting laws

straight from the Jim Crow notebook and a legislature

that insists on a right to hate. Purity at the polls and

religious “freedom” by statute are packages at cross-
purpose, both proclaiming liberty while forcing on

citizens an iron doctrine of exclusionary holiness.

Some freedom, indeed.

*

*

*

– JOHN MARSHALL

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here