Free Pass for Freakazoids to Break Every Law With Impunity: Mississippi Follows Kentucky

Kentucky's law didn't get anywhere near the publicity, but trust me, it's just as bad.

Like Kentucky's, Mississippi's law only pretends to protect anti-gay bigots.  It really starts with a pass to brutalize, assault and torture children and doesn't end until it exempts Xian freakazoids from literally every civil and criminal statute. The bibble, after all, justifies everything - theft, rape, assault, burglary, murder, even genocide - as long as your invisible sky wizard friend told you to do it.

From The Nation:

One of the more disconcerting sections of the law is that which discusses people who provide foster-care services. The government, we are told, will no longer be allowed to take action against any foster parent that “guides, instructs, or raises a child…in a manner consistent with a sincerely held religious belief.” If you want to know what that could mean, check out Focus on the Family’s “spare the rod” philosophy of child rearing. On its website, the religious-right advocacy group offers handy tips on “the Biblical Approach to Spanking.”

SNIP

The AFA and its allies on the religious right want to carve out a sphere in American public life where religion—their religion—trumps the law. It’s a breathtakingly radical ambition. And it upends the principles on which our constitutional democracy is based.

None other than the late Antonin Scalia put his finger on the problem. To make an individual’s obedience to the law “contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs” amounts to “permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself,’” he said. It “contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.” Scalia made these comments in his 1990 majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. In that case, the majority ruled that the state of Oregon could deny unemployment benefits to a pair of individuals who violated a state ban on the use of peyote, even though their use of the drug was part of a religious ritual. It was the overreaction to that verdict—on both the left and the right—that produced the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. Though intended only to ensure that laws did not needlessly burden the religious liberty of individuals, the RFRA sparked a wave of unintended consequences. It effectively planted the demon seeds of the current crop of “religious liberty” bills.

SNIP

To speak frankly, the law was designed to advance the claims of conservative Christians, and it never would have become law otherwise.  If you think that every religion will find as much liberty in the laws of Mississippi, then I have as Satanic temple to sell you.

And yes, children, these laws are indeed the steep downhill path directly to Dominionism and theocratic control of the nation by people who think that even married, heterosexual, missionary-position, penis-in-vagina sex is a crime if it is in any way pleasurable (as former Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum made crystal clear many times in public.)

Somebody ask Matt Bevin if he finds sex pleasurable.  If he answers yes, BURN HIM.