After Inciting Election Violence, Bevin Tells Churches to Break Federal Law

Sigh.  Just a year ago, we Kentuckians were basking in the national admiration for how Governor Steve Beshear had created the finest, most effective and most powerful state program for implementing Obamacare.   Kentucky had the biggest drop in percentage of uninsured, and we were even starting to see a drop in the generational poverty that has bedeviled the Comnonwealth for centuries.

Then we elected a new Governor. And it's back to putting duct tape on the "Kentucky" on our license plates and pretending we're from (gag!) Tennessee.

From the AP:

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin urged a group of preachers to embrace political speech at the pulpit by telling them not to fear a federal law that prohibits candidate endorsements by tax-exempt churches.

Bevin called the federal law a "paper tiger" during an address to preachers at the governor's mansion last month. A group called Kentuckians Against Matt Bevin posted video captured by someone at the gathering. Bevin says no church has ever been punished under the law.

The governor calls the law "an absolute paper tiger and there is no reason to fear it, there is no reason to be silent."

The 1954 law says tax-exempt organizations, including churches, may not participate or intervene in any "political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office."

They can do political endorsements all fucking day long, Gov. Lying Coward; they just have to pay taxes for the privilege.  Just like the rest of us.

 

Charlie Pierce, as usual, nails it:

The presidential campaign of Donald Trump is most remarkable for the forces it has unleashed in the country, forces that we all thought long dead or, at the very least, tamed to the extent that polite political society never would indulge them again. For an example of how wrong we all were, and for an example of what 40 years of conservative politics have wrought on the country by believing that they could flirt with those forces without being consumed by them, you need only look down to the Commonwealth of Kentucky, where Governor Matt Bevin is counseling his state's clergy to violate federal law.

SNIP
 

This is exactly the same argument that drug kingpins make to their crews regarding the federal narcotics statutes. But, whatever, it also demonstrates that, having swallowed up the remnants of American apartheid in the 1960s, the Republican party, and the conservative movement that is its only life force, never has given up on nullification, interposition, and the radical Tenther interpretation of the Constitution that lost so badly at Appomattox.

Matt Bevin is a pure product of that.

Kentucky famously never seceded from the Union or joined the Confederacy, although we kept our slaves throughout the war and were PISSED when it turned our we had to give them up just like Missi-fucking-issippi.

Governor Racist Motherfucking is doing his damnedest to get us into the modern Confederacy now.