Sunday, January 27, 2019

Giant Step Toward Gilead

I've been saying it for years:  These "religious freedom" laws are nothing but a massive power grab by freakazoids.

And there's no place to hide, because the U.S. Supreme Court has just made xian mythology the law the of the land.

The 5–4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby prompted a now-famous dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who condemned the court’s decision to use RFRA, a law originally intended to protect religious minorities, to legalize discrimination. “No tradition,” Ginsburg noted, “and no prior decision under RFRA, allows a religion-based exemption when the accommodation would be harmful to others.” Through Hobby Lobby, the court had transformed RFRA from a shield into a sword, creating a license to discriminate with no clear limitations.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration proved Ginsburg right. In a decision of startling breadth, the Department of Health and Human Services declared that, under RFRA, a federally funded foster care agency in South Carolina has a right to discriminate against non-Christians, closing its doors to would-be parents of different faiths. As Ginsburg predicted, the administration’s interpretation of the law has no limiting principle: It all but announced that taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies may now engage in flagrant discrimination without consequence, so long as they state a religious rationale for their actions. The grim future that Ginsburg foresaw in Hobby Lobby has arrived.
Need proof?  Here are the freakazoids demanding tens of millions of Kentucky tax dollars to indoctrinate children with their evil mythology

With several hundred students from private schools looking on in the cold Thursday morning outside the state Capitol, several public officials touted a proposal to offer tax deductions to provide school scholarships.

The event was a rally at the Capitol to celebrate school choice and National School Choice Week.
House Majority Leader John “Bam” Carney, R-Campbellsville, told the crowd that he will file a bill in early February that would grant a generous tax credit to those who donate money for student financial aid at private schools.
Yeah, no.  "School Choice" does not mean you get to steal money from public education.  "School Choice" does not mean you get tax dollars because your invisible sky wizard wants it.
SNIP

Vandiver said the bill is expected to generate $25 million to help about 7,000 families.
The tax credit would amount to up to 95 percent of the contribution. “You donate $10,000, you get $9,500 credit,” he said.

SNIP

The measure has never gotten out of a legislative chamber’s committee, “but we are optimistic this year,” he said. He acknowledged that the revenue bill would have to receive at least 60 percent of the vote, instead of a majority in each chamber, to pass since lawmakers are not scheduled to pass a two-year state budget this year.

Stephanie Winkler, president of the Kentucky Education Association, said her group has “a strong belief that school choice already exists in Kentucky.”

“Our organization fights hard for for the commonwealth’s constitutionally-mandated system of common schools that allow any child, no matter their abilities, to have the right to a high quality education,” Winkler said. “The local public schools of these ‘school choice’ activists would benefit greatly from the energy and financial support they give to this cause.”
No biggie, you say?  It is within the memory of people still alive when xians exercising their "religious freedom" punished homosexuality by firing you from your job, evicting you from your home and denying you civil rights.

It is within the memory of people still alive when xians exercising their "religious freedom" got away with lynching black people for the crime of getting uppity, because the bibble tells them so.

It is within the memory of people still alive when xians exercised their "religious freedom" to imprison women in abusive marriages, to beat children to death for disobedience, to force women to give birth annually until they died.

Every tyrant in history has used this kind of "religious freedom" to justify every form of oppression, torture and genocide.

Forget the Russians.  "Religious freedom" is where Democracy dies.

1 comment:

Ten Bears said...

Think Progress has an interesting story up connecting home schooling, etc. to Russian disinformation. Interesting, unsurprising, worthy of a look.