The Stupid Price of Freedom

Via Crooks and Liars, Gin and Tacos nails it:

This is the problem in a nutshell. "The price of freedom." It doesn't matter how many people die. The rights of every impotent old white guy who needs to hoard guns in order to Feel Like a Man are more important than human life. The rights of suburban commandos to stock up on guns to fend off the Young Black Bucks or the Thugs or whatever euphemism is currently in fashion are more important than human life. The rights of some guy to indulge his hobby (Can I make chemical weapons in my basement and call it a "hobby" as long as I don't use them to kill anyone?) are more important than your right to leave the house and be reasonably certain that you're not going to get shot at random.

Mass shootings are to the modern US what human sacrifices were to some societies, but replace the sun with 2nd Amendment and the bountiful harvest with Freedom. If 58 people have to die so that we may enjoy the freedom to own 35 guns – the killer had at least that many – that is a sacrifice white America is prepared to make. YOU are a sacrifice they are prepared to make. You don't matter. Nothing matters. All that matters is Larry Limpdick's need to feel tough or manly or important or strong or ready for the Race War he and everyone else in the comments section of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is certain is coming because BLM or campus libtards or something.

We have so thoroughly normalized a completely demented, paranoid, conspiratorial, afactual right-wing worldview that a man can buy 35 guns and not only are there no meaningful obstacles to doing so but the fact isn't even considered especially noteworthy or out of the ordinary. The very fact that we live in a society where a person can announce that they own 10 or 25 or 50 or 100 guns and the overwhelming, immediate response is not "What in the living fuck is wrong with you?" followed by a psych evaluation is the definitive proof that this will keep happening over and over and over again.

It's not merely acceptable, it's normal. And it's not merely normal, it's a sign of patriotism and masculinity. You don't like guns? What's wrong with you? You queer or vegan or somethin'? Don't you love your country?

This will never stop in a society that thinks there is nothing abnormal about fetishizing and stockpiling something that has no purpose – "fun" doesn't count here, sorry – other than to kill.

The guy who did this is not scary because he is insane or mysterious. He is scary because he is normal. All of us know probably a half-dozen of this guy. Because we live in a society that tells itself that it's perfectly normal for a person to stockpile enough weapons to outfit a brigade of paratroopers. Despite the insistence that this is a perfectly normal and healthy thing for a human being to do, it is not. It is fucked up. And until we drop the "mental health" canard and admit to ourselves that the problem is we have allowed a deeply violent, paranoid, and twisted worldview to become so ordinary as to attract little notice, these sacrifices will continue on a more or less regular schedule.

Keep Fighting and Laughing

From the great and good Doc Zoom at Wonkette:

Only Gun Nuts Have Freedom

When someone carrying a semi-automatic rifle saunters into the restaurant where you're eating, or the office where you're working, do you feel more or less free?

Digby: 

All of this is allegedly being done to protect our freedoms. But it’s only the “freedom” of the person wearing a firearm that matters. Those parents who want their kids to feel safe in a public park aren’t free to tell a man waving a gun around to leave them alone, are they? Patrons and employees of Starbucks aren’t free to express their opinion of open carry laws when one of these demonstrations are taking place in the store. Those Jack in the Box employees aren’t free to refuse service to armed customers. Sure, they are all theoretically free to do those things. It’s their constitutional right just like it’s the constitutional right of these people to carry a gun. But in the real world, sane people do not confront armed men and women. They don’t argue with them over politics. They certainly do not put their kids in harm’s way in order to make a point. So when it comes right down to it, when you are in the presence of one of these armed citizens, you don’t really have any rights at all.  

You can see why they think that’s freedom. It is. For them. The rest of us just have to be very polite, keep our voices down and back away very slowly, saying, “Yes sir, whatever you say, sir,” and let them have their way.

But only if they're white. Blacks and browns get the SWAT team dropped on their ass.

And yes, that's terrorism.

QOTD: Refugees

If America is not the beacon of freedom to every oppressed person on earth, then it is nothing at all.

 

Paul Campos at LGM:

... the proper response to calls for an end to accepting Syrian refugees is to point out that such a policy is grotesquely inhumane, as it buys Americans an infinitesimal decrease in the already infinitesimal risk that we as individuals will be victimized by jihadist terrorism, at the cost of failing to do anything to ameliorate the vast suffering of the actual victims of ISIS, 99.99% of whom are in Syria and Iraq.

Stand on Our Own Two Feet

Divine Irony:

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world— its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

Bertrand Russell. 1927

(Title: Why I am not a Christian)

• ↵ Reblogged from empiricaldaily

The Freedom Without Which There Is None

Molly Ivins wrote that the history of the United States is the effort to extend the promise of the Declaration of Independence - that we are all created equal - to everyone the rich, white, privileged Founders left out. Black people and brown people and female people and LGBT people and non-christian people.

It's a fight that's never really done.  Because the rich, white, privileged men in every generation are constantly finding new ways to not just prevent freedom from being extended to those who are left out, but to take freedom away from those who just recently won it.

Thus, once female people got the right to vote and the right to work (though not for equal pay) and the right to support themselves financially, the privileged ones took away the very right to a physical body.

282 forced-birth laws since 2010; 51 just in the last six months.

Digby:

Well since we're celebrating "liberty" this week-end and all, here's a little reprise of something I've posted before by my friend Debra Cooper about why this matters:

For women ALL Roads to freedom and equality - economic equality and most particularly the ability to avoid poverty START with control of their bodies. If they can't control how they get pregnant and when they will have a child then poverty is the result.

There is theory about something called the Prime Mover - the first action or the first cause. Well for women it IS reproductive rights. It precedes everything. It really is simple. Without the ability to control your own body then you are a slave to everything else.

Frankly sexism, the need to control women's lives by controlling their bodies and the things that arise from it, are endemic to any social structure. It is ever enduring and even when it seems to be quashed it returns in another form. That is the story in the modern era of women's rights. One step forward after a long struggle - suffrage and then a step back. (And no way do I say that women are not complicit in their own subjugation. We are.)

In the epilogue to The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, he makes a point of saying that the loss of power and control is what the elite and the reactionary fear the most. More than a specific loss itself, they fear the rising volcano of submerged anger and power. And for them it's most acutely felt as a compulsion for control in the "intimate" arena. That is the most vexing and disturbing of all.

It is why they want to control women. And controlling their reproductive lives is the surefire way to control them.

It is why abortion rights are absolutely central to every other kind of freedom.

 Abortion. On. Demand. No questions, no waiting, no charge.  No abortion, no freedom.

Free Yourself From Religion on Religious Freedom Day

Because freedom from religion is the freedom from which all others grow.

Divine Irony:

Free!

ummgumma.co:


(via artoftheunbeliever)

No Masters

ummagumma.co:

Coward

ummagumma.co:

Let's All Check the Definition of "Public Park" Again

Because Lexington, Kentucky, seems to think the definition is "tax-payer funded space that rich people decide who gets to enjoy."

Beth Musgrave at the Herald:

In coming months, people who deal drugs, harass people or commit other serious crimes in Lexington's 105 city parks could be banned from the properties.

The Urban County Council voted 14-0 Thursday to approve a new parks department policy.

The council was the latest body to sign off on the policy, developed by a task force appointed in response to multiple citizens' concerns about safety in the city's green spaces. 

 General Services commissioner Geoff Reed said the banning policy was a effort to help police maintain safety in parks. Under the policy, someone who is banned from a park and then returns may be arrested for trespassing. Currently, if someone commits a particularly dangerous crime in a park — such as assault or selling drugs — there is no way for the city to keep the person out, Reed said.

Really? The police cannot arrest somebody for assault or selling drugs? Oh, wait, he means the police cannot arrest somebody who may have committed a crime in the past but who is not committing a crime in the present.

In a free, Democratic society, there is no such crime as "trespassing" on public property. Public property is, you know, public.

If people are committing actual crimes in that public space, then it is the job of the police to obtain probable cause - you know, like evidence - and then arrest the people committing crimes. It is manifestly not the job of the police to arrest people they or the powers that be don't care to share park space with.

Saving People

ummagumma.co:

(Source: atheistjack)

Liberty From Attack

ummagumma.co

Freedom to Die

From the way freakazoids fight to prevent people from dying peacefully, painlessly and by choice, you'd think they don't really believe all that heaven bullshit.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

Isn't it funny how when there's an actual advance in human freedom, conservatives oppose it?

In a decision sure to cause debate, a New Mexico judge has ruled that terminally ill, mentally competent patients have the right to get a doctor to end their lives.

The landmark decision Monday by New Mexico Second Judicial District Judge Nan Nash came after a two-day trial and could make New Mexico the fifth state to allow doctors to prescribe fatal prescriptions to terminal patients 

The ACLU and Compassion & Choices, an end-of-life choice advocacy group, filed the lawsuit on behalf of two New Mexico doctors and cancer patient Aja Riggs.

The judge was asked to consider whether the doctors should be allowed to write prescriptions for a terminally ill cancer patient who wanted to use drugs to end her life.

"This Court cannot envision a right more fundamental, more private or more integral to the liberty, safety and happiness of a New Mexican than the right of a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying," the judge wrote. "If decisions made in the shadow of one's imminent death regarding how they and their loved ones will face that death are not fundamental and at the core of these constitutional guarantees, than what decisions are?"

Forcing people to spend their final weeks in unwanted agony is the very opposite of compassion or freedom. But then, conservatives don't actually care about freedom. They care about being able to make the most money possible at the expense of everyone else, especially society's "others." Since most people consider that the essence of evil, they redefine that goal as "freedom."

But the rest of us have a different idea of freedom in mind.

Permanent, Ubiquitous Surveillance Is Not Security

The battle against fascism never ends, because fascism is death to democracy.

Digby:

... this notion that we must keep the data forever just in case the government might want to use it in the future is the fundamental problem. I see no good reason why anyone should keep all this information forever, whether it be private companies or the government, simply because it might be useful to law enforcement. Just as we are not required to give the government every piece of paper we've ever sent or received (or the post office is not required to copy every piece of mail that passes through it's hands and "hold" it) just in case law enforcement might want to use it some day, neither should we have to give the government our digital correspondence "just in case."

I'm sure this particular group of very nice FBI and NSA employees would never do anything untoward with all that information they are storing. They sound like wonderful people with only our best interests at heart. But I'm afraid I just don't have the same faith in everyone. In fact, having watched our own government lose its collective mind after 9/11 and invade countries that didn't attack us, torture and imprison innocent people and build prison camps where the people detained are facing a kafkaesque nightmare because they allegedly can't be tried and can't be freed, you'll have to excuse me if I don't have a whole lot of faith that some future crisis won't "require" some future Dick Cheney to use some of that information they've been hoarding in ways they promise us they'll never use it today.

The party line here is that these listeners have convinced themselves that they must do all this lest some terrorist slips through their fingers. At yet, we have mass shootings every week in this country and the government follows constitutional requirements based upon the principle that there are dangers of living in a free society and we all must be willing to take the good with the bad. So I'm not convinced that it's a surfeit of concern for American lives that's driving this. And I'm very suspicious about just what is.

So no, they shouldn't be allowed to run a dragnet on everyone in the world and keep the information stored in some vault just in case they want to search through someone's data in the future. There's nothing different about that than the old practice of keeping dossiers on every citizen and telling them they have nothing to worry about as long as they are model citizens and do nothing the government doesn't think they should be doing. I think we know what to call a society like that.

this notion that we must keep the data forever just in case the government might want to use it in the future is the fundamental problem. I see no good reason why anyone should keep all this information forever, whether it be private companies or the government, simply because it might be useful to law enforcement. Just as we are not required to give the government every piece of paper we've ever sent or received (or the post office is not required to copy every piece of mail that passes through it's hands and "hold" it) just in case law enforcement might want to use it some day, neither should we have to give the government our digital correspondence "just in case."

I'm sure this particular group of very nice FBI and NSA employees would never do anything untoward with all that information they are storing. They sound like wonderful people with only our best interests at heart. But I'm afraid I just don't have the same faith in everyone. In fact, having watched our own government lose its collective mind after 9/11 and invade countries that didn't attack us, torture and imprison innocent people and build prison camps where the people detained are facing a kafkaesque nightmare because they allegedly can't be tried and can't be freed, you'll have to excuse me if I don't have a whole lot of faith that some future crisis won't "require" some future Dick Cheney to use some of that information they've been hoarding in ways they promise us they'll never use it today.

The party line here is that these listeners have convinced themselves that they must do all this lest some terrorist slips through their fingers. At yet, we have mass shootings every week in this country and the government follows constitutional requirements based upon the principle that there are dangers of living in a free society and we all must be willing to take the good with the bad. So I'm not convinced that it's a surfeit of concern for American lives that's driving this. And I'm very suspicious about just what is.

So no, they shouldn't be allowed to run a dragnet on everyone in the world and keep the information stored in some vault just in case they want to search through someone's data in the future. There's nothing different about that than the old practice of keeping dossiers on every citizen and telling them they have nothing to worry about as long as they are model citizens and do nothing the government doesn't think they should be doing. I think we know what to call a society like that..

Black Helicopters Won't Take Our Freedom, But Corporate Control Will

Firedoglake:

“President Obama reiterated on Tuesday his desire to complete an Asia-Pacific trade deal this year, arguing that it will not only boost economic growth but shore up global security.”

The Trans Pacific Partnership has nothing to do with trade and even less to do with economic growth. And the only entities that will feel more secure are the giant corporations who will own us lock, stock, barrel and meaningless Constitution.

Jim Hightower:

The nullification of our people's right to direct expenditures of our own tax dollars is but one of the horror stories being quietly packed into a political-and-economic bombshell benignly labeled TPP --the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

SNIP

This time we really must pay attention, because TPP is not just another trade deal. First, it is massive and open-ended. It would hitch us immediately to 11 Pacific Rim nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), and its door would remain wide open to lure China, Indonesia, Russia, and other nations to come in. Second, note that many of those countries already have trade agreements with the US. Hence, THIS AMAZING FACT: TPP is a "trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!

The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish "partnership" for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new "rights" and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments... and to us. Here are a few of TPP's provisos that would make our daily lives riskier, poorer, and less free:

 Read the whole incredible thing.

Meanwhile, we're getting a taste of corporatocracy wherever our elected officials sell off public assets.

Rick Perlstein at The Nation:

And if the city lowered the parking meter rates, the highest in the country? Same problem: that would trigger the “reserve power action” clause too. Chicago, meet your new City Council: the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi.

And that’s just wrong—illegal, says Geoghegan: “You can’t bargain away—you can’t sell off—the police power of the city.”

He thundered: “This is privatization gone nuts. It’s almost a comical form of privatization—privatization at its very, very most toxic. Because here, what is being sold off is not really a city asset. It’s not really like Midway Airport”—a deal that might be just around the corner, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. “It’s not like a tollway”—the Chicago Skyway was leased for ninety-nine years to an Australian concern for quick cash in 2005 (“With that kind of money to be made,” The Washington Post said, “Americans are lining up to try their luck at Wall Street’s hottest new game—“investing in infrastructure.”) No, at least in those cases it was just property they were selling off. Here, “they’re selling off the governmental powers of a city. And that’s what’s so disturbing about this. And getting those back is insanely expensive. And the City said, in its brief in the court below, that if the deal were undone they would owe all this money and they can’t pay it back.”

SNIP

As Tom Tresser of Chicago’s CivicLab impressed upon me, they’re coming after your meters—and bridges, and billboards, and who knows what other public assets—next. “We have a massive global movement of capital which, because they’ve burned their own fucking houses down through their own greed, don’t have the gilt returns that they’re used to receiving…. So the new guaranteed annual returns that big business and big capital are looking for is our assets.”

And that’s about all of us.

The AFL-CIO is fighting back.

Bad for labor, the environment, internet freedom, and the democratic process – while good for parasitic corporations and Wall Street. If TPP passes those making the decisions that shape your life will be out of reach and not subject to any democratically accountable authority. Like the feudalism of old, there will be an untouchable elite whose choices dictate the architecture of the world – independent and oblivious to the needs of the 99%.

 

Teaching Brainless Obedience

It works. Much more easily and more effectively than you think it does.

Digby:

Fergawdsakes. Just how many squads of armed Robocops running around rousting citizens for no good reason does this land of the free need?:

As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds.

The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States.

“The T.S.A., huh,” said Donald Neubauer of Greenville, Ohio, as he walked past the squad. “I thought they were just at the airports.”

With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

T.S.A. and local law enforcement officials say the teams are a critical component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, but some members of Congress, auditors at the Department of Homeland Security and civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. The teams are also raising hackles among passengers who call them unnecessary and intrusive.

SNIP

They even admit that this is mostly Security Theater. And that sounds so sweetly benign, doesn't it? But the effect of this isn't, in the end, to make little old ladies feel safer by confiscating the 8oz bottle of Geritol in their handbags. It's to train citizens to submit to authorities without probable cause. That's exactly what's happened in airports, after all. Americans are so docile about it that people in other countries are astonished to see us taking off our shoes and otherwise disrobing at airport security without even being told. (They don't have to.)

If what you desire is to make the Bill of Rights an anachronism, this is the sort of thing that works over time to make people wonder why they ever cared that they had any privacy or right to demand that authorities have good reason to stop and search them. Arguments against it already have the tone of something from another era:

“The problem with T.S.A. stopping and searching people in public places outside the airport is that there are no real legal standards, or probable cause,” said Khaliah Barnes, administrative law counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “It’s something that is easily abused because the reason that they are conducting the stops is shrouded in secrecy.”

T.S.A. officials respond that the random searches are “special needs” or “administrative searches” that are exempt from probable cause because they further the government’s need to prevent terrorist attacks.

That mentality says that the War on Terror means anything goes. Forever. And it's much more convenient than the communist threat ever was because they could actually declare the cold war over at some point. This one will never end. How could it? It's not a war against a state or even against certain people, it's a war against asymmetric war. That's not going anywhere.

And anyway, so far it hasn't really been about terrorism at all. Surprise:

In 2011, the VIPR teams were criticized for screening and patting down people after they got off an Amtrak train in Savannah, Ga. As a result, the Amtrak police chief briefly banned the teams from the railroad’s property, saying the searches were illegal.

In April 2012, during a joint operation with the Houston police and the local transit police, people boarding and leaving city buses complained that T.S.A. officers were stopping them and searching their bags. (Local law enforcement denied that the bags were searched.)

The operation resulted in several arrests by the local transit police, mostly for passengers with warrants for prostitution and minor drug possession. Afterward, dozens of angry residents packed a public meeting with Houston transit officials to object to what they saw as an unnecessary intrusion by the T.S.A.

“It was an incredible waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Robert Fickman, a local defense lawyer who attended the meeting. “Did we need to have T.S.A. in here for a couple of minor busts?”

Smell that freedom people!

Also too: they called it "VIPR" like some cheesy cop show from 1976. Doesn't that say it all?

The First Memorial Day

I wonder why we didn't learn about this in school. 

 

No, I don't.

Erik Loomis:

As we close another Decoration Day, we have David Blight with typically excellent stories about Civil War memory:

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.

The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.

The true patriots indeed, sadly forgotten about until recently because the nation decided to celebrate herrenvolk democracy in order to cover up the racial tensions that led to 750,000 dead Americans as a result of the South committing treason to defend slavery.

The Corporate Surveillance State of America

The next time you hear the Tribble-Toupeed one babbling about Big Gubmint taking away our FREEDUMBS, think about who is really making you feel less free every day.

Charles Pierce:

We are less free in every aspect of our lives than we once were, and the "government" is only a very small part of that process. Our children are less free in their schools; drug-testing without cause has been allowed by the Supreme Court, and Tinker v. Des Moines is only an echo of itself. The workplace is, in many places, as illustrated by the Times story, little more than a surveillance state encompassing almost the entire life of the average employee.

Dominionism Gets Big Boost from Kentucky Legislature

UPDATE:  Joe Sonka on how this bill will gut every local Fairness Ordinance in the Commonwealth.

Because this is not about respecting the beliefs of muslims or buddhists or animists.  This is about forcing everyone to suffer under the Bronze-Age-mythological dictates of xianist freakazoids.

Beth Musgrave at the Herald:

A bill that would strengthen people's ability to ignore Kentucky regulations or laws that violate their religious beliefs is now headed to the Republican-controlled Senate.

On Friday, House Bill 279 passed the Democrat-controlled House, 82-7, with 11 members not voting on the bill.

Rep. Bob Damron, D-Nicholasville, the sponsor of HB 279, said the measure would further clarify religious freedoms in state law. Thirteen other states have similar laws. The federal government enacted a religious-freedom bill in 1993.

Damron said the bill was needed because of recent state and U.S. Supreme Court cases that have changed the way religious freedom is interpreted.

But several Democratic House members spoke Friday in opposition to the measure during debate on the House floor, saying it was being pushed by the Catholic Church so it would not have to comply with any state or federal laws that direct health plans to provide birth control or other contraceptives to women.

No, Beth, this is not about "strengthen(ing) people's ability to ignore Kentucky regulations or laws that violate their religious beliefs." This is about allowing one freakazoid sect to defy the rule of law.

Birth control ain't the half of it. Fundamentalist pharmacists will refuse to fill prescriptions they don't like, half-wit clerks will refuse to sell condoms to single women, employers will fire women they think are having sex outside of marriage.

And that's just the start. The bible the freakazoids claim is literal divine law demands that parents kill their disobedient children, husbands stone their disobedient wives and everyone murder homosexuals.  Wave bye-bye to child protection laws, domestic violence laws, hate-crime laws.

There isn't a single law or regulation protecting the health, safety, freedom and civil rights of American citizens that freakazoids can't find a biblical excuse to ignore.

The only "religious freedom" the freakazoids want is the kind practiced in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Afghanistan. And this bill will give it to them.

The state senate will pass this motherfucker in record time.  Everybody who thinks Governor Cowardly Waste of Oxygen will veto it, stand on your head.