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.

When State Governments Go Bad

Outlawing abortion.  Criminalizing peeing in public restrooms. Restricting religious freedom to freakazoid bigots.

Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo:

Perhaps there should be a national registry to monitor state governments with a history of committing terrorist acts against the United States. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least eleven.

We Need A New Reconstruction

I've been reading Eric Foner's "Reconstruction:  The Unfinished American Revolution" and I am stunned by how many recent new stories fit perfectly in the unconstitutional, defiant-traitors mold of the confederates and ku klux klanners who refused to admit defeat and accept the end of slavery.

Gen. Sherman was certain that only permanent military occupation of the South would ensure that the traitors accepted Union control, and he was right.

Even 150 years later, the motherfuckers still think they can defy the federal government.

 

Ian Milhiser at Think Progress:

“The federal courts don’t have the authority to make us kill babies,” according to Oklahoma Republican Party Chairman Randy Brogdon. “Are the Supreme Court justices going to come down to Oklahoma and make us stop?”

Brogdon, a former state senator who once called for Oklahoma to form its own militia separate from that National Guard — and who previously cast doubt upon the Pledge of Allegiance because he objects to the line “one nation, indivisible” — offered his interpretation of the Supreme Court’s lawful authority on Friday. One day earlier, he signed a fundraising email making a similar pitch. “As Chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, I call on the Governor and legislators to completely end the practice of abortion in Oklahoma,” Brogdon wrote in that email, adding that the state should “[s]hut Planned Parenthood down immediately for their illegal actions, and prosecute the abortion doctors who violate their oath to ‘do no harm.'”

The party chairman’s call to simply ignore court decisions protecting reproductive choice seeks to escalate many of his fellow Republicans’ attacks on legal abortion. Other states, however, have already gone so far in restricting abortion that it’s not clear that Brogdon’s proposal is as much of an escalation as it immediately appears to be.

And this:

Pharmacy owners do not have a constitutional right to refuse to dispense medicines that they object to on religious grounds, according to a decision handed down Thursday by a federal appeals court. Had the plaintiffs in this case prevailed, it would have not only permitted them to refuse to fill many birth control prescriptions (which is what these particular plaintiffs hoped to achieve), but it could have also potentially enabled pharmacists to refuse to fill a long list of prescriptions, including “diabetic syringes, insulin, HIV-related medications, and Valium.”

Stormans v. Wiesman concerned a Washington state rule that permits individual pharmacists to refuse to fill a particular prescription “so long as another pharmacist working for the pharmacy provides timely delivery,” but does not generally allow the pharmacy itself to refuse to deliver a prescription “even if the owner of the pharmacy has a religious objection.” Intervenors in the case, who joined on the side of the state officials defending the rule, include an HIV-positive man and a woman with AIDS who feared that they would be denied “timely access to their prescription medications” if the court sided with these plaintiffs.

 The motherfuckers never, ever quit.