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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Oh! Oh, yes, it’s a whole thing here since the “Moral Majority” group in the 80’s that packaged well-meaning people into hateful ignorant political cheerleaders.

    And I appreciate your perspective because it highlights a different aspect of the right-wing agenda: part of their process is to build in a “reasonable interpretation” of laws that they actually have no interest in whatsoever.

    As an example, there was a big push in many states to enact “voter i.d.” laws. We used to just walk into the polling station, give our name and address, they’d look it up, put a checkmark next to it to show we’ve been counted, and we’d go vote.

    Well the right wing media in concert with the republiQans and propaganda mills, i mean, “think tanks” started complaining this was a system ripe for abuse. “SO MANY people just vote multiple times under different names!”

    That absolutely never happened in any even-close-to significant amount. Never. There were individual cases - we still see them once in awhile, and it’s always the republiQans doing it. Anyway, they kept this lie up for years.

    While that was going on, republiQan legislators, united by ALEC, passed laws saying everyone had to show a valid government ID to vote. I had several conversations with friends and family about these, and either due to parroting the fox news talking points or genuine well-meaning concern, they said, “but doesn’t it make sense to know someone is who they SAY they are, before they vote?” And it does. It does make sense.

    But that’s not why they did it. They did it because people without government ID are largely older minority voters, who mostly vote Democratic. This was just to prevent them from voting. They had all sorts of made up lies about “oh they can just go down to the DMV and get a free ID”, yeah if someone takes them and walks them through it and they brought the right paperwork, yeah. It was a big burden for a lot of people who just stopped voting (mission accomplished).

    Secondarily, anyone with outstanding parking tickets or who suspects there’s a warrant out for them (or is in general targeted by the cops, like black men) will see lots of ads and mailers before the election that when they show their ID to vote they’ll be arrested and taken away. They won’t, it’s just scare tactics but it works well and voting went down for a lot of Democratic-leaning voters.

    To this day they stand by the now long-discredited idea that people are using false identities to vote - trump even clings to this as one of his Big Lies of how he “mysteriously” didn’t get enough votes in 2020, still. It was always bullshit; it was always designed to keep Democrats from voting, and it worked.





  • Forcing it as a belief system is definitely wrong, . . . I don’t see the difference with the Bible . . .

    Make no mistake, that is absolutely the point of these - again, unconstitutional - laws. They’re hoping to parlay this illegitimate fascist court into making it constitutional while the iron is hot.

    . . . especially if presented as a historical document and prototypical collection of stories?

    It won’t be. They want this in elementary school. How much literature was in grades 1-3? Any inference that it will be treated as a “historical document” is an outright lie. (Edit: the article says teachers must teach it to “students in grades five through 12” but that’s different than Louisiana’s “10 commandments displayed in all classrooms” law. They all serve the same purpose: to promote “Christianity” in school.)

    I’m not religious and wasn’t raised in a religious family …

    Then believe me when I tell you this is what it is for. These legislators are not history buffs. They are evangelical ‘Christian’ nationalists.

    I couldn’t believe how much context it gave me on our culture and its origins.

    Having to read and study the whole thing would also help rein in overzealous religion IMO. The #1 reason I’ve heard from evangelicals who left their church was “I decided to read the Bible for myself”

    Good points and I’m all in favor of unintended positive outcomes. Bible scholarship is interesting as an elective and if that was offered at my school I might have considered it. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

    We’re talking about criminal penalties for not promoting a specific religion. That’s the whole point of the law, and it is 100% wrong.




  • For a long period which roughly coincided with the founding of America, English-speaking people only learned to read using the Bible, and often that was the only book they ever used for anything so it became a sort of de facto dictionary and Guiness Book of World Records and all kinds of things that it was never meant to be, plus a lot of new things it was never meant to be, and of course the things it was always meant to be.

    Mandatory firearms training in school would be more Constitutional than teaching the Bible though. For a very important reason. Akin to a “prime directive” if you will. If you want kids to study it as an elective then fine, allow that, but forcing it on kids is wrong, wrong wrong.