(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done and where someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press.
We begin in Tennessee, where the Republican majority in the state legislature is letting its freak flag fly again. This week, a special session of the legislature opened, ostensibly called by Governor Bill Lee to deal with public safety, and a possible "red flag" law, once again dissolved into a hooley regarding gun reform measures despite Speaker Cameron Sexton's police-backed efforts to shut the subject down. From PBS:
The emotional scene was just one of several chaotic moments that erupted during the second day of Tennessee’s special legislative session. Republican Gov. Bill Lee initially called lawmakers back to the Capitol to consider his proposal to keep firearms away from dangerous people.“I was supposed to speak, I was supposed to testify,” said Sarah Shoop Neumann, sobbing and shaking in front of the silent GOP-controlled House subcommittee room, which was cleared out after some clapping from the public gallery, even though she sat quietly and wasn’t holding any signs.The Republican majority wasn't interested in giving Lee's proposed bill a fair shot, but they were enthusiastic about stifling debate on almost every other subject.
On the first day of the special session on Monday, House Republicans advanced a new set of procedural rules that carried harsh penalties for lawmakers deemed too disruptive or distracting, and banned visitors from carrying signs inside the Capitol and in legislative hearing rooms. The Senate and House also signed off on severely limiting the public from accessing the galleries where people have traditionally been allowed to watch their government in action. The actions come after the Tennessee Republicans attracted national attention for expelling two young Black Democratic lawmakers earlier this year for breaking House rules during a demonstration in support of gun control. Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson have since been reinstated to their positions, but the actions sent shock waves about the Republican supermajority’s ability to hand down strict punishments to opponents.While moms with signs were given the bum's rush out of the capitol, armed members of the Proud Boys wandered around freely, exercising their constitutional freedom to be nuisances. From the Tennessean:
Beautiful.
We move along to Michigan, where the Washington Post found an indelible example of what happens when the forces of MAGA meet local government, which was minding its own business and not bothering anybody until a piano of ignorance was dropped on its head.
As the sex educator for the county’s health department, Alberda, 46, developed programs to lower teen pregnancy and curb the spread of sexually transmitted infections. She spoke about sex and sexuality with a directness that was rare in her conservative county and sometimes got her into trouble. A late June meeting of the county board was streaming on Alberda’s living room TV. The board’s vice chair, Sylvia Rhodea, was introducing a resolution that sought to “protect childhood innocence” by blocking the county from spending money on programs that “normalize or encourage the sexualization of children.”The problem wasn't that Ms. Alberda was doing a bad job. It was that she was doing her job.
Alberda had already endured months of scorn from the new commissioners, who had publicly accused her of promoting abortion and sexualizing children. What she’d been doing was her job, which required her to talk about birth control, sexually transmitted infections, abstinence and consent. She met with high school students, migrant farmworkers, teens in juvenile detention and people struggling with addiction.Definitely a threat to the public order.
Public school teachers invited her to speak with their students. She developed sex-ed programs for women in drug rehabilitation and inmates in the county jail. She spoke to uterine and cervical cancer survivors who were seeking alternatives to vaginal sex. Often, Alberda had groups write anonymous questions for her on scraps of paper, which she kept in a drawer in her desk. They asked her about pain during intercourse, penis size and consent. “If a guy presses me into sex and I say no five or six times and he starts touching me is that molestation?” read one question from a high school student. Alberda talked with the students about sexual consent and the importance of reporting abuse.Then, the nutballs rolled into Ottawa County.
The group’s leaders drew inspiration from Matthew Trewhella, a Wisconsin-based pastor who preaches a version of Christianity that focuses on using politics and the law to purify the community of evildoers and sin. Trewhella and the leaders of Ottawa Impact didn’t respond to requests for comment. In 2013, Trewhella self-published a book called “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” which argues that low-level elected officials — “lesser magistrates” — have a sacred duty to oppose higher authorities who attempt to enforce immoral or anti-Christian laws. Trewhella drew inspiration for the book, which he said has sold more than 80,000 copies, from 1500s-era treatises written by Protestant leaders resisting the tyranny of the Catholic Church. His roots, though, were in the 1990s antiabortion movement. In 1993, he signed a letter describing the murder of doctors who provided abortions as “justifiable,” and he often boasted of the 15 months he spent in jail for blocking the doors to abortion clinics.Can we please have a break from the people who Do Their Own Research and can we all agree to make laws based on precedents that are at least from the last two centuries. Justice Sam Alito relies of an old British witch-hunter to destroy the right to reproductive freedom, and now here's this guy, making people's lives miserable, and endangering public health, based on some 16th century religious tracts. That was not a good century for religious activism. I suggest that Trewhella stay out of the Louvre for a while. Of course, once you've opened the door to this kind of lunacy, all kinds of other lunacy comes storming through.
Many of the group’s most ardent supporters were convinced that the nation was in the midst of a moral crisis so deep that it had precipitated a massive surge in child sex trafficking that had reached west Michigan. At county board meetings, they insisted that the media was conspiring with the state and federal government to hide the heinous problem. One of the area’s biggest churches was building a shelter for trafficking victims.Which brings us back to Ms. Alberda, who was pretty thoroughly ambushed by the crazy.
By early July, Alberda’s supervisors at the health department had largely shut down her work as a sexuality educator and assigned her new, bureaucratic tasks that mostly kept her confined to her office cubicle. Public school health teachers were still teaching sex-ed classes, but Alberda was no longer allowed to talk to their students about birth control or sexually transmitted disease. Alberda’s Wear One condom program was still running, but she was told not to add any new locations. Her parent guide, which had drawn the scorn of Libs of TikTok, had been taken down months earlier. Initially, her supervisors said they would review it and put it back online. It still hasn’t returned. “It feels like I don’t even exist anymore,” she said. “Twenty years of what I worked so hard to build literally was in one instant destroyed.”And that is how you wreck public health in the year 2023. You hunt the witches that exist in your own head.And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Reptile Negotiator Friedman of the Plains brings us yet another tale of what happens when the voices in your head get a vote. From nondoc:
In her letter to TPS staff sent Tuesday (embedded below), Gist said she believes her departure provides the district its best chance to avoid a takeover by the Walters-chaired state board. “It is no secret that our state superintendent has had an unrelenting focus on our district and specifically on me, and I am confident that my departure will help to keep our democratically elected leadership and our team in charge of our schools–this week and in the future,” Gist said in the letter. “So I’m stepping away. What we have built together is larger and stronger than any one of us, and this team will continue to serve our students and make the improvements we know our students need and deserve.”Keep an eye on Walters. He's already opened Oklahoma's public schools to theocracy. Now, he's cracking down on the state's urban schools.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
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