06.26.13
What did you learn in WhiteManistan today?
The politicians of the New Confederacy don’t let the grass grow under their feet.
No sooner had they blown the vote on law to make abortion virtually impossible in Texas, they came right back with the expressed intent of ramming it through in another special session of the Texas legislature.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp said he will file a constitutional amendment later this week to restore DOMA.
The Kansas Republican said he will be joined by other conservatives in supporting that effort.
“My response to this will be later this week to file a federal marriage amendment,??? he said at a Conversation with Conservatives lunch on Wednesday morning.
When Hell freezes over.
However, everyone knows now that the extremists are never stopped, not in 2013 divided America. WhiteManistan wants no part of the future.
Its politicians have deduced they can enact unconstitutional law much faster than it can be undone, in effect bringing on the Cold Civil War riddling the country.
Thought question:
What happens when, before the 2014 elections, WhiteManistan has legislation in place to disenfranchise its enemies at the voting booth? When the people who have voted for years come out in force because they know they’ve been targeted and they are told their papers are not in order by someone who has different color skin, do you think they’ll go home?
That’s not going to happen.
It is heartening to know that it was California’s gay couples who wouldn’t stand for the state’s Prop. 8 banning gay marriage. It was that persistence that pushed it before the Supreme Court, bringing about the repeal of DOMA.
From Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy , published in 2006:
Within [WhiteManistan’s] most loyal denominations — Southern Baptists, Mormons and Missouri Synod Lutherans — overall theology accords women secondary status. The essential female role is biblical and familial …
In a related vein conservative publications emphasized the importance in the 2004 election of the “baby gap” — the data showing the pro-Bush [white] voters have more children than do Democratic voters. The states where white fertility rates were high went conservative … Conversely, the states were abortion rates were highest supported Kerry.
To religious traditionalists, homosexuality threatened institutions of family and marriage. Eleven states held November 2004 referendums to ban gay marriage. In the seven states where conservative denominations are strong, the propositions carried by huge majorities: 86 percent in Mississippi, 77 percent in Georgia, 76 percent in Oklahoma, 75 percent in Kentucky and Arkansas, and 66 percent in Utah and Montana. Church-going black voters, principally Baptists and Pentecostals, supported the curbs by lopsided margins, increasing the antigay margins in the Deep South (and accounting for much of the small 2004 Republican increase in black support.)
Time moved on, shifting the sands of race demographics undermined the status quo of the Bush years. The country is more polarized now but WhiteManistan is in numerical decline.
Outsized Mormon bankrolling of Proposition 8 gave sleeping California a ban on gay marriage during the 2008 state elections. It won narrowly with a 52 percent majority. It put the state in the awkward position of having gay marriages enacted legally prior to its stand-up with the rest of the polity left to awkwardly look on. Socially, it was always a bad fit, rigged by money. One could perceive it would eventually be undone, somehow.
This was another factor, but not the major one, in the destruction of the GOP within the state. Its strategy of legislatively attacking enemies doesn’t work here anymore. In the intervening years the GOP was driven out of power, its end coming in 2012.
The rest of the country waits. But the neo-Confederates are never idle. They won a big one early in the week. They lost one today.
It’s not a coincidence that the win for the forces of good started in the Golden State and evil’s win in Shelby County, Alabama. The two regions — here and there in the Deep South — could not be farther apart.