Saturday, January 28, 2017

State sovereignty for the Big C but not for thee

California's overweening view of inter-state relations is Exhibit A in the polarization of American society:

The Golden State is symbolically showcasing its commitment to tolerance and inclusion… by cutting off state funds for travel (including for college athletic competitions) to states that the legislature deems insufficiently socially liberal. Governing magazine reports:
California has banned state-funded travel to Kansas after determining that the Sunflower State is one of four in the nation with laws that it views as discriminatory toward gay people.
The policy could prevent public universities in California from scheduling sporting events with Kansas teams and raises the question of whether teams will travel to Wichita in 2018, when the city is scheduled to host two rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. […]
Kansas is on the travel prohibition list because of a 2016 law that enabled college campus religious groups to require that members adhere to their religious beliefs and standards.
Just to be clear about the infraction that landed Kansas on the list: Some universities have “all-comers” policies for student group membership, meaning that no student can be excluded from any campus organization on account of his or her beliefs. Technically, this means that Democratic students could join the College Republicans, that Zionist students could join Students for Justice in Palestine, and so forth. But the biggest controversy (which led to the Supreme Court decision Christian Legal Society vs. Martinez) often has to do with Christian student associations that seek to require that all members subscribe to a Biblical view sexual morality—that is, that sex should take place only between married men and women. The Kansas state legislature wanted to ensure that the university didn’t enact an “all-comers” policy that would force student religious groups to violate their beliefs, so it passed a law stating that these groups can create their own criteria for membership.
In other words, this is not Jim Crow applied to the LGBT community. This is an eminently reasonable (if debatable) policy for how to balance religious freedom and gay rights. In fact, four out of nine Supreme Court justices ruled that such a policy is required at public universities to maintain freedom of association.
And thus does good will become an ever more precious commodity in post-America.

9 comments:

  1. Not at all man, your gang is in charge now. Spreading good cheer and good will throughout the globe as you see it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You don't care to comment on the actual topic at hand, do you?

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is clearly the result of too many queers in power in CA. It sucks as much as jailing them. Just like the niggas, they now want affirmative action and as is their fallen human nature, like our straight human nature, to make things miserable for those they don't like who clearly don't like them It's bullshit and will eventually be seen for what it is and left behind in the dustbin of history, like forced conscription, jail for marijuana use, censorship, all that other crap used as rationales for fucking peoples lives up who never even directly fucked with you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was sort of following you - although it required some god hip boots to wade through some pretty fetid language - until apples started getting mixed up with oranges. I really don't see the connection between the issue in question here and marijuana and conscription. For one thing, conscription has not been in effect for decades

    ReplyDelete
  5. Aren't you at all concerned that someone might consider you a bigot with that n----s stuff?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Not too much, given the projected readership here and certainly the number of varied responses.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The connection, you see, is that this too shall pass, with a yawn, and of course forced conscription appears to be in the "dustbin" of history, but it appears our country, via its fearful Republican leader, is not averse to rooting through the trash to throw it at us again.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Plus, I'm not a bigot. This is a literary device called hyperbole, with a dash of irony posing as satire.

    ReplyDelete
  9. That's exactly how the final finishing-off of Western civilization occurs: taking a ho-hum, this-too-shall-pass attitude toward each individual outrage as it comes along.

    ReplyDelete