Michigan GOP Seeks To Legalize Discrimination Because ... God

Out there in Michigan, the GOP controlled House of Representatives, led by Speaker Jase Bolger, has passed a bill that would allow discrimination to become sanctioned by the state if you can say you discriminated because God told you it was okay … cuz God is all about discrimination, you know.

This bill, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act [RFRA] is much like one that made nationwide headlines in Arizona before it was vetoed; it appears to allow the government to step aside if a person's "deeply-held religious beliefs" mandate they act, or not act, in a certain manner. Supporters of RFRA claim the bill allows people of faith to exercise their religion without government interference, but the fact is that what these bills do is to allow discrimination under the mask of religion; and, again, we all know that God—whether you believe in Her or not—is all about the discrimination.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at what could happen …

Under the RFRA a pharmacist could refuse to fill a doctor's prescription for birth control, or HIV medication; an emergency room physician or EMT could refuse service to a gay person in need of immediate treatment; a school teacher could refuse to mentor the children of a same-sex couple; a science teacher could teach that the Earth is just 6,000 years old; a DMV clerk could refuse to give a driver's license to a person who is divorced. 

And what if a Catholic-owned hospital refused admittance to people who need a procedure that violates the institution’s religious directives, such as a pre-viability pregnancy termination in the case of a miscarriage; what if that Catholic-owned hospital refused a same-sex couple.

And, what about those religions that allow for a man to beat his wife? Would he be allowed to do so because of his deeply held religious beliefs? It’s not that far-fetched when you allow religious discrimination of any kind.

But Jase Bolger — and the Michigan GOP — doesn’t care about that because the people who are being discriminated against are not part of the goose-stepping GOP base, and so he fast-tracked the bill, which passed solely along partisan lines, and now heads to the Michigan Senate. If successful there, it’s a hop skip and a hate crime to Republican Governor Rick Snyder, though, to be fair, it’s not yet known if he would sign it. 

“I support individual liberty and I support religious freedom,” Bolger said today. “I have been horrified as some have claimed that a person’s faith should only be practiced while hiding in their home or in their church.” — Jase Bolger

I, too, am horrified that he would say that without offering one single case of a person being denied their religious freedom in this country. Oh, if he means the baker who doesn’t wanna bake a cake for a gay couple, then he needs to make sure the baker is a church, and not a publicly run business; or, if he means the clerk who won’t issue a marriage license, then he needs to make sure the clerk is working for a religious organization, and not the state, or federal, government.

And this whole notion of “restoring” religious freedom annoys me because, again, I have not seen religious freedom stripped away from anyone. Take a drive down any street in South Carolina and you’ll find more churches than gas stations; take a peek at our local channels and you’ll find a church, and its pastor, advertising their faith every morning.

We have always had religious freedom, but what we don’t have is religion trumping the laws of this country; what we don’t have is people using God to inflict their own personal beliefs on anyone else.

But, if that’s how you wanna roll, Michigan, please make an addendum to your bill: please force those business, and hospitals, and pharmacies, and schools, that want to discriminate against people while citing their religious beliefs post a sign at their doors so that people who don’t think God hates anyone, or would discriminate against anyone, or people who don’t believe there even is a God, can go somewhere else.

Make people who want to discriminate against anyone else be forced to advertise their discrimination.

If haters are gonna hate, make them tell people about it.

via NCRM

Rick Snyder: Asshat or Ally?

The last time I spoke about Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was … wait a minute, let me recall, I think it was, it could have been, oh yeah … yesterday.

See, it was just yesterday that Snyder asked that the 300 same-sex marriages performed during the tiny Equality Window that opened in the state last March be declared void now that the Sixth Circuit Court has ruled that it’s okay to discriminate against The Gays in Michigan.

But, lo and behold, I found yet another tale of Rick Snyder, one that has me scratching my head and wondering if there are two Rick Snyder’s governing the state. Last week, fresh from his reelection win, Snyder, a devout Republican, encouraged his state legislature to take up adding LGBT protections to the Elliott-Larson Civil Rights Act before the end of their session.

Yup, just before working to basically annul 300 same-sex marriages, Snyder asked that The Gays be added to the states discrimination laws. And let’s toss in the fact that the very legislature he’s asked to add LGBT protections to the law is a very GOP-centric legislature, with Republicans in control of both houses.

Now, it seems Snyder has made his move now because, come January, the Michigan legislature is expected to be even more conservative with an added Tea Party element. But he might still face an uphill battle with the House Speaker, one Jase Bolger, who believes that LGBT protections should be "balanced" by religious protections; but, with Bolger on his way out the door having lost his election, maybe he’d be more gay-friendly, or, at the very least, less gay-hating?

Still, the questions arises, why Rick? Why now? Why protect The Gays one week and then strip the married gays of their marriages the next?

Money; corporations. It appears Snyder was motivated by his base in the business sector; the very people to whom he gave a tax cut paid for by raising property taxes on Michigan retirees. That group, the Michigan Competitive Workforce Coalition, includes AT&T, Google and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, who have all publicly supported amending Elliott-Larsen with LGBT protections.

So, he didn’t do it for The Gays, he did it for the people to whom he gave tax breaks paid for by people who maybe cannot afford tax breaks. So, while this might be a nice, seemingly, LGBT-friendly move, it’s really just appeasing business while smothering the public under more taxes.

And that’s no surprise coming from a Republican. And an asshat.

Looky there, I answered my own question: Rick Snyder is still an asshat.

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How Would You Like Your Marriage Voided?

I know firsthand what a feeling it was to go from being “partnered’ to being married; it’s really a subtle difference, maybe a change in speech — This is my husband versus This is my partner — but it felt huge.

Now, imagine that you’ve married your partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, significant other, and you’re feeling that joy, that sense of newness, that sense of equality, only to have the rug yanked out from under when a Circuit Court decides that marriages bans against the gays are just fine.

That’s what happened when the 6th Circuit Court recently ruled that marriage bans are legal and, somehow, just. And since that ruling the state of Michigan is trying to declare that the 300 same-sex couples who received licenses last March, and were subsequently legally married in the state, are now no longer husband-and-husband or wife-and-wife.

How’s that for equality?

The weddings were performed by county clerks March 22, a day after U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman struck down Michigan's same-sex marriage ban; that same day the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati issued a stay on those marriages, but it came after those 300 couples had legally completed the steps to be married.

Now, Michigan Governor, and ISBL Asshat winner, Rick Snyder would like those marriages voided since the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Michigan's ban on same-sex marriage, along with bans in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

You can’t get married; you can get married; now your marriage is void. It never existed. You don’t exist as a married couple. Ain’t that America?

Lawyers for the governor, and for the state of Michigan, are saying that "from a legal standpoint, because the marriages rested solely on the district court's erroneous decision, which has now been reversed, it is as if the marriages never existed.”

I mean, bad enough that we are being treated like second-class citizens; bad enough that we are expected to do as everyone else in this country is supposed to do, work, pay taxes, be responsible citizens, vote, and yet we do not have the same rights as those other citizens; bad enough. But to allow us the opportunity to get married when the law is changed, and then to change it back and sue to have our marriages declared void?

That is not America; that cannot happen. These cases need to go before the Supreme Court and have marriage equality declared the law of land everywhere in this country.

Case closed.

Appeals ruling voids300 gay marriages, Michigan argues

Ignore My Arrest For Choking My Chicken In A Neighbor's Chrysler and Vote For Me

Jordan Haskins is just twenty-four, and running for Congress in Michigan as one of those stalwart, conservative Republicans for whom the way to govern is defined by “faith, family and freedom” saying:

“I have dreams, and I want to make a difference.”

And so he’s asking the good people of Michigan to ‘overlook’ his past behavior, his sexual fetishes and his many felony convictions and vote for him. He wanst you to know that although he served time in prison in two states, and is currently on parole, there are no laws that prevent him from running for public office.

Still, on four separate occasions between April of 2010 and January of 2011 — when Haskin’s was twenty, maybe twenty-one — he broke into stranger’s cars on public and private property, disconnected the ignition wires, started the engine and, well, masturbated; he called it “cranking.”

Most folks called it a crime.

Haskins, who has lived in both Michigan and North Carolina, has lengthy criminal records in both states, though most of his early offenses — going back to when he was fifteen — were mostly breaking into cars and stealing them for a joyride. In North Carolina Haskins was arrested in 2006, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 for breaking and entering, larceny and trespassing, but when he came to Michigan he added the jerking off in stranger’s cars aspect to his criminal, sexual, behavior.

And he has an excuse for his behavior:

“I really had no friends at the time. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was one of those young people who grew up without a father in the house, grew up with his grandmother and his mom. I just didn’t really know what I wanted to do, what my purpose was, where I wanted to go.”

Except to beat off in a Buick, apparently. Yet now he wants the good people of Michigan to forget about his arrests, and his behavior, because he’s replaced the jacking off in Jeeps with political conservativism.

Though if he is elected — he’s running in a  heavily Democratic district — I imagine his constituents might often wonder what he was doing with his hands under his desk in the statehouse.

Cranking? Or yanking?

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Two Gun Nuts Take Each Out In A Road Rage Incident

Well, it was bound to happen …

James Pullum and Robert Taylor were driving on a public road in Ionia, Michigan when, apparently, one or both of them began acting like asshats and driving like fools and then stopping their cars to get out and argue with one another.

Pullum [left], who was driving with his wife and mother, pulled into a car wash parking lot, and Taylor [right], who had been tailgating Pullum, followed suit. The two men exited their cars and began arguing in a case of what I like to call ‘¿Quien es mas macho?’ Or, ‘Who’s the most manly?’ when Robert Taylor pulled a gun—that he licensed to carry—and began firing at Pullum; Pullum, also a gun-owner with a license to carry, pulled his weapon and fired back.

Both men died at the scene.

Both men are dead because when you carry a gun you in tend to use it, and when you have a hot temper, like, say, when someone tailgates you, or you think someone cut you off, then it’s the perfect time to pull out a weapon and begin firing.

Too bad James Pullum didn’t think about his wife and mother, for how might he have felt if a stray bullet from Taylor’s gun, or even his own, killed a member of his family because he has a bad temper. And how would either man have felt if they accidentally shot an innocent bystander whoa just happened to be washing his car that day?

But then idiots like this don’t care about others, family or strangers, they care about protecting what’s theirs, massaging their massive egos, pretending to be 'real men,' and using a gun to do so and then losing their lives over a case of road rage which never would have happened if they hadn’t had guns.

The NRA likes to say that a good man with a gun can stop a bad man with a gun, but they never mention what happens when two so-called good men use their guns to settle a traffic dispute and they both end up dead.

People.Who.Carry.Guns.Intend.To.Use.Them. 

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