Friday, April 3, 2015

It's not about the cake

Cake jump. Via GalleryHip.

I guess I need to emphasize this. I keep writing about cake, because cake is, like tango, or Donald Trump, or the word "amplitude" (think about it!), intrinsically funny. But it's not about the cake.

What it's about, really, is the exposure of the whole system of Republican double dealing, which millions of American voters are now becoming truly aware of for the first time; the way they wrap every ugly agenda item inside a spuriously attractive one: from corporatizing the education system inside "leaving no child behind" to licensing corporate pollution inside "clear skies".

Because this one is just so unmistakable. On the inside, that a business owner can treat anybody he wants like shit if his reasons for doing it are pious and if it's not otherwise illegal; on the outside, the "restoration" of "religious" "freedom". Excuse me, something happened to religious freedom? Like wear and tear, so we need to redo the grouting and paint it?

“Religious liberty is not some cockamamie new theory that the Indiana legislature just figured out yesterday,” Mr. Cruz said to a standing-room-only crowd at Morningside College in Sioux City. “It was literally among the founding principles of our nation, and we have to be able to explain that cheerfully and with a smile.”
It's always been a principle in North America that people are entitled to practice the religion they prefer, at least once we got rid of the New England theocracies, not that they're entitled to practice it on other people. If God tells them they can't have blood transfusions, that's fine, let them die. If God tells them they can't have vaccinations, that may put the rest of us in danger, and we shouldn't put up with it if it gets out of hand.

What people like Cruz really want to "restore" is the religious freedom of Governor Bradford, to fine, jail, or exile anybody who offends him. But that's only the wrapping.

The real reason for all these RFRAs, the ugly inside intention, is corporate: to increase the rights of capital over the working class by hindering regulation; to codify the awful Hobby Lobby decision at the state level, giving the employer an opportunity to enforce his moral code on the employee, or at least make it harder for the employee to break. It's to build in the idea of a right to fire a person arbitrarily. It's to enable vendors to throw a customer out—not because they're gay; because they're "not our sort" or because they "wouldn't feel comfortable" or you know the rest. They want to restore the religious freedom they lost in 1964, to be the Self-Chosen People.

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