Dear teacher, I must ask that my child, Idaho “Conservative” GOP, be excused yet again this year, as he is pale as a sheet and still suffering terribly from a horrible MAGA infection, leaving him disordered, delusional and unbalanced. We haven’t stopped praying, but where we once asked for his recovery, at this point, we’d be just as happy to see the end of his suffering. Thank you, Conservative’s mom.
“This bill increases the amount of freedoms Idahoans will have,” Rep. Robert Beisenger, Horseshoe Bend, said on introducing HB 32 to prevent the big ol’ intrusive gub’mint from mandating masks to slow the spread of disease.
In the time you’ve been alive, how many times have you been required by law to wear a mask? (Military personnel and veterans, exclude gas masks, not even the time you were mandated to take yours off in the gas chamber full of CS.) Unless a requirement due to where you work, the answer is one unless you’re around 106 years old. And why were you mandated to wear that mask? If you said “pandemic,” grab a cookie.
A key function of government is public health and safety, and when faced with a new and unknown biological threat to which we have not yet developed immunity (which is basically what a pandemic is and something medicine was just beginning to understand when the Spanish flu pandemic hit in 1918), most people, to include folks right here in the USA, are grateful for the best advice of the most qualified, even while understanding that the threat is new and unknown.
Extrapolating from known illnesses based on symptoms shown is known to be better than doing nothing, and it’s fairly straight forward. This appears to be a respiratory illness, transmissible and highly contagious, the key to reining in a flu outbreak is to slow transmission. Masks are known to slow many respiratory vectors. To be maximally effective, application must be as universal as possible and the maximally effective method of accomplishing that is by weight of law.
It’s not to impose on anyone’s rights, it’s not a punishment, it’s not an alternative to throwing a virgin into a volcano to appease the gods. It is applying the best available data to a problem for which no data exists so as to minimize deleterious effect as data is compiled and knowledge develops.
But there are ever those who disagree, ever those who will say politely, “No thank you! To don that life preserver you insist on throwing would infringe upon my right to swim topless!” just as they went under for the third time.
HB32 is a knee jerk and silly reaction to a rare event that, if enacted, would deprive freedom to people who recognize that rights and freedoms go only to the living.
Unsurprisingly, the House chose to diss the libs rather than serve the public interest and voted 51-17 to pass this stellar legislation on to the Senate. True conservative Idaho Republican Mark Sauter, who serves the constituents of District 1, voted no, Cornel Rasor, who serves the Idaho Freedom Caucus from District 1, voted yes.
Our former radical GOP representative, Heather Scott, now of District 2, is defending Idaho State rights against the Supreme Court of the U.S. with House Joint Memorial 1, which amounts to a strongly worded letter that never gets mailed respectfully excoriating the high court of the land for daring to overturn an Idaho legal case with their boneheaded, scientifically wrong and morally depraved decision in Obergefell vs. Hodges, wherein the boneheaded, scientifically wrong and morally depraved Supreme Court Justices ruled that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and its boneheaded, scientifically wrong and morally depraved assertion that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” is indeed boneheaded, scientifically wrong and morally depraved.
Several of the states, including Idaho, having earlier demonstrated their level-headed moral superiority and scientific acumen by declaring “they’s on’y two sexes, a man an’ a woman,” and passed laws that declared that the institution of marriage was only moral and legal betwixt a man an’ a woman, became upset when the Supreme Court told them all states must license a marriage between two people of the same sex and recognize such a marriage if it was lawfully licensed and performed in another state.
It’s not about gender or how the private parts of two people fit together or doesn’t, Heather insists.
“I would ask you to substitute any other issue and ask yourself, ‘Do I want the federal government creating rights for us, for Idahoans,’” Scott said. “So what if the federal government redefined property rights or nationalized water rights? What does that look like if they came up with some new fair use policy or came up with different ways to define property rights? That is not a decision for the judges; it is a decision for the states.”
Either Heather is a legislator without a clue or she’s thinkin’ the libs she’s dissin’ are, because she’s mixing apples and oatmeal and calling it … ooh! look over there!
Property rights, water rights and fair use rights, while contentious, are areas appropriate for legislation as they set out rules for things people do, not try to regulate who people are, what they believe, what they think.
Nearly every human alive will agree — there are two obvious sexes, but that point is moot — it is equally obvious that sexual preference and love are not constrained by that point of fact, else there wouldn’t be folks of the same gender lined up to be wed and to derive the benefits and privileges of being institutionalized in wholly matrimony.
Once again, Mark Sauter gave thought, applying logic, reason, intelligence and common sense to render a vote of “no,” Rasor peeked in the IFF/Heritage Foundation closet, got a nod and voted yes. House Joint Memorial 1 passed, 46-24, and once again the MAGA afflicted displeased the libs rather than serve their constituents.
And back this year for another is a heapin’ helping of “school choice,” a fine euphemism for “ya’ll ain’t gonna indoctrinate my kid, I’m gonna indoctrinate m’own kid, and ya’ll is goin’ t’pay fer it.”
It’s the right-wing way and as with so many such things, the right way is wrong.
“The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools,” says Article IX of the Idaho Constitution.
General. Uniform. Thorough. Not for all kids — only for those whose parents choose a public education for their children and for those children who would otherwise be deprived a general, uniform and thorough education. And not for teaching what a parent thinks their child should know, but what the citizens of that district, represented by those who are elected and who serve without pay, determine should be taught for the betterment and benefit of the community.
The Constitution goes on to prohibit sectarian appropriations for any sectarian or religious purpose, and not just from state coffers, but from any county, city, town, township, school district, or other public corporation’s cash box. In Idaho, public funds cannot be used in any way to support any religion. Not even your one true religion, Mr. Christian Nationalist. In addition, the state constitution prohibits any religious test as a condition of admission to any public educational institution, and no religious teaching.
No matter your religious beliefs, be thee from the world’s richest church filled with well dressed teeming throngs or more along the isolated lines of the booga booga savages painting their faces with mud and shaking sticks while dancing naked around a bon fire, truth is, ain’t nobody around who can give credible evidence-based proof as to whether their God exists or whether their God actually did all the hard work of creation, a central tenet of nearly all human religions.
We can’t prove with any degree of certainty that any god has ever had a conversation with any of us, let alone if those who insist with all assurance that they have the 800 number directly to God’s personal hotline telephone be telling us exactly what their all-knowing, omnipotent and perfect in every way deity told them to pass on to the rest of us or not, or why he didn’t just call a mandatory meeting and tell us all hisself.
Those are all matters that have to be taken on faith, and no government can legislate or arbitrate matters of faith … going back to that two sexes thing and the institution of marriage, how can anyone look at two people professing their undying love for one another and tell with certainty whether they are or not, be they man and woman, woman and woman or man and man?
In the United States we don’t have to answer that because we are recognized, under the constitution, as being equal.
And my oh my … wouldn’t all those finely clad devout souls proclaiming theirs the one true God turn red on arriving in the Hall of Valhalla to find the God of the booga booga man sat at the head of the table of that mystery cloaked pantheon?!
Idaho parents of all stripes have ample school choice, of which public education is but one, albeit the catchall to see that no Idaho child goes uneducated. It seems incongruous to hear patriotic liberty lovers who extol their strong individualism and self sufficiency raise such a clamor for educational welfare until you realize their true goal isn’t to give Junior a good education, but to starve the public schools out of existence, making education at all levels the privilege of the rich.
Rep. Dale Hawkins, R-Fernwood, speaks parental rights and protection from government in advocating for his proposed amendment to Section IX of the Idaho Constitution, which would add the line, “The right of the people to educate their children without government regulation outside of the public schools of the state shall not be infringed.”
It’s just another right wing distraction, another “I’ll show you conservative” ploy, even bringing in that magnificent snippet from the second amendment. Ye doggies! How can you not vote fer that if you ain’t a liberal?