Dear America,
Over the past week or two, the Indiana statute putatively intended to solidify religious freedom in Indiana as if the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply there has garnered almost universal attention among the media, and of course, Indiana's governor, Mike Pence, has been the poster boy for his state's misguided legislation. I say misguided for several reasons, but I'll get to them after I say my piece about Mike Pence. He is the silver haired former Republican congressman from Indiana who said when asked whether he was going to run for president in 2012 that he and his family were going to "pray about it" over the following weekend. Apparently God dropped everything and presided over their deliberations, which led to their paterfamilias running for governor instead. In Pence's mind, what he does in his political career is a function of afflatus rather than political ambition, which runs parallel to his belief that his pontifications of righteousness, presumptuousness and sanctimony are tantamount to piety. Pence is the embodiment of the either self-deluded or hypocritical motivations of a despicable contingent of the members of a segment of our population that describes itself as "evangelical." According to Webster's New World Dictionary, evangelical means "in, of, or according to the Gospels or the teaching of the New Testament." There are two phrases in that definition that are the quintessence of evangelism: the Gospels and the New Testament. They are quintessential because they define the creed's etiology very simply and very specifically. It derives solely from the descriptions of the life, death, resurrection and the words of Jesus Christ as depicted in the Gospels, that is in the first four books of the New Testament...you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But the vast majority of people who seem to understand that the Gospels don't imprecate against sinners but rather adjure tolerance and forgiveness even of sinners--as in let he who is without sin cast the first stone and do unto others as you would have them do unto you--and who thus characterize themselves as evangelicals are not people like Mike Pence.
Pence proved that on national television. When confronted with the discrimination argument against the ostensible freedom of religion statute that had just passed in his state's legislature and been signed into law by him, Pence couldn't bring himself to say outright that the law would not, and was not intended to, bar homosexuals from receiving public accommodations and services like bakeries and photography studios if the purveyors of such so choose. And thus, he made it clear that the intention of the law was indeed precisely what he subsequently claimed to eschew...things like exclusion from public accommodations and the Hobby Lobby case's nullification of the Affordable Care Act's mandate that birth control be provided under health insurance policies, at least as it applied to closely held corporations. Pence is a bigot, at least on the sexual preference issue and the broader issue of whether fundamentalist doctrine should prevail over secular humanism. I knew someone in college who used to call people like Pence "Christers." It is pejorative in its way, but not in the same way in which "nigger," "yid," "kike," "wop,""queer" and "faggot" are. Rather, it connotes the kind of self-righteousness and peremptory values that pass for legitimate religiosity among people like Pence...the kind of people who would never use such epithets, but whose thoughts and feelings reflect them. If anyone ever deserved the epithet Christer, it would be Pence. In my opinion, if God really advises people about politics, I am confident that he will advise voters not to vote for Pence...for any office.
But setting Pence aside, the rationale for the Indiana law, and for all of the other 19 or 20 state laws that it emulates, is a reflection of the kind of values that Mike Pence and the Republican majority in Indiana's state legislature embrace. The reason I can say that with such certainty is that our federal constitution was amended in 1865 to include the 14th amendment, which incorporates all of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights and applies those mandates against abuse of power not just by the federal government but by all of the governments of all of the states as well. That means that the first amendment's proscription of laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" and a federal statutory codification of those first amendment principles passed during the Clinton administration do exactly what Pence and his cohorts say they were intending to do, thus obviating any such action in Indiana, Arkansas, Arizona or any other state. Those 19 or 20 state statutes were nothing better than thinly veiled attempts to circumvent the strictures imposed by our founding principles as embodied in their seminal documents and the 14th amendment to thus defeat individual liberty rather than protect it. If such were not the case, the amendment of Indiana's statute to prevent anyone from invoking it as a defense to a discrimination case brought in court would not be necessary. Texas included such a provision in its parallel legislation, so the Indiana legislature surely knew that it was necessary to avoid any confusion if confusion isn't what they were inviting.
I suppose that Pence and his like minded compatriots have the right to do what they did, but they should have the courage to call it what it was before they fixed it. You can call segregation whatever you like, but what's in a name. Tyranny by any other name smells just as vile.
Your friend,
Mike
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