We are governed by terrible people,
part the whateverth.
On Tuesday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) offered an amendment to the Congressional budget that could force the federal government to maintain contracts with organizations that do not treat their gay employees equally.
The amendment, as read into the Congressional record, dictates that “Federal agencies do not discriminate against an individual, business, or organization with sincerely held religious beliefs against abortion [or] that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”
Why does Inhofe feel the need to inject this into the budget? You know, I don't even know anymore. I'm just going to presume that this is yet another necessary step in the conservative attempts to redefine the nation as an explicitly religious state, by which we mean a state that legally codifies the beliefs of particular sub-sect of one particular religion, and here's a hint—it ain't yours. Sen. James Inhofe doesn't give a damn what
your religion is.
Inhofe’s amendment notably only protects the religious beliefs of those who oppose abortion and same-sex marriage, saying nothing about protecting those whose religion teaches them to respect women’s bodies or celebrate same-sex couples’ relationships.
Nor do they protect people who have certain opinions on ham, or whose religion obliges them to pray at certain times of the day, or any of that other fluff. That is because James Inhofe's personal religious convictions, which of course are the only ones he deems worthy of writing into federal law, revolve almost exclusively around penis and vagina stuff. There were probably once some other ideas floated about in his local church and in others, things about helping the poor and caring for the sick, but all of that was tossed aside around the turn of the last century so that God's Chosen People, by which we mean religious conservatives, could focus on telling everyone how to use their penises and vaginas properly and (just as importantly) stage bouts of orchestrated public outrage over the idea that some American, somewhere, was ignoring their edicts on how to use those penises and vaginas.
Forget all the other stuff—all of Christianity, everything Our Lord And Savior was nailed to a cross for all led up to this modern American moment of making damn sure everyone followed the rules about penises and vaginas and that people who didn't would get what's coming to them from the various bakers and florists and tax accountants of the world.
Head below the fold for the full ridiculousness that is Inhofe.
I remember a lot of Sensible Pundits getting very hot and bothered a few years back when Markos and other progressives began to use the term American Taliban to refer to the rising political effort to codify ultra-conservative Christian extremist beliefs into state and federal American laws. This made me very sad, because of course I have always prided myself on coddling the emotional sensibilities of people who demand the rest of the nation abide by their specific religious convictions and I have tried even harder to please that group of well-heeled analyzers of these things who believe that while it certainly may be upsetting to think that some members of the American government are seeking to institutionalize religious beliefs into American law it is of course far more upsetting to call those persons rude names. But we shall try to soldier on.
James Inhofe and his peers are attempting to pass federal laws codifying their deeply conservative religious beliefs as the only religious beliefs that will be protected under American law. Yes? Yes. Their beliefs are that women are not allowed to do certain things because the preferred religion "forbids" it, and that The Gays not have the same rights as "normal" people, and that citizens of the nation ought not only feel free to discriminate against those specific people but will be protected by the full force of the nation's laws if and when they do. In the various states, governments are shuttering longstanding services rather than comply with court edicts that they provide those services to citizens who are, in the eyes of the religious movement, sinners. In the various states, medical institutions that do not subscribe to the required religious edicts are targeted by religiously ardent state governments with law after law singling them out with cripplingly onerous "legal" or "medical" requirements that affect them and only them. It is the government doing those things, not the sporadic acts of movement terrorism (the Olympic bombing, countless other bombing plots both realized and foiled) or the fervently religious movement adherents murdering doctors even on the steps of (the wrong) churches after the movement press (Bill O'Reilly) broadcast condemnations of those specific doctors by name as dangerous and malevolent and un-American sinners.
Where was I? Oh yes: American. Taliban. Get over it. As religious forces seek to enshrine very specific religious protections into state and federal laws, including formalizing their supposed God-given right to punish those that they see as sinners while offering those with different religious beliefs no similar recourse, at long last get over it. A sitting United States senator demands his personal religious edicts on abortion and properly, legally shunning The Gays be enshrined into the official budget of those United States, and it is at this point a demand so commonplace in his party that it will not likely rate even a passing mention among the pundits that decide which things are reasonable and which are not.