Good Morning, Hoosier Daddy?
Part the First.
It’s a one man, one woman, one wedding cake kinda place I hail from. Used to be when I was kid it was a big corn maze on the way from Chicago to Cincinnati, with a race track tuck in the middle of it. Pretty much a quiet little place except for the 30 days in May when AJ Foyt and that blimp showed up to circle the race track.
The Crossroads of America. Good Ole India-no-place. Where the deep south comes to take a nap.
Then that tall fella got elected Mayor in that big city by the racetrack and figured he’d turn us into a Big City like the ones you’d see in Life magazine. Thought he’d kick-start that by swiping a football team to put in his new stadium smack downtown. That might get folks to pick up their trash and look at the pretty flowers they’d planted all over downtown. Seemed a fairly wacky scheme at the time, but what the heck, nothing else was going on.
Couple of decades later, we bring home the Lombardi trophy and get to host the big game, ably, a few years later, without having to rename Georgia street. Throw in a big convention center, an NCAA headquarters and a NASCAR event and people all around the country were thinking, maybe, just maybe, there was more than corn (and a racetrack with a hovering blimp) in Indiana.
Enter Mike Pence and the General Assembly that cracked the genetic code of plain stupid. First off, the Hoosier state can gerrymander legislative districts with the best of ‘em. Not a meaningfully competitive seat in the house or senate, for that matter. After the 2010 census, the fresh crop of tea partying crazies got to redraw the maps to try and improve on the state’s ninety-five plus percent re-election rate. Which means- even more crazy crazies who get to stay around as long as they want…
In the 2014 session, the boys at the copper-domed asylum in Indianapolis decided it was IMPERATIVE to protect traditional Indiana heterosexual-marriages from the dangers posed by sinful notion that folks who wanted to be in other-than-heterosexual marriages might be allowed to act on that notion. It was such a pressing issue that they had to act immediately, and constitutionally, to assure that gay and lesbian nuptials could never occur, lest the space-time continuum be ripped asunder, and the wrath of God summoned from the heavens.
The Democrat uber-minority, whose best tactic of these last few years is to flee the capitol and hide out in Illinois until the crazies gavel it sine die. Makes for fun news stories, but really only frees up seats in the chamber so the lobbyists can sit closer to the elected folks. Oddly enough, this time they stayed and got really, really fired up over this crazy attack on civil rights and were joined by thousands of activists and protesters in the first serious demonstrations at the statehouse in 20 years.
Long story short, it didn't happen. In fact- a judge on the federal court issued a stay on the previous statute prohibiting same-sex marriage and licenses began to be issued in June 2014 to same-sex couples.
As for the reactionary 2015 edition of the General Assembly- not to be outdone in terms of utter failure, they passed a little gem called RFRA or SB 101. This ignited more demonstrations, protests and editorials. It also got us national, even international recognition for our remarkable advances in cutting-edge paleolithic legislation. Signed into law by Governor Pence on March 26th, it assures- forever- that no Hoosier will ever be forced to bake a gay wedding cake or serve pizza to sinners.
Our intrepid Governor, aware of the threatened boycotts against our misunderstood, but quite dependent on convention and tourism as an economic driver Hoosier state, attempted to soften the perception of this law by posing with a diverse group of open-minded progressives at the signing.
The original RFR act was a federal law from 1993, later overturned by the Supreme Court, intended to allow native religions the right to use otherwise illegal traditional hallucinogens in their religious ceremonies. Subsequent legislation was passed to allow ayahuasca use and eliminate state interference with federally-protected peyote use by the Native American Church.
The 2014 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., granted a for-profit business the right to exert its religious belief in it’s business practice and employee relations. Nineteen members of Congress filed a brief in the proceedings, as signatories to the original 1993 RFRA, opposing the expansion of the original intend of the law to for-profit corporations, claiming the law as passed: “extended free-exercise rights only to individuals and to religious, non-profit organizations. No Supreme Court precedent had extended free-exercise rights to secular, for-profit corporations.”
Now that no Hoosier can be forced into making cakes and pizza for gay weddings, risking their immortal souls, it would seem they could actually take 2016 off . But- they showed back up in January.
Can’t wait until April and see what the wise elders came up with this year…
