The Bad and The Good ... Monday April 11, 2022

These really are the easiest posts to compile, because, literally, there are dumb people everywhere ... but that's what makes it so frightening. So this week, I decided to include some Good News as sort of a palette cleanser for the crazies …

ALABAMA

GOP Governor Kay Ivey has signed two anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law, a day after the state Legislature passed the legislation along party lines on the last day of the legislative session.

SB184 criminalizes gender-affirming surgeries for trans youth.

HB322, is Alabama’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which also only allows people in schools to use the bathroom of the gender listed on their birth certificate.

Alabama and Kay Ivey and the GOP hate LGBTQ+ people.

Washington DC

Six GOP Congress members opposed a bill passed last week that encouraged efforts to document and preserve evidence of Russian war crimes during the war in Ukraine.

They don’t want to see evidence of war crimes because they don’t want to make Putin angry.

The six are, no surprise: Andy Biggs, Warren Davidson, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tom Massie, and Scott Perry, and they are all  members of the House Freedom Caucus.

Vote. Them. Out.

Oklahoma

The GOP-controlled House gave final legislative approval last week to a bill that would make performing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The bill will be sent to GOP Governor Kevin Stitt who says he will sign any anti-abortion bill that comes to his desk.

Governor Stitt, who contracted COVID in July 2020, announced a statewide day of fasting and prayer against COVID in December 2020.

On his inauguration day in January 2019, he declared that the primary mission of his administration would be to “bring people to Jesus.”

In April 2021, he signed into law a bill that legalizes running over protesters.

Cuz that’s what Jesus would do.

Tennessee

House and Senate Republicans are voting on legislation this week that would bypass the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that finds same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as their different-sex peers.

The bill creates all-age marriages classified as common-law “one man and one woman” unions while mandating the state defend in court any clerk who decides to not issue a marriage license for any reason.

Yes, The Gays can’t marry, but adults can marry children in Tennessee.

And now for some Good News …

KENTUCKY

Democratic Governor Andy Beshear vetoed a Republican-priority measure that would ban abortions in Kentucky after 15 weeks of pregnancy and regulate the dispensing of abortion pills because he questioned the constitutionality of the bill and criticized it for not including exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

As an example, he said that a girl impregnated by her father—raped by her father—would have to notify him of her intent to get an abortion.

State lawmakers will have a chance to override the veto when they reconvene next week for the final two days of this year’s 60-day legislative session.

COLORADO

The left-leaning state has just enacted a law that enshrines a woman’s right to have an abortion in the state.

The Reproductive Health Equity Act affirms that pregnant people in Colorado have the right to continue a pregnancy and give birth or have an abortion, and it blocks public entities from denying or restricting that right.

Colorado joins 15 other states and Washington, D.C., in codifying the right to have an abortion either prior to a fetus's viability or throughout a pregnancy in state law.

CALIFORNIA

The California Senate Judiciary Committee passed SB 1327—legislation authored by Democratic Senator Robert Hertzberg and sponsored by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom—to limit the spread of assault weapons and ghost guns.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last December allowing Texas’s ban on most abortion services to remain in place, Governor Newsom directed his Administration to work with the Legislature to propose a measure, modeled on the structure of Texas’s abortion law, to enable private citizens to hold the gun industry accountable through civil litigation for the proliferation of illegal firearms.

SB 1327 allows private citizens to bring civil actions against any person who manufactures, distributes, transports, imports into the state or sells assault weapons, .50 BMG rifles, ghost guns, or ghost gun kits.

WISCONSIN

Kelly Ruh, a Wisconsin official who two years ago posed as a presidential elector for Thing 45 in an to overturn the 2020 election, lost her re-election.

Ruh sought a second term as an alderperson in De Pere but lost to Pamela Gantz. She received a subpoena from Congress earlier this year over her involvement in Stop-the-Steal efforts.

Please note that the Good News, the sensible news, comes from Democrat-run states, and Democratic Governors. That speaks volumes.

Get educated and save yourselves from The Stupids.

And CAST A GODDAMNED VOTE!