From Pine View Farm

An Upsidedown Cake 2

Writing about Indiana’s recent decision to give legislative sanction to sanctimonious bigots, Emily Mills wonders what would happen if the cake were turned upside down (emphasis added).

It’s not just LGBTQ people who will be affected. The language is general enough that really anyone could decide to violate the Civil Rights Act and claim that it’s all part of exercising one’s religious “freedom.”

That’s the biggest problem with laws like this one. The people who write them do so with an intensely myopic view of the scope, one focused almost solely on their own personal pet peeves, instead of seeing the way it could be applied right back at them. Say a gay couple owns a bakery, and decides they don’t want to serve the Republican couple that comes in to have a wedding cake made. The proprietors could claim that serving Republicans violates their own religious beliefs. Turnabout is fair play. Except when it’s not.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    March 31, 2015 at 1:26 pm

    We can write about it and John Oliver can make as much ridicule humor of it as needed. In the end, the only solution is what was done in California. After years of ruin, the Republicans were driven from every position of power in the state because the people they hated on so thoroughly rose up, voted in masses, and ran them out. LA County, as you must know, has more people living in it then quite a few of the lily white red states with reactionary legislatures. So attacking brown people in CA eventually proved suicidal for the fascists. In the bigger picture, the fascists benefit because it doesn’t really matter how -I- vote in the Presidential election, Cal will be blue, so the huge mass is not adequately represented by the artifice called the electoral college.

    In the mean time, the insane right doesn’t care how much calumny is heaped on it over Indiana. Mike Pence cares now but it’s easy to see his instinct is to go down fighting, whatever it costs the state. They are affirmed when a majority recoils at what they do. They have the power of unity.

    My call is Indiana is, in the end, going to be only a minor setback. They’ll just become more tenacious and busy, rewriting state codes and laws faster than they can be repealed or opposed. I recommended economic sanctions, state vs state, awhile ago. Nobody can make it stick. In fact, you can see some might view it as just the thing on the other side, a de facto split in the continuing Civil War.
    stick.

     
  2. George Smith

    March 31, 2015 at 1:33 pm

    If one really wanted to enact a boycott, states and companies would take it a step further and us real world embargo. Apple, since it control every aspect of its business with an iron hand, could refuse to sell iJunk in Indiana. That would create and immediate and huge problem and force the state into creating a black market. Google could block Indiana-based ISPs, forcing users to go through out of state proxies or into use of anonymizers. A big blue state could treat Indiana like the US government treats Iran, or the world treated South Africa at the height of apartheid.

    You could have a rolling and progressive dissolution of the union. Why, for example, should California allow shipment of its agricultural goods, almost all harvested by brown people under hellish conditions, to red states that are busy using government to attack those same people because of their color and alleged status?