New Orleans We’re living in bizarre times without easy explanations, making it hard not to start drawing straight lines in our mind about things that might normally have seemed simply examples of random events, but the examples abound.
The legislature is meeting currently in Arkansas for instance. News reports indicated that there was a difficulty in the conservative Republican legislature in passing an “open carry” law for college campuses in the state similar to what exists in Texas. They worked it out a compromise by passing the “open carry” for colleges but also adding that “open carry” would be extended to bars and other venues. Yikes!
They had a similar problem when some of them wanted to make the Bible the state book. A number of them thought that was a grand idea, but a couple of wet blankets among the thumping crowd thought it might demean the Bible and be sacrilegious. More seriously, I listened to a lot of discussion about a bill that kept failing and being pulled back up until it passed that essentially said that any time a school district closed a school for any reason a charter school operator would have first dibs on taking the school over. Since Little Rock schools were pretty arbitrarily taken over by the state, many of the opponents of the takeover see the state legislature’s action as just another backdoor move to force charter schools into the district to make the Waltons happy.
But, before anyone gets the big head, looking at state legislatures in many of the Republican controlled states is clear evidence that Arkansas is neither the first, nor the last, in this kind of weird world. Federal courts had to strike down a Louisiana legislative act that tried to bar nude dancing in strip clubs in that famously wide open state for young women between 18 and 20, because it not only abridged their free speech as determined in the past by the US Supreme Court, but there was also no way the judge could find any evidence that the bill was really about sex trafficking despite the legislatures cover story.
Seems a bit like Muslim Ban 1.0 and now Muslim Ban 2.0. It really isn’t enough to protect you from the US Constitution and the rights it offers against discrimination because of religion or national origin, to insert a sentence or two in the new ban that says, hey, this isn’t discrimination. Judges and lawyers may have been born at night, just not last night.
Meanwhile as Russian knocks on the door of the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1917 in a surprise Prime Minister Putin has put the kibosh on any kind of big celebration of what any would acknowledge as one of the seminal events of world history in the 20th century. According to spokespeople in Russia, the government is of two minds. On one hand Putin doesn’t want to remind anyone that revolution might be a good idea, because in his view that would be a very bad idea. And, on the other hand there are many others in the country who see the end of the Soviet era, according to a spokesperson, as being “like Brexit,” the vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. You can’t make this stuff up!
Ok, all this is random, but so bizarrely connected that it’s enough to prevent anything like clear thinking on any given morning. That’s my excuse anyway. I wonder what theirs might be.