BY BOB BEARDEN
Tennessee just passed an anti-LGBT law similar to the one North Carolina passed a couple of weeks ago. Pointy-headed logic I guess says if you go back to the future things will be great again just like you remember them when that old LaSalle you owned ran great, right?
Taint necessarily so, McKee. You can’t legislate morality and you can’t make onerous laws that attempt to stem the tide of social progress.
As Rudyard Kipling said in his epic, prescient poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, “As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man, There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
Why the southern GOP state legislators keep thinking they can somehow turn the tide of social progress and make things go back to the racist and bigoted days they so seem to love is beyond me. As someone said [might even have been a Republican who knows?], “You can’t stand in the way of progress!”
But then the Scopes monkey trial was more than 90-plus years ago and the pointy-heads in Texas are still trying to teach children that creationism trumps the science of evolution. They are putting things in our children’s school books that deny slavery ever happened. That an apple led to the creation of man. That climate change isn’t happening.
Why, as Kipling said, “They deny the moon is stilton, or that it is even Dutch!”
North Carolina is already starting to feel the backlash as “The Boss,” Bruce Springsteen, has told them where they can stick their money and their onerous law and has cancelled his upcoming concert there. He won’t likely be traveling to Tennessee anytime soon, either. Good for him! We need more socially conscious entertainers like The Boss to stand up for what’s right.
And now the NBA, whose All-Star game is scheduled for Charlotte next year, is considering moving it to another city. Stupid laws do have consequences and dumb, pointy-headed, racist and bigoted decisions by ignorant backward thinking politicians can and do have negative impacts on the states they trot them out in.
These laws are not only onerous in nature but they don’t take into consideration the impact that passing a racist and bigoted law can have on the economy of a state and its citizens. Money talks, and in these cases it’s well that it should. If common sense can’t override the stupidity of idiot state legislators, money can and usually does.
These people who pass and design these types of laws really do think with their pocketbooks and not their minds [probably because their minds are a cesspool of insensitivity and just plain stupidity]. When the pocketbooks of the corporations they have lured to their states start to speak, just like E.F. Hutton they listen.
It would be nice if they actually used their heads for something besides a hat rack but as Forest Gump’s mother once told him, “Stupid is as stupid does!”
– Bob Bearden is a trustee of the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation, a member of Mayflower Congregational Church, UCC, and a frequent contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
