Faux* News: County Clerk Defiance Movement Spreads

Faux News Exclusive Report, September 3, 2015

Inspired by Kentucky clerk Kim Davis county clerks in Arkansas, Kansas, and South Carolina announced that they, too, had sincere religious and moral reservations and joined in the movement to refuse executing parts of their jobs.    Four clerks in three states have announced religious objections to certain governmental acts and have cited Davis and Republican candidates' statements as justification and encouragement for their decisions.

The three areas of religious objection involve interfaith marriage, concealed carry permits, and interracial marriage.

Ted Cruz, Texas Senator and candidate for president said "Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith.   This is wrong.  This is not America."  Robert "Bobby" Sewell, county clerk in Boone County, Arkansas cited the encouragement of Cruz in his statement and agreed with Cruz.  "Right and wrong is spelled out in the Bible. This is America, not Kenya," Sewell said.  

"I am obeying God's law," Sewell said in a prepared statement on the Boone County courthouse steps.   Sewell said he was encouraged by Davis but the catalyst was the engagement of the son of a long time family friend to a Catholic girl.  "The pope is the anti-Christ, and Catholics consider the anti-Christ the head of their church.   I cannot support a marriage that causes a protestant evangelical to marry into the church of Satan.  So I'm not issuing that marriage license.   When Catholics marry each other the damage is already done. They are keeping it in the family and will see hell together.   But when a Catholic draws in a boy from a good family of good churchgoer, I just can't live with my conscience."

Sewell said that the young man refused a marriage license was well known to Sewell and his family and had done lawn and pruning work for Sewell in the past.   He said he didn't know the girl and had no animosity toward her personally other than that she "was Catholic and going to hell."

Johnson County, Kansas county clerk Allison Roberts and assistant clerk Lucy Williamson  said they had seen too much gun violence to turn a blind eye to the damage caused by "the free for all in gun ownership."   They published a joint announcement that beginning September 2, 2015 they would no longer issue concealed carry permits, as authorized by Kansas law.  "People think it is cool to 'pack', Roberts said.  "Jesus said we should turn the other cheek," Roberts and Williamson said in a hastily called press conference.   "People get liquored up, get into some argument, then shoot somebody.  Black people, white people, everyone.   They get a pit bull and they get a gun and they walk around looking for fights.   The gun stuff is totally against my religion and I'm not going to issue any more permits, period."

Salem County South Carolina clerk Paul Robertson said he believed races were never meant to mix and cites the story of Noah and the Arc as his biblical justification.   "The different animals went on two by two.   White folks, black folks, yellow folks all of them, different continents, different people. But now they are getting all mixed together like Tiger Woods and Obama and other mongrel hybrid mixups."   Robertson said his opposition to inter-racial marriage was not based on racism but on the Bible, and that opposition to race mixing was a deep southern heritage.  "The Bible was clear and my loyalty is to God.  And to tradition."

Governor Huckabee, a strong supporter of Kim Davis, upon hearing of the movement said he fully endorsed people obeying Bible law.   "But I have to disagree with the Kansas people, who have stepped over the line.   Gun ownership and the right to bear arms means just what it says, the right to bear arms.   Jesus wanted people to protect life and liberty," Huckabee said.   "That means it is right to protect yourself and your family and community.   Sometimes that means using your God given right to a gun, to protect the innocent."   The Kansas county clerk action refusing concealed carry permits elicited universal condemnation from Republican candidates.

County clerks supporting the defiance movement have formed a Facebook group and have received 42,000 "friends" within 30 hours of its formation.  At this writing these 4 officials have formally announced their religious objections and intent to defy court orders, but comments in the Facebook page are urging other clerks to follow the example of Sewell and Robertson.   Comments on the Kansas clerks refusing gun permits have been overwhelmingly negative.

(Legal notice:   Per free legal advice from my in-house legal counsel I wish to note that the word "Faux" is French for False.   The quotation from Ted Cruz is accurate.  He really said that.   The rest of this is made up.  Pretend.  Faux.  But, Jeeze, if Kim Davis can exercise her "right" both to keep her job and refuse to do it, and be supported by presidential candidates, it only seems reasonable that other county clerks who oppose other things might want to get onto the bandwagon.  What kind of gun would Jesus carry?  Handgun?  AR-15?  Would he carry his own ammunition or have a disciple carry it for him, so he would have his hands free for blessing people?)

Donald Trump and Political Correctness--Racism comes out of the closet

Donald Trump has done us a favor and we should thank him.   His frank and unapologetic manner and words, and his celebration of plain talk instead of political correctness, has taken the veil off the racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual attitudes that are the social values orthodoxy expressed by the 17 Republican candidates for president.

Donald Trump is the popular because he is voicing the politics of George Wallace of the 1960s, and he isn't bothering to hide it.   And the 16 other Republican Party candidates for President, watching his success, are opening up themselves and revealing that social values conservative orthodoxy gets some of its energy from resentment over the displacement of white, Christian, heterosexual, native born Americans as the sole expression of Americanism.   

A refrain heard again and again is "take our country back."   What are they talking about?  Who is "our"?   And what is "back"?    

"Our" means regular, normal people:  white, Christian, church-going, heterosexual, American born of American born parents, with men in charge and women content to serve those men..   And "back" means a world when people who didn't fit that profile were understood both by you and by them to be inferior, wrong, unequal, and powerless.

Fox News is losing its place as the purest voice of the Republican Party.   The constraints of mass audience television forces their anchors and spokespeople to condemn Fox enemies with a bit of care in their language.   They cannot embarrass mass market advertisers.  The Trump-Fox debate tiff exposes the Fox strategic vulnerability.  They need to be a little bit politically correct.

Donald Trump is not so constrained.   He is speaking another language, the language of talk radio.  The language of plain talk.  He loves being outrageous, and he is loved for it.  Jeb Bush is "weak", Anthony Weiner is "a perv", Mexicans are rapists, except a few that aren't.

"Political correctness" requires that words avoid open disrespect and contempt:  
  Say "undocumented", not  "illegal alien".
  Say "Asian", not "Chink." 
  Say "Black" or "urban" or "central city", not "nigger."  
  Say "Hispanic", not "wetback".   
  Say "homosexual" or "LGBT", not "faggot" or "queer".

Political correctness requires you not tell sexual jokes at work, you not call women managers "bitches", you not hint that a female TV anchor asked tough questions because she was menstruating and in a grouchy mood.

Political correctness keeps prejudice in the closet.

The fact that respectful language is termed "political correctness", and is resented for its constraints, reveals the underlying secret.   Political correctness is a restraint when one needs to disguise the feelings that come first to mind when voicing certain things and use the polite language, not the frank language that reflects the contempt or resentment one feels.   Open prejudice and racial-religious-sexual contempt is no longer acceptable in polite company, but the feelings of resentment continue.  

What to do?   Disguise and misdirect.

George Wallace of the early 1960s spoke of "segregation now, segregation forever" but by October 1968, when I heard him speak on Boston Common he asserted that he was no longer prejudiced on the basis of race.  But he got his message across by condemning and mocking "protesters", the advocates for civil rights.  Overtly, it was a new target, but he ginned up the same resentment in Boston's ethnic working class population.  But his was a billiards bank shot, an attack on protesters, not blacks.   But the audience gets it.

Trump is franker than Fox, which worries Fox and worries the Republican establishment.   Some things should not be said aloud.  But the Republican candidates are moving in the direction of Trump: Trump light.

Below is an opinion piece, blaming liberals for the rise of Trump.   After all, it is liberals who have created the environment where a guy cannot call a spade a spade.



http://townhall.com/columnists/secupp/2015/08/27/blame-liberals-for-the-rise-of-trump-n2044818/page/full

The 14th Amendment is a wonderful thing. Shame on people who want to ignore it, or define it away.

The 14th Amendment is a glorious thing, an expression in law and the constitution of the founding aspirations of our country, the self evident truth that all people are created equal.

The 14th Amendment begins:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Yesterday I watched Megyn Kelly attempt to pin down Ted Cruz on whether he agreed with Donald Trump in saying that children born in the US, who have one or more parent of foreign nationality, should be deported immediately and be allowed back only conditionally.   He said this was the wrong question.   Megyn persisted, saying it was an easy yes or no question that Donald Trump has put on the table, with a clear position saying "Yes."   Do you agree, she asked again.   

And, again, Ted Cruz refused an answer saying we needed to examine the whole immigration system.

Well, I will answer the question directly:   Of course not.   Children born in the US are citizens of the United States.   Their parents might not be, but they are.  American citizens are "persons", who cannot be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

It is the Constitution, and it is good.   I have witnessed the mess in Israel where there are a vast number of people in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River who are now in their 2nd and 3rd generation of non-citizenship.   Non citizenship creates stateless people, people with diminished or zero rights, who are locked into an underclass, people who are frustrated, angry, resentful, and easily drawn toward revolution and violence.   They don't have "buy in" because in fact they are not in.

China has its own version of this chaos, with its rules about residency.   Rural people move to the coastal cities, find work, but lack the privileges of local residency in those cities.  Their children cannot attend schools there, they "belong" elsewhere.   This internal population is frustrated, angry, resentful, and is part of the political instability of their country.

But we need not look to foreign countries to see the problem of an un-integrated population.   We had a legal underclass of noncitizen residents, an enslaved population, counting as 3/5 for purposes of representation but lacking citizenship rights.   American fought a civil war to cure this, then notwithstanding this 14th Amendment had another century of legalized segregation, vote suppression, lynching, terror, all-white juries, and oppression.   America has a long ugly history of oppression racial and ethnic minorities, and having residents with diminished rights enabled that in the past and enables it in the present.

Americans forget our own history of our founding.    Colonists in the British colonies resented lacking the rights and powers of their fellow citizens in Britain.   Since we were not accorded the right of representation in Parliament  one of the privileges of citizenship, Britain had no right to tax us, we asserted.   The colonists protested, the rioted, they revolted and took arms against lawful government.   We were born here, we lived here, but lacked equal rights--no way.   

Yet today, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and now other candidates are jumping on the bandwagon to deny equal rights to some native born persons.

How dare they say the Pledge of Allegiance:  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."   Justice for all.   All persons.   

Hillary Clinton event in Portland, August 5, 2015: This is a product of the "photo op". Hillary was gracious, smiley, and quick. I would estimate 20 seconds per person. Your name is announced by a staffer, then a handshake with Hillary, then the guest says something, Hillary responds very appropriately, then the two face the camera, click, the next person is announced

A look back to the Hillary Clinton Event in Portland, Oregon, August 5, 2015

It was a pure expression of the Hillary/Sanders match up.   Bernie spoke to crowds, and excited them.  My preferred candidate, Hillary, raised some very useful money, very well and competently.  But not passionately.

Bernie was coming to Portland in a couple of days for an event and some 20,000 were expected, and that is how many showed up, it turns out.  We later learned that it was the largest event in the campaign so far, in either party, more people than Trump.     The Hillary event was at a lovely home in a great area of Portland.   A fundraiser.  The capacity was 157, set by a fire marshall. There was a minimum donation of $2,700.   She stood and chatted with people in an orderly reception line for a little over an hour, then moved directly to a dais where she spoke extemporaneously for another hour.

She looked vigorous.   She didn't look tired in the least, standing for 2 hours and 15 minutes.  She wore flat shoes.  I had worried that she was looking haggard in some of her Secretary of State photos.   She never sat, not for a moment.

The event raised some $500,000, and it was the second of three events for the day.   Her jet flew her from Salt Lake City for a brunch reception, to this afternoon reception, and then on to Atherton, California, the Mother Lode of tech money.

She said all the right things for this audience:   support for Planned Parenthood, support for the Iran agreement, support for early childhood education, support for reversing the mass incarceration policy of the drug war, support for empowering the middle class, a higher minimum wage

I was struck by what she did not say:  actual firm policy regarding breaking up break up the big banks, Keystone Pipeline, free trade TransPacific Partnership.   She spoke generally and did not make waves or enemies within a Democratic donor class crowd.   I am in that crowd.  I was comfortable.  I was delighted by the chitchat while we had our photos taken.

But it was prose, not poetry.   There was a template of good things, but it wasn't set to music.   It pleased my good mature judgement.   But I want my heart to beat fast with real excitement.  I wanted some vision of some sort of better improved world.  I wanted something uplifting to be said, but it wasn't, at least not yet.  Maybe someone can write her a speech, something that soars about the possibilities of some better world, not just another decade of the current grind.

I want transformation, and Obama offered it.   But the world didn't transform.   Hillary offers an experienced competent warrior in a world of ugly endless political trench warfare.   The Democratic candidate will have a billion dollars spent on ads attacking her.    I was hoping for something better than a fight, but if that is what we are doomed to be in, then Hillary knows what to do in a fight.

Note a vigorous Hillary, toward the end of her talk.

Seeing what the camera doesn't show.

The big TV cameras show one version of political events, as they point at the candidate and scan the crowd.   But there is another view of these events, the view from the audience side, amid the jostling of the crowd, the comments people make to one another, the thrill or disappointment at the size of the audience, the security arrangements.  

And perhaps most important is whether the audience thinks they are seeing the next president and are full of hope and anticipation, or whether they are watching the political equivalent of a bull fight and the slow ritual death of a doomed animal, weakened by the little stabs of bad press, disappointing fundraising, and superior competition.

There are lots of candidates but only one desk at the oval office.   We are going to see a lot of slow deaths.   I want to see it up close.