Traditionally one of the more liberal Southern states, North Carolina has been going down the tubes since the state government turned Republican in 2013. It’s got a Republican governor (Pat McCrory), and both houses of the legislature are majority Republican. That hasn’t happened since the Civil War!
One of the most obvious signs of this hegemony is how the state is dismantling what has long been an excellent state system of higher education, something my colleagues in North Carolina report to me regularly. Perceiving a “liberal bias” in state education (probably true given the conservative bent of the state’s inhabitants), the legislature has closed institutes dealing with poverty and biodiversity, forced the president of the Universities of North Carolina to resign (he was a Democrat), and replaced most of the University’s Board of Governors with Republicans. Some legislators tried to do away with tenure, and faculty at state universities haven’t had a raise in about five years.
This is what Republicans do when they control a state. The latest shenanigans, as reported in The New York Times, involve gay marriage. Both houses of the legislature have passed a law that permits a state officials to deny marriage licenses and refuse to perform marriages of gay people if those acts defy the religious sentiments of that official.
The bizarre aspect of this homophobic law is that it was vetoed by the Republican governor, and both houses of the legislature overrode the veto.
And if the Supreme Court rules this year that gay marriage is a constitutional right, as I expect it will (my prediction is that the ruling will be 6-3 in favor), this law will be unconstitutional, just as Alabama’s current refusal to grant licenses for same-sex marriage violates a federal court order. Everything’s on hold until the Supreme Court rules. But the Republicans are busy doing damage on other fronts:
The measure is one of a string of bills in states like Indiana, Arkansas and Louisiana to allow people to circumvent equal protection for same-sex couples on grounds of religious freedom. It is also part of a series of sharply conservative bills passed by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature, including a bill signed last Friday by the governor that requires women who seek abortions to wait 72 hours before they can undergo the procedure.
Here’s Rachel Maddow on June 2 talking about the law, and noting that it has ramifications beyond gay marriage: it could permit refusals to allow marriages between people of different faiths, or even different races, based on religious conviction. As the Times notes, “However, the bill itself contains no language about same-sex marriage, leaving open the possibility that it could be used to refuse to perform any marriage for any reason.”
And so proceeds, as one of my colleagues in the state noted, “The Alabamafication of North Carolina.”
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I really don’t understand the vicious hate of tenure by conservatives. Even if one is a die-hard free market capitalist it makes no sense, as in the free market tenure (and other forms of job security) is simply part of the benefits package that employers and employees can negotiate on.
In fact if we look back several decades before all this arch-conservativism started, IMO we see that this is pretty much how the market treated it: professors have typically had lower pay than their corporate counterparts, which is fully consistent with the hypothesis that employees (and employers) value the “professorial benefits package” (both tangibles and intangibles) higher than a typical corporate package.
You wrote, “I really don’t understand the vicious hate of tenure by conservatives….[I]t makes no sense….
Since when do religious conservatives care whether what they do makes sense?
If a lot of those tenured professors were hardcore republicans, and not a bunch of humanist, lily-livered Democrats, then tenure would not be an issue. Republicans would be as glad to have it as the rest of us.
Even if one is a die-hard free market capitalist it makes no sense,
This is assuming, rather generously, that free-marketers actually take their own economic policy seriously, rather than use it as a PR mask to enable predatory rent-seeking for fat cats. When you want to rake in more by spending less, and can do so best by forcing a wages’ “race to the bottom” upon employees, even decent job security is about as welcome as bankruptcy. The whole point is that employees “should” have little to no sway in negotiations. And if you can rig the game so that there’s nowhere better for them to go, all the easier it becomes.
Free market and negation is the biggest lie going around.
Exactly, in almost all economic chat by politicos it will make far more sense if you make the substitutions:
free-marketeers –> rentiers
free market –> rent-seeking
Anti-intellectualism is now a main plank in the GOP platform. It isn’t just Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin anymore. Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Mike Huckabee are selling pretty much unadulterated anti-intellectualism – and they’re just in the dozen or so running for president. The GOP is now like the assholes in junior high school who managed to convince people it wasn’t cool to be smart and their voter base are same people from junior high who idolized those assholes.
The basic truth of American conservatives is this: There has never been an honest American conservative. Heck, there has never been a minimally decent one.
As such, to them contracts, treaties, international laws that they helped draft? Are just so many pieces of paper.
The American conservative despises the New Deal, because they despise the thought of upholding their end in any deal.
I disagree. I think there are honest, yet ignorant, conservatives. I was one of them. When I staunchly advocated for the conservative Catholic position, I hadn’t fully considered other views. I often find myself thinking that I never really believed any of the religious nonsense, but I did. As Richard Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. That remains true: it is much easier to tell myself that I never really believed such disgusting and bigoted viewpoints, but I did. I believed them whole heartedly. Yes, it was ignorant belief, but true belief nonetheless.
One of my good friends was originally from NC. He can only stand the place in small doses. He calls it the “Bubba Factor”.
Given the wide range of that marriage bill, it seems it couldn’t possibly be constitutional.
The GOP: Big effing liars. (What was that 8th commandment about … ?)
It really annoys me when pundits talk about how divided and partisan current politics is, because (wait for it) the Republicans have moved right and the Democrats have moved left. No, not unless you count the distance to left as from the midpoint. You could make a case, perhaps, the the Democrats have moved a little left from the Clinton days, but the Republicans have moved so far right that they’re about to enter a political event horizon.
I’ve a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. The mass of the announced Republican candidates for President, factored in with the denseness of their policy positions, is approaching criticality. They’re already flirting with a singularity when they gather in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Mitt Romney’s country club, but this will probably come to a head in the first FOX NEWS debate (unless Chris Christie announces, in which case it will happen at that moment).
LOL – yes, extremely high density.
Haha that was a meaty joke.
“Hey, … where are we going … and why am we in a hand basket?!”
William Safire had a good piece on that phrase, in his great On Language column.
Meanwhile, the alliteration on that general concept must go farther back than that. Some 15yrs ago I saw painted on the ceiling of a very old church in Denmark, in a style from the 1700’s, a devil carting someone off to hell in a wheelbarrow. In Swedish (and so presumably similar in Danish), that would have been something along the lines of åt helvete i hulkärra.
I do miss Safire.
Glad someone else does, too.
And that should be åt helvete i hjulkärra in case anyone’s looking.
I was looking but, despite my Norwegian background, do not understand it or Swedish or Danish…
Neither do they! 🙂 Or the Finns.
I can almost read the Scandinavian languages from knowing German fairly well; but understanding them spoken? Especially Danish? Forget it.
The version of the phrase I am familiar with is ‘going to hell in a handcart’ which is consistent with the church ceiling picture you saw.
Thx!!
Maybe like the cart in “Bring out your dead?”
The law is probably unconstitutional no matter how SCOTUS rules on Obergefell. It establishes a religious test for constitutionally protected benefits. The law tagets same sex marriage, but it could be used for a magistrate to refuse a license on any grounds s/he finds religiously objectionable: interracial, interreligious, divorced person(s), hair color, you name it.
They had to do it that way because they were afraid of explicitly saying what they really mean: We hate gays.
Which, as you point out, makes it extremely vulnerable to challenge.
Even the right wing nuts now that “we hate gays” won’t really fly anymore. They are playing the butthurt card: That makes me SOOOO sad when you gay folk are allowed to be yourselves.
This business in North Carolina that Maddow is explaining is very important in understanding the deep mess this country is in when determining law and governing people. It sounds insane when you see what they are doing there with gay marriage and then stepping on every aspect of marriage but it should make everyone concerned with the question — how does the clock get rewound so far and so quickly in one state and then another?
Republican centered states are doing this all over the country on many important issues and it covers all aspects from medical health to education and marriage. It goes back to that thing they never settled when making the Constitution and that was sovereignty. Who gets to be in charge here, the federal or the state government.
The earlier version of James Madison thought the loss of federal control over the states was a disaster and he was right. He later changed his mind but he should see it today. What we have is a government that cannot cannot control the states or the people most of the time. And some of us like to call it democracy.
Maybe it would’ve been best to just let the Confederacy go during the Civil War…
Only problem is, that’s only 11 states out of 50 by today’s count. We need actually, national sovereignty and do away with that 10th amendment, I think. What we have now is so stupid and costly, is just a mess. Even on the most basic level, what the hell are 50 driver’s license for?
If something makes sense to do at a state level, it should be done at a state level. But your license example easily refutes the notion that every last thing the Founding Fathers didn’t think of should be ceded to the states. The argument doesn’t even make sense internally, for if too much power shouldn’t be centralized, what about municipalities within the states? Why should the state have power over them? The natural end to this progression approaches quickly as we approach full out anarchy–which is actually the precise result these “religious freedom” laws. Laws are useless when they can be circumvented by the subjective opinion of individual citizens.
The founders were also very afraid of central control. They had just escaped it. The first batch of states were settled by different groups for different reasons (e.g. Maryland for the Catholics) and people identified much more with their states than the nation. (That’s still sometimes true.) That didn’t really change until the Civil War.
Well, Texas at least.
Just more evidence that the GOP has been completely hijacked by the religious right- I don’t think that they have anything against tenure, per se; it’s just a way of getting rid of any obstacles against them removing anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
The Republicans were brilliant in their efforts to Gerrymander voting districts to make sure they could cling to power despite the will of the people. Having a Conservative SCOTUS and the redistricting of 2010 have led us to this disaster for reality-based policy and laws that honors our secular Constitution. Until we correct these two glaring subversions of our Constitutional Republic, the vast majority of Americans will continue to suffer the unrestrained scorched earth policy of the right-wing zealots of the GOP.
Exactly. But again, the gerrymandering and other political games are all powers to the states that further destroys and concept of legal government. The other party is likely never going to get a majority in the House and maybe not the Senate either. So you might still elect a democratic president who spends most of the time getting nothing done. The national government is left useless by the power of the states.
These two posts sum it up for me. 2020 will be the next census where gerrymandering *might* be addressed. It is agonizing to think the damage the GOP hacks can do to the country in the meantime. It’s amazing how quickly a state can spiral into disarray…the south today is state dominoes, all of them falling over one another, deeper into anti-democratic policies and extreme approaches to governing.
The marriage-exemption law is bad, but not as bad as it might appear on cursory examination.
The law does not prevent any couple in North Carolina from obtaining a marriage license or from having a civil ceremony performed by an appropriate official. Nor does it prevent a same-sex couple (or any other couple) from obtaining these marriage services on exactly the same terms as any other couple.
What it does is allow certain employees (i.e., assistant registers of deeds and magistrates) to opt out of personally performing all marriage-related functions for all couples of any gender or other combination for period of six months, if the employee objects on “sincerely held religious” grounds to any aspect of the current marriage law. The exemption period then is renewable indefinitely.
In that circumstance, the marriage-related functions still have to be performed — either by another employee in the office or, if all other exemption-eligible employees in the office have opted out, by an elected superior (i.e., the register of deeds or the chief judge of the circuit court). In other words, the law effectively creates partial no-show jobs for some privileged employees who get to go fishing part of the day — and in some cases a big part of the day. But it doesn’t permit the state to actually deny civil marriages to anyone or to issue them on unequal terms.
In fact, if there are enough religious zealots in a county, the perfunctory marriage duties that offend their sensibilities ironically get elevated in stature — from a license issued by a lowly assistant to one issued by the register of deeds and from a wedding performed by a lowly magistrate to one performed by the chief judge of the circuit court.
Now that’s showing ’em. If they give us any more trouble, we’ll make them accept a plaque and have a highway named after them.
Do you mean to say that the Register of Deeds and the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court cannot claim the religious objection exemption?
Yes. Only underlings get to claim the exemption. Their bosses are out of luck.
In some rural counties, there is only one assistant register, which might mean that the register herself couldn’t take a vacation, go on maternity leave, etc., because the new law requires licenses to be available at least 10 hours a week over three business days. And some circuits cover multiple counties, which can’t make the chief judges too happy about their new duties, either. My guess is that hardly any employees are going to invoke the exemption because they don’t want everybody they work with mad at them. But we shall see. I do know that the registers were quietly trying to kill this thing in the North Carolina House, but, as elected officials, they were reluctant to make waves. Being excessively reasonable in public is not our way.
North Carolina really does seem to be going to hell in a handbasket. Check out this article about Harry Chase, then President of the University of North Carolina, that appeared in the June, 1929 issue of H. L. Mencken’s “American Mercury.”
http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1929jun-00183
Apparently Chase had something that is a rare commodity among university presidents today – a backbone. He calmly stood up to the religious fanatics who wanted to gut his programs then as now, and won! The article also mentions that William Louis Poteat, President at Wake Forest, decidedly a Baptist college in those days, had already been teaching evolution there for a generation! Evidently there were fewer imbeciles in the state legislature in 1929 then there are now, and the people of NC had more common sense. Then again, it hadn’t occurred to a large segment of the ideological Left to crawl into bed with Moslem religious fanatics back in 1929. That probably made things a bit easier for the likes of Chase and Poteat.
Crawl, nicely put.
What certain Republicans want to do is trash public state universities in general. It’s a long-standing animosity dating back to the U.S. Civil War when southern politicians were opposed to land-grant universities:
“The goal of land-grant colleges was, among other things, to democratize this system: early supporters of such schools, writes historian Allan Nevins, believed that “no restrictions of class, or fortune, or sex, or geographical position—no restrictions whatsoever— should operate.” The same went for race. Justin Morrill, the senator who proposed the act, emphasized that African-Americans and Native Americans deserved schooling too.”
http://carnegie.org/publications/carnegie-reporter/single/view/article/item/318/
The GOP hates public education in general.
They want the money to have ALL the power. That’s why they hate public employee unions (Scott Walker*) and universities (what do these damned pro-fessers need tenure for? We need to be able to fire them at will, so we can control them!)
The majority of union members are now public employees — especially teachers — which is why the GOP is going after public schools. (The joke amongst teachers about Bush’s law was that it was, “No Public School Left Standing”. And if it hadn’t been scrapped, that’s what it would have done.
* That’s Walker’s claim to fame: He wrecked the public employee unions in my neighboring state. The tea-baggers are simply too ignorant (of history, economics, generally) to understand that lowering those “other people” lowers them too. The GOP plan has been a disaster for anyone not in the top 20% of incomes in the US.
Scott Walker is also a university drop-out — and damned proud of that. He’s an arch-anti-intellectual.
I just overheard some (dork) in the line at the breakfast cafeteria saying “I suppose you think the Democrats will take good care of your money!” Well … he (and every other American) owes it to themselves to check two plots:
The incomes of various levels of the US (easily found at the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the GOP wanted to stop making these data public when the trend became clear after Reaganomics)
And the federal deficits (and note under which party they occurred). The GOP is not a steward of the taxpayer — unless you think that the government ought to be borrowing money (in your name) to pay the wealthiest handful of people at the top — because that’s exactly what they’ve done.
The GOP program is to give all the money and all the power to those who really ‘deserve it’ — the wealthy.
And they’ll do whatever it takes to get there. As I tell my wife every election season: For the GOP, any lie will do (as long as it gets votes).
“The GOP plan has been a disaster for anyone not in the top 20% of incomes in the US”.
It’s a mystery why so many voters in the US vote against their own self interest and in the interest of those much better off than themselves.
A lot of people in the US (and to a lesser degree, here in Canada) simply don’t vote, likely because they feel the system is corrupt or what not.
A lot of people vote against their economic interests because the candiates share (or pretend to share) their *values*, like the antiintellectualism discussed. This is where the theocratic part of the theocratic plutocratic party comes in.
Counterfeit conservative patriots are always whining about the “liberal press” giving them a bad name.
Horseshit! The retards do it to themselves and then expect pity for creating their own unpopularity.
It’s so bad, that liberals have become what was once considered a MODERATE conservative.
Specifically addressing NC, I know a lot of people from out of state moved there to be less conspicuous in their bigotry, religious radicalism and racism / homophobia.
It’s a beautiful state geologically, but increasingly populated by theological protonazis.
As an outsider, I don’t get why so many positions in the US are political appointees. Jobs that in most places people have to apply for and get on merit, are elected or political appointments in the US. It’s not possible for a government to change who’s in charge of a university here, and I fail to see why that’s appropriate. To me it’s a system that creates corruption rather than dispels it, and is anathema to democracy.
I totally agree.
Your comment is ambiguous. “It’s not possible for a government to change who’s in charge of a university here, and I fail to see why that’s appropriate.”
Not sure which way you mean that?
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What with the middle of Pennsylvania, Alabama’s on track to become the largest state in the Union.
I think it really ought to be called ‘AlabamafUcation’.
Running scared and fear of a truth without god makes you irrational, but we know this.
I do not go right or left anymore if I can help it, it makes for a miserable life with your back to a wall. It also has this added affect of inhibiting intellectual growth.
At the marriage registry:
Who is going to marry the gays!
Start the death march CD and pass the GOP code of conduct manual!
music stops.
Oh f**k it’s me again. Will I get the handbag treatment?
No, minor minion, wear this protective suit.
– Tobacco Road (J.D. Loudermilk)
Link to the classic cover by Eric Burdon & the Animals here.
Woo hoo! ‘Faith vs Fact’ is published by Viking, and I could download it on the Kindle app for Australia!
WEIT – is published by Penguin who still won’t let go of the geographical nonsense.
In somewhat more heartening news, SCOTUS rejected NC’s bid to revive a law that would require women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound and have it described to them. It was deemedunconstitutional because it forced doctors to voice the state’s message discouraging abortion.
When are they going to bring back droit de seignure?