Yahoo Finance Utah Is Allegedly Dealing with a McDonald's Porn Epidemic
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where Louis The King says, "Let me think for a minute, son."
We begin this week in Alabama, where the Anniston Star informs us that the city government of Oxford has looked at the great economic catastrophe that the now consistently insane state of North Carolina has visited upon itself with the Urinal Cooties Protection Act of 2016 and has asked that most fundamental of all local government questions: "Me some too, yes?"
The new law, approved unanimously by the council's members, restricts a person's use of public bathrooms and changing rooms to the facilities designated for use by those of the gender listed on his or her birth certificate. The law applies within both the city's limits and police jurisdiction. After members approved the new city ordinance, Council President Steven Waits read from a prepared statement. Waits said he and the council sought the law "not out of concerns for the 0.3 percent of the population who identify as transgender," but "to protect our women and children."
Protect them from what, exactly?
He said the measure isn't meant to be discriminatory, and comes in direct response to the bathroom and changing-room usage policy put forth by supermarket chain Target, which has a store at Oxford's Exchange shopping center. The company posted that policy in a blog on its website last week, referencing "recent debate around proposed laws in several states."
Target-the vanguard of the cultural elite.
Elsewhere in Alabama, the latest news from Appomattox has not yet reached the Secretary of State's office. From ThinkProgress:
At one such event this week, organized by the Ladies' Memorial Association, Alabama's Secretary of State John Merrill lamented recent calls to remove Confederate symbols from government buildings. "The next question that has to be asked is so what's the next thing you are going to do," he asked, "are you going to take a bulldozer to the monument and forget what people fought for to preserve a way of life that makes us special and unique?" Civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, slammed the remark as "shameful." But in a follow-up conversation with ThinkProgress, Merrill explained that the "way of life" he celebrates is based on Confederate soldiers' independent spirit, not their advocacy for slavery.
OK, that's bad enough, but dig the rest of this barrel of bullshit.
"When we have things happen in our state, we don't rely on the federal government to come take care of us," he said. "We take care of ourselves. For example, after the tornadoes in 2011, or after the massive flooding we had. That's who we are. That's who these people were. I'm proud of that."
You know what's coming, right?
Alabama, however, is the ninth most reliant on federal aid out of the 50 states, taking far more in aid than the state pays back in taxes. As for the 2011 tornado damage Merrill mentioned, an auditor recently found that the state improperly received about $1.2 million in federal aid that it now must pay back. Antebellum Alabama's "self-reliance," meanwhile, depended from its founding on the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of slaves.
Not to be a smug northeastern liberal or anything, but the fact that these people really believe this is actively harmful to the advance of American political life. I am my wit's end trying to explain this to people who have no reason to listen. Maybe somebody at Vox can do better.
Let us go, Alabama! Let us move along! OK, one more, from our old friend and pre-eminent judicial melonhead Roy Moore, who is still the chief justice in Alabama. (Some day, Alabama, we're going to have to have a real talk about this.) The folks at AL.com were there as Judge Roy got his robes in a bunch again over the Supreme Court and gay marriage.
Moore said the complaint to the JIC, which was filed in January, was politically motivated. He referred to one of the complainants, Ambrosia Starling, as being a "transvestite" who illegally performed a mock same-sex marriage ceremony in the state. Moore then referred to "transexuality" as being a "mental disorder" until 2013, when a diagnostic manual used by the medical community replaced gender identity disorder in the handbook.
If there is such a thing as his just reward, Roy Moore will die and go to heaven, and everybody there, including God Herself, will be named something like Ambrosia Starling.
Concealing ourselves in a railroad car full of mulch and bags of cement, we finally escape the Yellowhammer State and we find ourselves, as Top Commenter Roy Webb would put it, behind the Zion Curtain in Utah. The legislature there is wrestling with the problem of porn. The folks at Right Wing Watch bring us the tale of one bold solon who has gone right to the edge of the abyss-which, oddly enough, seems to be in a booth in the back of a McDonald's in Ogden or some place.
State Sen. Todd Weiler, a Republican, recently declared porn to be "a public health crisis." (Perhaps there has been a rise in carpal tunnel syndrome and some odd vision problems out there.) He urged libraries and McDonalds restaurants with WiFi to block pornography websites, claiming that he has heard anecdotally that children go to McDonalds to view pornographic websites: "I said to McDonalds, 'You're a family restaurant and you market to children, why would you want to be a purveyor of pornography?...You know, the librarians will put their hands over their hearts and talk about the First Amendment and yet if these libraries and these McDonalds were giving cigarettes to our children, we'd all be up in arms, we'd be picketing them. But somehow it's okay if they deliver pornography to them…Someone may have the First Amendment right, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, to view pornography. But what about my First Amendment right not to view it?"
I am trying very hard not to think of Weiler's sneaking around the fast food joints, peeping over the shoulders of everyone who's there with a laptop, desperately seeking porn that can oppress him. Also, to paraphrase Chief Marge Gunderson, I'm not too sure about your Constitution work there, Todd. There is no First Amendment right to not be offended by that which you see while being a public busybody.
Utah is just as hard to leave as Alabama was. It seems there's a movement to have an area called Bears Ears declared a national monument. Environmental groups are on board, as are five Native tribes, all of whom seem descended from the mysterious Anasazi. But, as the Salt Lake Tribune notes, they have reckoned without one intrepid lawmaker and some Utah government body called the Constitutional Defense Council which, just judging by its name, can not mean anything good.
Noel denounces this tribal buy-in as a "charade" manufactured by meddling outside environmental groups that pay Utah Dine Bikeyah board members and bankroll their lobbying forays to Washington. His call for a probe into the group's finances and relationships drew numerous rebukes. Under pressure from the lone Democrat at the table Wednesday, Rep. Brian King, of Salt Lake City, the Constitutional Defense Council expanded its resolution and will probe all groups involved with Bears Ears, both for and against the monument. King said Noel's probe smacks of a "witch hunt" and falls outside the scope of the council's statutory duties, which focus on asserting state sovereignty against an overbearing federal government. Investigating those with whom the council has a political disagreement is an "intimidation bullying tactic," King said.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Silica Sifter Friedman of the Plains brings us a tale of what happens if you allow state judges to split hairs and you find that they've split them right down past their skullbones. From Oklahoma Watch:
On March 24, the Court of Criminal Appeals found that because of the way the state's sodomy law is written, "forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation."… Although Oklahoma's rape law says a rape can occur when the victim is intoxicated or unconscious, the forcible sodomy law does not contain that language. The appeals court unanimously ruled that because the law lacks that provision, the defendant could not be prosecuted. The boy, who was 17 at the time, was charged as a youthful offender, meaning, if convicted, he could have been moved to a prison at age 19 if he didn't meet certain conditions in the juvenile system. "We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language," the appeals court wrote in what is called an "unpublished opinion," meaning it cannot be cited as a precedent.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
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