The pathology behind Kansas House Bill 2453

by Graham Email

As my previous Round-Up article points out, this bill, which seeks to permit both private businesses and government businesses to discriminate and refuse service to individuals based on sexual orientation, is now dead...for the time being.
Andrew Sullivan explains some of the consequences if the bill becomes law.

However, this article explains that the underlying rationale behind the bill is one of regressive censoriousness:

...seeing defeat on the horizon in the gay-marriage wars, social conservatives have shifted gears. Instead of trying to stop the tide of social change, they are seeking to exempt themselves from it under the banner of "religious liberty." Typically, social conservatives have pushed for exemptions in blue states like New York or Vermont only once the legislature has begun considering gay-rights legislation. But starting with Kansas, followers of the gay-marriage saga should expect to see more and more red states considering such preemptive measures as stand-alone bills.

Folks, this is quite simply, petulant, foot-stomping, authoritarians jerkishness. Other people's marriage arrangements are none of their damn business. These people do not have to associate with gays, bisxuals, trisexuals or trans-sexuals if they do not want to, they can exclude anybody they don't like from their personal lives. However, the bill seeks to permit them to avoid having to come into contact with those individuals in any area of their lives. It is an attempt to allow them to live in a weird zone where they can exclude sinful individuals at will. Another way to describe this is that they wish to forever be able to live in an exclusionary bubble, a universe divorced from the reality that the rest of us have to live in. As this article explains, the legislation was written by a religious lobbying group, not the Kansas GOP. This is both interesting and somewhat mind-boggling. (It also confirms my long-held suspicion that a lot of bills are, despite their promulgation by politicians, written by lobbyists, but maybe you knew that already).
The attempt to introduce this legislation appears to be part of the standard behavioral approach of regressive authoritarians, which follows this sort of sequence when their worldviews and attitudes are challenged:

1. Issue snarling challenge "If you don't like it, leave"
2. (If 1 fails), try to change the law to enshrine your worldview
3. (If 2 fails), threaten to secede from the Union
4. (If 3 fails), threaten to leave and live somewhere else

Note that very few authoritarians of this persuasion actually leave or move. Part of it is that when looking at other countries, there are a limited number of places that would willingly embrace a collection of censorious religiously-motivated crackpots. Some countries ending in -istan spring to mind, but those embrace The Wrong Sort of Religion. After that, the possible list gets real short real quick.
There are other areas of the USA that historically have been tolerant of people with exclusionary worldviews (like Idaho), but setting up a new community anywhere is really quite tough work. However, it might be best if these exclusionary religiously motivated people did form their own community, preferably a long way away from where I live. It seems that if they are not going to be happy until they can exclude anybody whose values they disapprove of from their lives, the right answer is for them find their own bubble some place else.
I see these bills, now being proposed in several other states, as an attempt to modify the law to perpetuate religious privilege under the guise of anti-discrimination. This is tilting at windmills, just like the attempts to pass anti-miscegenation laws in the recent past. Those legal maneouverings failed, and anybody arguing for them soon ended up on the wrong side of history.