UniversalDistress said:
Is America's South turning into a hotbed of liberalism/bohemianism
I would advise against mistaking American fake libertarianism for liberalism.
Second, I would add to our neighbor's note:
Branch Davidian was not part of the Latter Day Saints, but, rather, a splinter from Seventh Day Aventism.
Third, I would note that it's a laugh to suggest Louisiana is about to go liberal.
Fourth, it's hard to take the article seriously; the two sources are yours and Inquisitr; both articles read like comedy jobs. Yet, on the other hand, this
is Louisiana, where police really hate gay people, and that actually has something to do with all this.
See, in Louisiana, they spend money and labor hours sending police out to hit on suspected gay men, and then ask them out on dates. Not prostitution, but just, hey, you wanna go someplace and fuck, and that sort of thing. And then they arrest the suspects for being gay.
The other thing they do in Louisiana is figure out who's gay and HIV positive, then shake them down to steal their medication. The police in Louisiana have literally tried to kill people for being gay.
And for some reason, as Christians stirred the Gay Fray to viability in the nineties, they were also obsessed with using homosexuality as an excuse to license all sorts of other behavior, like raping children, dogs, and corpses. Incest has always been on their list, too. And that's how the right-wing, including libertarian, argument goes:
If it is legal to be gay, then it must also be legal to have sex with children, animals, corpses, and our sisters. Versions of this argument have made into Supreme Court briefs, and in at least one case a state attorney general who wrote such a brief was promoted to a federal bench. (Fifth Circuit Judge William Pryor was Attorney General of Alabama, which just about makes sense, but we should not be surprised to find that his university education was in Louisiana.)
While the people of DeQuincy read like cheap satire in the News Examiner article, but they're also from Louisiana. Perhaps the strangest thing about this thread is the idea that someone can mistake Louisiana for liberalism. You might as well call a dead hooker a bitch because she won't haggle over prices.
Look, it's been kind of apparent for a while now that incest was the next target for social conservatives in the U.S. And the way it works is that they pick a fight with something, call a lot of attention to it, and then lose. That's what happened in the Gay Fray. In the 1990s, that was the line:
If you don't pass this ballot initative to disenfranchise faggots, next thing you know they'll want to get married! In 1992, that was laughable. But we won in Oregon at the box, and struck Colorado in the courts. So the conservatives came back for more, and over and over again through the nineties. One of the results of this was that gays threw in. If we were going to have this fight, we were going to have this fight, and we were going to win.
And this is where that strange ritual called NCOD, National Coming Out Day, becomes really important. Many wondered and even complained that the queers were so avidly calling attention to themselves, but in the end, here's how it goes:
After over a decade of fighting about the issue of gay rights in the context of whether homosexuals ought to be allowed to participate in society, the Supreme Court struck the antisodomy laws used to persecute homosexuals.
Bigot states panicked, and what happened in Oregon is emblematic. A Multnomah County clerk, as the story goes, issued marriage license to a gay couple on the grounds that the law did not prohibit him. Now, ordinarily, this is a proper
libertarian argument, except libertarians joined social conservatives in exploding. How dare a
mere county clerk "subvert democracy" like that. And for nigh on a decade, gay marriage was smacked down by deliberately exclusionary laws; 0-33 or 1-34, depending on how you count the Arizona back-to-backs that first rejected and then adopted a marriage ban.
But the whole time this was going on, the attitudes of the
people were changing.
See, because of NCOD and other actions intended to empower homosexuals and increase visibility, each time the right wing put the question before the people, the growing proximity of "The Gay" to individuals was having its effect. People had to look their friends, neighbors, and family in the eye and say it, and there came a point when they just couldn't do that anymore.
And then, 2012.
The quiet route to Article Four and Amendment Fourteen came through Amendment Ten. There is irony in that; libertarians love shouting about the Ninth and Tenth, but while there is, indeed, a "liberal libertarian" sector in the marketplace, most libertarians are simply conservatives who are either too angry or too ashamed to call themselves conservatives or Republicans. After
Windsor, the decision in
Kitchen seemed pretty much inevitable.
But
Kitchen hit Utah's supremacist law. That is to say, it hit
Utah's marriage discrimination law.
Utah.
And, well, of course the breaking of their anti-gay law was enough to also break their superficial anti-incest laws.
So now a bunch of conservatives who are too stupid to tell the difference between consensual sexual intercourse and rape have decided that since homosexuals get to be gay, heterosexuals ought to be able to get on their mothers, sisters, and kids.
The coincidence of such an idea with Louisiana is hardly shocking.
