Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Personal freedom

Last week it was announced that the Supreme Court ruled for Westboro church people, that they do have the right to make asses of themselves standing outside funerals for our fallen military with hate filled signs.
I refuse to call them their official name because although I was born Baptist and converted to Catholicism, I don't think they are any kind of Baptist I can recognize. I'll call them church people for Lord knows lots of ignorance is alive and well in churches.

Anyway, five of their members came to Kentucky this past Sunday. They protested at a Protestant and Catholic Church in Owensboro. They protested at a Catholic Church in Louisville. An article about the day and the five people from the Westboro group as well as the local response was on the front page of the Courier-Journal Monday morning. According to the newspaper they chose the small Louisville church because it was on the way from Owensboro to the airport. That makes me wonder how they transport their hate signs. Do they go through the TSA checks with the signs and fold them up to fit in the overhead bin, or do they get folded into luggage that is checked?

A local man, a veteran, organized a group of about 200 people to stand on the other side of the road. These people were students from Bellarmine University and other school groups. Some of the students spoke to the reporter saying they had been debating freedom of speech issues and the Supreme Court's ruling in their classes. The signs the local group held said things like, "God is Love."
Wonderful. I think that is a fitting response to hate and often while believing that freedom of speech is important in America; we have to speak out but not with hate.

Another ruling by the Court last week had to do with AT&T and their belief they had the right to personal privacy when they didn't want information held by the government from a federal investigation of their billing practices, released under the Freedom of Information rules. This was a unanimous decision for the Court.

In the brief written by Chief Justice Roberts he spent several paragraphs discussing grammar and personal adjectives. To quote CJ Roberts: "The ordinary meaning of 'personal' does not refer to an impersonal company." I'm hopeful he has a sense of humor is isn't using this as a political device after the egregious ruing last year that gave corporations the right of free speech.

On another note, the Kentucky Legislature is in the last week of their session. Not much has been accomplished. The Senate brought up such bills as a law that would require people who need cold medicine to go to their doctors for a prescription. If that had been passed, instead of buying a box of 12 cold capsules for $12, you'd need to make an appointment with your doctor, so to the office, wait in there with 15 other sick people, meet with the doctor, get a prescription, pay the co-pay and your insurance company would have to pay what they do for the visit. That's making the assumption you have health insurance.
They did pass a bill allowing sale of previously banned fireworks. Now if you want to sell fireworks in Kentucky you get an annual license for $500 and pay sales taxes. The guy who sponsored the bill was mad because he saw Tennessee making all that money from Kentuckians who crossed the border each summer for fireworks.

Of course this is the same legislature that won't allow Kentuckians to legally gamble on anything but horses at race tracks. If we want to play slots or blackjack, we have to cross a river. According to all the Protestant preachers some of whom seem to be legislators, gambling is immoral and a sin. Fireworks on the other hand are ways to make tax money.

The Legislature also tried to pass a law that would allow every public school in the state to create a class to teach the Bible. The state would contribute funds for these classes and of course they would be voluntary. This didn't pass, but it sure got time on the floor in debate and was covered in every small town newspaper for the Christians to see.

Meanwhile Medicaid is unfunded by over $150 million and cuts are being made to any social safety net around. I guess it could be worse. We could live in Florida where Gov. Rick Scott, the former criminal health industry CEO whose company was sued by the federal government for cheating on their billing of Medicare and paid a billion dollar fine, has cut over $150 million from that state's education funding and gave it to his corporate buddies in tax cuts.

Or we could be like Wisconsin and have a governor devoting our time voters to destroy one of the hardest fought rights of the American worker, collective bargaining.

I worked at a company for ten years that got a union voted in. There were 12 employees and everyone was an office worker. You might wonder why this happened. It happened because the boss started having an affair with the head of one of the two departments. No one cared who he screwed but when she was promoted and people were being fired and laid off because they didn't give her the respect she felt she deserved, the remaining employees went through the process and got a union shop voted in.

It didn't last long but it got the attention of the boss and the board of directors! There's a whole story in that which does not need to be told here.

Unions are the reason we have 5-day 40 hour work weeks and there is overtime and paid vacations and benefit packages. The whole idea of safe working conditions and worker's comp and health insurance were negotiated by unions until they became part of the fabric of jobs in America. The reason people like the Koch brothers and corporate America fund elections of wack jobs like these new governors and such, is they want to get rid of their competition and face it, unions are the yang to the ying or corporations when it comes to laws and enforcement of laws in the country.

Oh, and don't let anyone get away with saying the reason American jobs went overseas is unions. The reason they went away is people like KFC wanted to sell chicken in China so they and others in the American consumer products corporations worked for free trade and before you knew it everyone was taking advantage of tax breaks to move production to cheap labor places.

You don't get benefits? You don't have a wage high enough to live on and have to work two or three jobs to pay your bills? Maybe it's time to vote and work for unionizing your work group.

16 comments:

  1. I cannot believe those people can justify rioting at the funeral of a veteran.

    KY is completely screwed up when it comes to OTC meds. If they took this time and $ to shut down meth labs, they wouldn't need to monitor cold meds. In my part of KY, we are surrounded my labs.

    As a former teacher, I am for unions. I understand the whole "bad teacher" thing, but there has to be another way...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Part of me can understand the Supreme Court's position in not wanting to tread on 'Free Speech'... but an equally big part of me recognizes the family's right to bury their family member with out all of the vitriol and hate that this group espouses.

    Mississippi just passed a law where pseudopedrine (sp?) now requires a prescription, a visit to the Dr's office... all in all, a huge increase in cost all to off set the production of crystal meth in our state...

    Blah...

    ~shoes~

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh dear, this is starting to sound like that most (apparently, at least in the USA) offensive of labels - Socialism!

    Isn't it funny? There seems to be so much discussion about the preservation of free-enterprise and those ideals enshrined (and codified) in the US Constitution, that a lot of Americans have utterly lost sight of the primary ideal behind it all. WE THE PEOPLE. That's socialism right there, folks. Made law, codified, no less, by the ultimate legal document in your nation. And don't get me started on the Founding Fathers' intention to maintain a fully secular governement and education system. Bible classes in schools and prayers before Senate and Congessional sessions indeed! Jefferson would be banging the hell (pardon the metaphor) out of his grave!

    To the so-called "Church group" that demonstrate outside wherever to tell the world how evil gays are, or that whatever war is happening is as a result of God's wrath against America/sinners/fags/abortionists/liberals/Mexicans/unionists/legislators/France... Fundamentalism is an evil that may have many masks, but essentially only one face. Whether Muslim, Baptist or Vegetarian (!), these people seek to destroy freedom in all its possibilities and impose their own narrow-minded, anti-intellectual, intolerant and yes, malevolent ideals on all of Earth. They are a blight that unfortunately has no easy solution...

    I love this blog. It is refreshing to hear an American voice not from the Coasts that is moderate, humane and sophisticated. Keep up the great work, mate, and I look forward to your next enlightening piece!

    Koops.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The area I live in is insanely anti-union and consequently workers are treated really badly. It's just wrong.

    As for Westboro, they are a cult. A mostly single-family cult. Mean, ignorant people who wouldn't know Love if it bit them on the ass.

    ReplyDelete
  5. As always you rock Charlene! My grandfather
    helped to organize unions for the coal mines,
    he and my dad(who was nine or ten years old) worked for twenty-five cents a day. Thanks for speaking your thoughts!

    ReplyDelete
  6. So glad to see you're still alive and kicking ass, if that's the right expression. Stand by - you may be needed in France...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Makes you want to run those assholes over with the hearse, you ask me. Guess I'm not religious enough to answer back with love.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Yes it is strange how the unions brought about so much change for the better to our working conditions, and yet they are despised for it, and accused of breaking the back of manufacturing, causing job losses etc etc..

    ReplyDelete
  9. In the Uk we have had Muslims pissing on war monuments which are there for us to remember those men weho gave their lives in order for those same Muslims to be able to live freely in this country.

    Ironic, symbolic, and a pisstake. Pun intended.

    ReplyDelete
  10. One upside of that inbred Westboro bunch is they galvanize opposition to anyone who tries to allow more religion into our official government business. Anti-fag signs at soldiers funerals turn off a whole lot of people. They're sickening, but I'm glad the First Amendment protects them; it allows them to demonstrate their hatefulness out in the open for all to see and judge.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thanks for a nice article.

    Regarding the "church people" I'll only say that while many activities are legally protected, that doesn't necessarily mean those activities are moral or ethical. We must use those same rights to voice our abhorance to such ignorance and intolerance.

    I particularly enjoyed your comments about the unions. There is one question that I have not heard asked of the union busters: "Exactly how low a wage would be sufficient to bring about a return of jobs from overseas?" I've read that the average wage paid by American companies to overseas workers is in the neighborhood of $2/hr US equivalent. I'd like to find a way to document this by country, since I've not seen any official studies documenting this, only hearsay. But I'm sure that the wage is very low. And that's not to even consider that in many of these countries American companies do not have to deal with safety restrictions, pollution regulations, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Damn, I could hug your neck! Sister, I'd vote for you for president.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Excellent work! I know how much time it takes to put together a thoughtful and well-researched piece on an important subject.

    "The whole idea of safe working conditions and worker's comp and health insurance were negotiated by unions until they became part of the fabric of jobs in America."

    We must not forget this basic truth. Mine may be the last generation who heard the true stories of life in the mills for women before unions changed the picture. I never forgot the stories my grandmothers and great aunts told.

    Power on, sister.

    ReplyDelete
  14. My grandfather was a union organizer. My dad and he worked in the coal mines for 25 cents a day.
    Thanks for your voice, for your truth!
    I'd vote for you for president too!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Beautiful articulated posting!

    Yes, unfortunately the First Amendment guarantees the right of what's his name and his slack-jawed followers to be complete assclowns. I'm just saddened that when the Afghanis protested they had to use a dummy to burn in effigy when we would have gladly given them the real thing!

    Do you think AT&T understands what personal pronouns are?

    Thanks for stopping by my blog. I'm amazed that you can get lavender and basil to come back!

    ReplyDelete
  16. Oh man, I wish everyone in this country would read your blog. I really do.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are encouraged.