Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/JeremyWhat
March 3, 2014
|
Last
week, a bill to make way for the display of Ten Commandments in public
buildings, such as courthouses and schools, passed out of an Alabama
Senate committee, sending it to the full Senate for a vote as early as
next week.
If you want to know why nine out of the 10
poorest states are located in the hyper-religious South, look no further
than this calculated right-wing political play, which is designed for
one purpose: to ensure Southern and Sunbelt voters continue to vote
against their own self-economic interests.
If passed by
the state Senate and signed by the governor, the state would put a
constitutional amendment on the next ballot to let Alabama voters decide
the issue. The theocratic authors and the Republican Party sponsors of
this bill are fully cognizant of the fact that the bill is
unconstitutional, and thus it will, inevitably, be struck down by the
courts.
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution is clear: "Congress shall make no law
respecting the establishment of religion." It is the very basis of the
separation of church and state.
For state Sen. Trip
Pittman (R-AL), the constitution is a secondary concern. "We talk about
the constitutionality of them, but we have to understand the purpose of
these is the laws of God," he said. "And we think they may have passed
irrelevance because of the constitutional question, but beyond that,
which is the most important, it's also about behavior and conduct
through the ages."
State Rep. DuWayne Bridges (R-AL)
declared, “School shootings, patricide and matricide are due to the Ten
Commandments not being displayed in schools and other government
buildings.” Bridges also said, "The Tenth Amendment [sic] was adopted
before the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea because Moses didn't get
to cross the Red Sea.”
While both Pittman and Bridges
may sound like idiots, they’re actually shrewd political strategists,
for the promise of tax cuts for the rich is hardly an effective platform
for rallying the Republican Party base in a midterm election year. The
promise of the Ten Commandments, however, is how you get a person
without healthcare to vote for the party whose platform is based on
repealing the Affordable Care Act.
According to the Pew
Research Center, Alabama is the second most religious state in the
nation with 74 percent of residents saying religion is very important in
their lives. Number one is Mississippi. It is a pitiful irony that
those states that are most religious are also states with the most
individual suffering. More than 30 percent of the children in these two
states suffer extreme poverty. In both states, the primary reason for
abject poverty is that more than a third of children have parents who
lack secure employment, decent wages, and healthcare. But thanks to
Jesus, these poor saps vote for the party that rejects Medicaid
expansion, opposes early education expansion, legislates larger cuts to
education, and slashes food stamps to make room for oil and agriculture
subsidies on top of tax cuts and loopholes for corporations and the
wealthy.
All this despair comes courtesy of
low-information voters being duped by the corporate elite to vote
against their own economic self-interest. The corporate elite and their
political appointees have convinced tens of millions of Americans that a
vote for the Ten Commandments is more important to a Christian’s needs
than a vote against cuts in education spending, food stamp reductions,
the elimination of school lunches and the abolition of healthcare
programs.
It’s no secret that social wedge
issues are used by the Right to drive low-income people to the polls.
The point is that in an overly religious country it works too well, and
to America’s detriment. Pushing sophisticated tax schemes for already
wealthy venture capitalists, like the 16 percent tax rate Mitt Romney
gets away with, doesn’t excite the base. On the other hand, “taking back
the country” from the gay, socialist, Muslim, liberal agenda does, as
do issues like abortion and stopping sodomy. The Right’s passion for
these social issues often makes them the loudest in these debates, and
the sheer volume, which is amplified through the right-wing echo
chambers, makes progressives limit themselves.
Mississippi
and Alabama are not isolated examples. The three other worst states, in
terms of children living in extreme poverty, are Arizona, Nevada and
Louisiana. Other than having Republican state legislatures, what do
these five states share in common? All five enacted anti-union
"right-to-work" laws that funnel more people into poverty as a result of
creating pathetically low wage conditions, while corporations in each
state are thriving with record levels of profits. Three of the states,
Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, have rejected Medicaid expansion.
According to the site, PoliticsUsa.com:
In
all, there are 13 states not participating in the free expansion (of
Medicaid) and six others leaning toward non-participation. Those 19
states — to no-one’s surprise — are all Republican-controlled and more
than pleased to prevent millions of their residents, especially
children, from benefiting from the most basic health care provisions.
From a Republican perspective, it likely makes sense to keep the
poorest, and youngest, residents in ill-health to go along with daily
hunger, thereby rounding out an existence steeped in suffering and
despair.
Nine of the top 10 poorest states
are found in the South. Thompson writes, “It’s a region [the South] that
stands out from the nation at large for its slavish devotion to
economic policies that increase the burden on its poor, rather than
allowing its lower and working classes to share in the financial harvest
that its politicians and business leaders are so eager to tout in
speeches.” A book titled Taxing the Poor looks at the way we
tax the poor in the United States, particularly in the South, where poor
families are often subject to income taxes, and where regressive sales
taxes apply even to food for home consumption. The authors, Newman and
O’Brien, write:
The legacy of the past —
southern opposition to property taxation in the nineteenth century —
continues to define the disparity in tax structure and revenue we see
today. ... That legacy has cost the southern states dearly [and] is
placing a heavy burden on the rest of the country as well. The pattern
is distinctive and destructive. The problem is very much with us today
in part because ... very high barriers to change are in place throughout
the South and have been for decades.
The
Republican Party, particularly in the South, will always dredge up these
cultural issues to ensure its base remains a captive tool of corporate
ideology. That way its corporate sponsors can maintain a perpetually
impoverished lower class from which to draw its cheap labor.
No comments:
Post a Comment