If you identify as LGBT and you’re looking for a place to move, don’t head to Kansas. A new executive order signed by Gov. Sam Brownback rescinded discrimination protections for state employees based on one’s sexual orientation and gender identity. The law had covered 25,0000 of the state’s 41,000 employees:
Brownback, who won re-election in November despite an uprising from Kansas Republicans, said in a statement the executive order reaffirms the commitment by the state to follow employment practices that do not discriminate based on race, color, gender, religion, national origin, ancestry, or age. “This Executive Order ensures that state employees enjoy the same civil rights as all Kansans without creating additional ‘protected classes’ as the previous order did,” Brownback said.
It seems that this dude doesn’t understand the meaning of the words “protect” and “discriminate.” And please note, there are only 18 states that actually have non-discrimination employment laws that offer protection for sexual orientation and gender identity. We still have a loooooong way to go, America.
Team Blackness also discussed Jackie Robinson West losing its Little League win, Vince Vaughn’s stupidity surrounding affirmative action, the Chapel Hill shooting, and some bad Valentine’s Day dates.
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Cacti
Governor Brownback is just continuing that fine tradition of Kansas bigotry, first made famous in Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka).
Bobby Thomson
KU has already publicly flipped him the bird.
Punchy
I live in KS, and the outrage of the general public (most of which, by nature of being Kansans, are Repubs) is stunning. Looks like he overplayed his hand by a mile. At the same time the budget crisis is crushing him and his own ledgy is ix-naying his stupid-ass proposal to steal from highway funds to pay for rich tax cuts, he pulls this stunt.
Not even the insanely conservative state gov’t was asking for this. He did this all on his lonesome. Lays bare just what a pandering shitbag he really is. I suspect Topeka may actually pass a bill restoring these protections, despite all the baggers and such in the state govt. Just wait unitl peeps start equating him with the Fred Phelps clan….that ought to get his attention.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bobby Thomson: Good for KU.
boatboy_srq
@Punchy: Any chance the “outrage of the general public” will translate into either a recall campaign now or replacement with somebody less rabid next time he’s up for reelection? Because unless they’re willing to do one of those things, then it’s unlikely he “overplayed his hand” so much as expressed the party id a little to explicitly for all those “nice” folks.
srv
Now that Boeing has left Wichita, perhaps Brownback can form a faith-based aircraft manufacturer.
jl
@Punchy: Did Brownback do this just because he is who is, and misjudged public opinion? Or maybe he is thinking about getting into the GOP 2016 presidential primary circus?
Howard Beale IV
Wha?
Tree With Water
There is an episode of TV’s Barney Miller where a discontented NYC criminal in the witness protection program pisses off his handler. The handler then tells him he’s relocating him to Kansas, and asks the native New Yorker if he knew what was in Kansas? The criminal shook his head with a wary no, and the handler told him, “Wheat”.
Punchy
@boatboy_srq: No, no recall. Likely could mean a D gubbnah next time tho. The D almost won this year and Sebelius (sp?) was a D governor in the past.
It’s just weird (to me) to see Republicans, who usually go completely lockstep with Their Dear Leader no matter what (Cleeks and all that), actually calling him out as being an ass. Again, these are the same peeps who re-elected him, so liekly this outrage lasts < 1 week.
boatboy_srq
@srv:
Harps & Wings, Inc. The musical instrument division of that enterprise will likely be the most profitable – in this world, anyway.
pete mack
Can you please stop double posting?
Tree With Water
@pete mack: Oh, yeah, it’s killing me, too. It’s almost as hard to take as those bottled drinks you need to shake a few times before drinking.*
*(hat tip J. Seinfeld).
Eric U.
it’s an improvement from the triple posting.
I don’t really understand what Brownback was thinking, just seems pointless. Very similar level of logic to Limbaugh’s idea that Walker should say he left college because he was a rapist
C.V. Danes
@Punchy:
Nevertheless, that is what they got.
John
@Eric U.: You seem to be under the impression that Sam Brownback is your garden variety Republican hypocrit pandering to the religio-bigot base. Brownback is a true believer. He is ruining his state on principle.
NeutronFlux
@Punchy: You going to the rally at the statehouse tomorrow?
Oopps. Try this link. http://eqks.org/statehouse-rally-against-legalized-discrimination-sat-feb-14-1200/
John
So I looked up that Vince Vaughn reference. Generally, I could care less what glibertarian millionaire dipshits have to say in public, but for some reason I was curious here.
Apparently, the government attempting to correct centuries of discrimination based on race is racist. He says it’s like gay marriage. That should be between two people and their church, without any government interference. I can see his point. Without government interference, all those spousal rights and tax benefits would eventually be applied by the invisible hand of… um… But for sure if the government would just let the free market handle racial discrimination, we would be a color-blind paradise within the next 400 or so years.
You would think that with all that time he has freed up by not taking any acting lessons he’d have spent some time educating himself, but you’d be wrong.
Yatsuno
@Howard Beale IV: I think that’s inartfully stated. Or the state government of Kansas is AMAZINGLY fabulous!
mdblanche
Reposted from below: The important thing to remember is that marriage equality is the one and only item on The Gay Agenda(TM), so once the Supreme Court gives them that they will all switch over to voting for Brownback for the tax cuts on all the money they won’t be making after he fires them.
PS: double posts are even more confusing on the mobile site.
NonyNony
@Punchy:
It’s weird to see them getting outraged about this. I suspect it’s spillover buyer’s remorse from people who are only now waking up to the fact that not only has Brownback screwed over the economy of Kansas and the government services they receive, he actually has no intention of fixing either one. And not just that but he’s actively trying to make things worse. And not just THAT but when he’s not actively trying to make it worse, he’s wasting time on culture war bullshit.
Scamp Dog
@pete mack: This isn’t your garden variety “posted it twice” deal. From the main page (at least on my phone, in Safari), I can go to either of the two posts, as you’d expect. But at those posts the “previous post” arrow goes to Tom Levenson’s post for both pages, and there’s no “next post” arrow on either. I imagine that will change with the next post, but I’m guessing that both “next post” arrows will point to the same page.
Quick summary: these posts don’t link to each other, but seem to exist as parallel posts in the sequence. So there’s something more going on than a mere double posting.
piratedan
@NonyNony: but he’s still failing Conservatism because he’s not yet called for pogroms and the stoning/shaming of the sluts…. once that happens, those tax coffers will start filling up, you betcha!
piratedan
@Scamp Dog: I blame Obama….
Southern Beale
Does anyone think this will pass legal muster, even as gay marriage becomes legal across the land? It’s just a waste of taxpayer money. Brownback and his kind are true to their form, but I doubt anyone outside the KKKristian KKKult really gives a shit, not in Kansas or anywhere else. The problem with gay hate is that EVERYONE knows a gay person. Everyone has a gay friend or family member or business associate of some kind. And when you start putting faces to policies, this shit falls apart real fast.
Scamp Dog
@Scamp Dog: …and Tom’s post points at the “earlier” of the duplicates, which has four comments at the moment, instead of the 23 or so here.
Yatsuno
@Scamp Dog: It’s the Many Worlds Theory of Balloon Juice. Or something.
Seriously, there is some kind of weird derp going on.
boatboy_srq
@Southern Beale: Short answer: yes. Long answer: SSM isn’t in the same sphere as ENDA any more than DADT was directly connected with DOMA; and in both of these cases federal law had little bearing on state laws besides propaganda for the movement to run every state as if DC didn’t exist. The core of the matter is that to Conservatists, Other is icky, whether it’s queer, brown, blah, or whatever, and any- and every- thing they can do to make Other People uncomfortable is absolutely Right and Correct; and that to these same wingnuts Big Gummint is the disease not a treatment, and rebuffing it at the state (NB it’s the state level, not the local level, that matters here) is the Right Thing To Do. In this case they get the added bonus of wasting taxpayer dollars, which they can point out as more Gummint Cain’t Do Nuffin’ Raaht and so shovel more cash at their
ownerspet projects.boatboy_srq
@Eric U.: Given what Walker has done to WI, that suggestion is probably closer to the truth than either Limbaugh or Walker himself thinks.
Gex
@Howard Beale IV: I’m guessing there were a pool of employees who didn’t qualify for this particular type of benefit, and those who were. Among those 25000 were some gay couples that will lose the benefit, among the other 16000 they never got the benefit in the first place.
Gex
Also, basically the title should be “Are You LGBT? Don’t Let Republicans Get Elected Anywhere Because This is Their Main Agenda.”
I see Ted Cruz is calling for DOMA 2, presumably on the presumption that if Congress keeps passing the same unconstitutional law over and over again, it will be the law of the land while it works its way through the courts each time.
Seriously, it is baffling me that the GOP is going so hard and so loud on this issue now. It still helps them with their base, but a lot of the country has not only gotten over it, but thinks there’s something wrong with them that they can’t get over it.
Kilen
>The law had covered 25,0000 of the state’s 41,000 employees
To be fair, any law that covers 609% of the state’s employees is probably a bit too broad in its eligibility. I can only assume this point was important enough for the double post.
pluege
seems pretty loony that you would have to specifically call out everyone. or every possible human characteristic that is not subject to discrimination. You’d think everyone would be protected automatically under life, liberty, blah, blah, blah and the only ones that wouldn’t be protected would be people specifically called out as NOT protected. And who might that be, well, convicted criminals for one might be subject to some restrictions.
But American society is pretty assbackward upside down. A real bunch of rubes.
Ruckus
@pluege:
There you go trying to make logical sense.
Everyone is equal, except those who have lost some rights by dint of their own actions, what kind of rubbish is that?
/snark, just in case it wasn’t clear.
Another Holocene Human
@pluege: Gay people faced legal discrimination on the streets at least from the early 20th century, if not earlier. All part of policing women, actually, as the women’s movement started to gain real political power. (But combined with the whole “inverts are sick freaks who belong in an insane asylum” strain + sadistic cops with sticks.)
But you can thank the 1940s for the dawn of wholesale, widespread employment discrimination against homosexuals. The Feds started it, some dipshittery about blackmail, Red Scare, argle bargle, of course by making it illegal to employ homosexuals in Federal jobs they CREATED to opportunity for blackmail. Duh. Banned from military, then from the civilian jobs. US homophile societies pretty much organized for the first time around the same period and there was a protest on the sidewalks of DC, to no avail.
50s was the apotheosis of Neo-Freudianism. “The Children’s Hour” was a 50s play about a whisper campaign against a female teacher. The 60s saw the shutting down, even the demolition of burlesque houses and districts under the banner of urban renewal. But 1969 saw the street riot that marked the turning point. Harvey Milk ran for office in the 1970s and campaigned against the firing of gay schoolteachers. The Gay movement picked up steam. Then the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, the Reagan administration with the Meese commission, so many setbacks, the “Halloween” letter, Bowers v Hardwick, the loss of a whole generation, and finally, the 1990s, Queer Nation, the March on Washington, DADT, Hawaii and Vermont same sex marriage cases, the rise of the media and legal strategies, gay-straight alliances, Rupert Everett came out, Ellen DeGeneres came out, 2004 Lawrence v Texas and SSM in Massachusetts.
In there was 50 years of really serious job discrimination in a culture where employers do not respect the private and the personal with respect to employees. 50 years of lavender marriages, of lying about the gender of your housemates. 50 years of fear, of enforced celibacy, of quack therapies to change sexual orientation. It’s a capitalist society out there, if you can’t work you can’t eat, if you can’t eat you can’t live. 50 years of sexual minority teens thrown out of their homes living on the streets and engaging in sex work for cash income. 50 years of male rape victims feeling unable to name their accusers for fear of losing their own status, identity, and livelihoods. 50 years of rage, pain, sorrow, deceit, shame, rape, domestic violence, adultery, suicide, and broken families. 50 years of being unable to go to the police or justice system. 50 years of victimization and exploitation.
Pass ENDA now.
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: I know you’re snarking, but by own actions that includes women who just had no sexual interest in men and couldn’t feign it and men who liked things that were supposed to be reserved to women and could only conceal their swishiness with paranoid hypervigilance gripped by an iron will.
It seems odd in the 21st century when so many Americans are willingly and openly living single lives, but only a few decades ago there was a deep distrust of the single adult, and whether ace, gay, or just to self-possessed to care about partnering up, they were judged to be crazy, queer, selfish, suspicious, and in need of a violent straightening out.
Gay people in particular were subject to being sniffed out for what they failed to do, not what they went out and did. Back in the closet days you had to learn in high school how to fake the appropriate social interaction with same sex peers, pretending to be interested in the opposite sex. Beards. Sham marriages. Or just lying your ass off. I dated people I was pretty ambivalent about, trying to be straight. Made me feel sick inside.
Some people turn into homophobic obsessed asshats trying to throw others off the scent (which doesn’t work any more) and also providing justification to indulge in the buried obsession with buttsechs or rugmunching.
Howard Beale IV
@Gex:
Cruz is calling for a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage, not DOMA 2.
Sad_Dem
@Another Holocene Human: Thank you–ever so much this. I’m old enough to remember the Briggs Initiative, which Harvey Milk campaigned against. It was a proposed law that LGBT schoolteachers would be fired, and it was on the ballot in California in 1978. In the mid-1980s, I didn’t get hired at one school almost certainly because the interviewer thought I was gay. You don’t work, you don’t eat. Now it’s 2015, and the governor of another state is still advocating open, legal employment discrimination against LGBT people.
John M. Burt
@Howard Beale IV:
Ewww. That’s perverse and depraved.
Zinsky
Let’s start calling these creeps what they are: Monsters. He is also blatantly unAmerican.
Ruckus
@Another Holocene Human:
Should have been clearer. I meant their own illegal actions – against others. And yes the law is an ass that is/has been used to try to control things that some disapprove of, homosexuality for one example. And the law shouldn’t be used that way. The law should be used to protect those who can not protect themselves, and it should be used to protect us from each other, not to limit who we are, how we use our genitalia, what skin color we were born with. This is supposed to be a free country/society based upon individuality and privacy, not conformity and repression. That it is not those things is something to work towards, it is a direction we were headed in, one we may achieve in someone’s lifetime, alas very likely not mine. Maybe 3 or 4 generations behind me will see that, but I’m doubtful, many humans being the wonderful prissy assholes that they are.