Today on my drive into work I was listening to Stephanie Miller on the radio as usual - and heard her and Jim Ward tear into the Tennessee Legislature for introducing two separate bills (House and Senate) that criminalized the sale, wholesale, distribution, advertisement, exhibition, or publishing of any, "…three-dimensional device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs…"
Three dimensional device? Wow. Would a vibrating massage from Wal-Mart qualify? Only if I got you to buy it by telling you how it could be used sexually, I guess. So perhaps yes!
These two bills make it a crime to even offer to sell a sex toy for another person! (Can you see the police sting for that - "Hey buddy, would you like to sell this dildo for me?") Both bills were supposed to be implemented on July 1st of this year!
So, being a curious individual, I looked up the Tennessee General Assembly Legislation, and found the proposed bills under question, HB3798 (pdf) and SB3794 (pdf). And I was surprised - not that these two bills were true (Stephanie doesn't need to lie about right wing idiocy.) What surprised me is that by the time I had visited the Legislation web at about 10:15, 9 March 2006 Nashville local time, both bills had been withdrawn!
That's right, these bills were active at close of business last night, and were killed this morning - very early this morning!
Why were these bills withdrawn in such a hurry? Was it because Senator Charlotte Burkes and Representative Eric Swafford realized that the legislation was flawed in some way that needed to be fixed and resubmitted? No! The bills were yanked in a panic after Stephanie Miller skewered Tennessee for being so stupid. The legislator reacted like a cockroach in the kitchen when the lights come on - they fled from sight and no doubt are now cowering somewhere hoping they won't be noticed.
These bills were yanked because it was wrong for them to be introduced in the first place. They were introduced by two people who were trying to enforce their own narrow view of morality on everyone else in the state of Tennessee. This was morally wrong - and perhaps even evil to try.
I hope that Burkes and Swafford have learned something from their fiasco. I hope that they get their hands slapped for this. And if they haven't learned anything, then perhaps they will be lucky enough to have to look for new jobs in the near future.
3 comments:
I certainly hope they do! (And I'll be working to ensure it, along with the Dems down here.) Yeesh. Nashville's been in the news enough lately- first FBI stings and now this.
This is really funny in another way, though. I'm almost certain that this latest brainchild of the anti-sex-unless-it's-missionary-position-in-a-cow-barn crowd is a reaction to the opening of the new Hustler Hollywood on the corner of 14th and (three months later, this still cracks me up) Church Streets. It's a very big, glossy, shiny, attractively built sex shop (I know that isn't the right term, but it takes too long to write "purveyor of adult novelties and erotica") downtown, and right off I-40, here in the buckle of the Bible belt. Beautiful.
Ahem. In any case, I couldn't find any article about why they'd withdrawn it- would you mind replying with the cite?
Whew. Just- whew. Thank goodness. Or something- because I really don't think goodness or even a realization of their own stupidity (which would take self-examination, which would require a modicum of intelligence- lack of which is step 1 in this infinite loop) prompted the withdrawal. (Hence my desire for more info.)
Thanks to you- and Ms. Miller- for the heads-up.
I don’t have a cite for the why the bills were withdrawn – the ‘why’ is my reasoned conjecture. I knew that they withdrew them early this morning, and I know that there seemed to be no sign that the bills were in trouble last night.
I’m ex-military and I know how slowly a bureaucratic process works, so I can only conclude that someone scrambled like mad to withdraw the bills this morning. I would assume that they did so because someone heard Stephanie Miller and started making calls to their elected representatives to turn up the heat.
Yes I know this is an assumption, and that any good politician could deny that there was a connection between Stephanie Miller’s broadcast and the withdrawal of the bills – but my suspicious mind tends to come up with four after summing two and two.
Yes, C, I think you're very probably right- the main reason I asked for the cite is to figure out which organizations pulled together such a swift and effective response.
It's not something, especially in the political arena, that the left has been good at lately.
Post a Comment