Wednesday, February 1, 2012

What Color Are the Skies on Your World?

From time to time we hear stories about legislators at various levels trying to pass laws preventing people from doing things that no sane person (and very few crazy ones) has ever considered doing in the first place. Most of these are allegedly intended to prevent unscrupulous individuals from taking advantage of innocent members of the public in some nefarious way, but are actually proposed in order to draw attention to a political topic or to the lawmaker in question. Once in a while, someone will actually come up with one of these measures that anticipates a new problem in safety or legality, but most of the time they’re just the political equivalent of a child yelling “look at me!” over and over again while riding their tricycle on the roof. And in the latter category, I don’t know how anyone will top the efforts of an Oklahoma State Senator to pass a law forbidding the use of aborted human fetuses in food products…

You can pick up the Associated Press story by way of the Houston Chronicle website if you want to, but the basic gist is that Freshman Senator Ralph Shortey said that his own online research has convinced him there is a need for a state law that will prevent food companies from using either the bodies or embryonic stem cells harvested from the bodies of aborted human fetuses in order to develop new artificial flavors or food products, even though he admits that he hasn’t turned up any evidence of companies in Oklahoma doing any such research. It’s possible, in fact, that no one else in the state of Oklahoma has heard of such a thing either; the AP story quotes the executive director of the state’s most conservative anti-abortion group (one of the most extreme in the world, if anyone’s counting) as saying they’ve never heard of such an idea, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says they don’t know anything about this either…

Now, it’s probably worth noting that Oklahoma already has some of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion laws, which would definitely make it harder for a politician who is trying to build a career on a “pro-life” platform to get any attention. It’s probably also worth noting that Senator Shortey has in the past sponsored bills to deny Oklahoma citizenship to children of illegal immigrants, to allow police to seize houses and vehicles belonging to illegal immigrants, to allow legislators (including himself) the right to carry concealed weapons anywhere they want to (including the floor of the Senate), and will probably introduce legislation forbidding trout to live in trees as soon as that becomes an emotionally-charged political issue anywhere in the United States…

What makes this story so comical, at least to me, is that the practice he’s trying to outlaw is a non-issue precisely because no one in the world would ever be sick (or stupid) enough to do it, let alone speak out in support of it. There’s a widely-held popular belief that business people are soulless monsters who would grind up live babies for food if they thought they could get away with it, and Senator Shortey is clearly trying to capitalize on that belief in order to make himself more popular with his constituents – and probably others, if he’s considering running for higher office some day. Unfortunately, it’s one of the weakest “straw man” devices I’ve ever seen, and is likely to get him mocked by millions of scruffy bloggers before this is over…

Perhaps, somewhere in the universe, cannibalism really is used to create new consumer products, but on my planet (Earth) this isn’t even a thing; it’s a joke – and a particularly sick one. Which leads me to ask the senator what planet he’s actually from – and if he’s gotten his green card yet…

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