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Y’All Qaeda Files #3

Y’All Qaeda is what we call the fundamentalist right wingers who, hypocritically, pretend there is a (non-existent) attempt to impose a form of sharia law in America and yet are themselves trying to impose their own distorted theocratic views on the majority.  The Y’All Qaeda Files will document their hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism wherever we find it.

 

One of the leading Y’All Qaeda figures is the Governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback. Just last week he reinforced this position by removing protections from LGBTQ people being discriminated at work on the basis of their sexual orientation. These rights had been put in place by an Executive Order of the previous Governor. Brownback has rolled the State back to a discriminatory past by cancelling the Executive Order.

In the years since [former Governor] Sibelius’s action, one has to wonder how many gay state workers put a picture of their same-gender spouse on their work desks, believing they had the right and the opportunity to be more open under her executive order. Those workers are now “out” to their work colleagues and bosses. Can the boss or supervisor now fire them for being gay, with impunity? Does the gay worker now have no recourse in the courts because Brownback changed the rules? … It is an astounding and horrifying phenomenon when rights are actually taken away from citizens.

About a month ago, ISIS executed gay men by throwing them from the top of a tall building. We can only guess that Brownback and ISIS share similar beliefs about the value of LGBTQ people’s lives.

The Y’All Qaeda movement also has some very peculiar and dangerous ideas about medicine.  For example, a Nevada legislator recently suggested that cancer was just a fungus and, if only the Government would allow it, cancer could be cured by simply flushing the fungus away.  She added that if Nevada, which is already “the capital of entertainment”,  it could help “make it the medical capital of the world as well.”  Another legislator from Alabama has suggested that the current measles outbreak might be caused by “illegal aliens” crossing the border.  And it is almost too bizarre to note the anti-abortion Idaho lawmaker who suggested women could swallow a camera to check on their pregnancy.

Talking of science, one of the key beliefs of Y’All Qaeda is that the scientific fact of evolution is merely a theory, and a theory moreover that has no more validity than their own creationist myths. I believe that people have a right to believe whatever they want to believe; the problem comes when they want State schools to follow suit. Y’All Qaeda commentators say the question is only posed to “embarrass” Republicans. Surely, they can only be embarrassed if they are embarrassed by their own answers.

And if anyone wants to question the strength of the Y’All Qaeda movement in the United States, they need only look at the results of a recent poll of Republican primary voters.  Fully half say they do not believe in evolution. Even more, 57%, want to cancel the First Amendment and make Christianity the national religion of America. That would be a form of Christian fundamentalist sharia law if ever there was one.

 

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