Some news about legislative activity out West, via Ezra Klein:
In the Wyoming state legislature, 10 congressmen and three senators have co-sponsored “The Health Care Choice and Protection Act.” The intent? To make it a felony to implement the health-care reform law — which is, you’ll remember, the official law of the land. Here’s the relevant bit:
Enforcement of federal laws prohibited; offenses and penalties.
Any official, agent, employee or public servant of the state of Wyoming as defined in W.S. 6-5-101, who enforces or attempts to enforce an act, order, law, statute, rule or regulation of the government of the United States in violation of this article shall be guilty of a felony punishable by a fine of not more than five thousand dollars ($5,000.00), imprisonment in the county jail for not more than two (2) years, or both.
Any official, agent or employee of the United States government or any employee of a corporation providing services to the United States government that enforces or attempts to enforce an act, order, law, statute, rule or regulation of the government of the United States in violation of this article shall be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than five (5) years, a fine of not more than five thousand dollars ($5,000.00), or both.
Ezra calls this “scary” — although he adds that it will not “survive two seconds in a court of law.”
Maybe not. Anyway, here is an unrelated piece of news that is much scarier than Ezra’s item, at least judging by the fact that there is already blogger reaction to it, and the original Fox News article has already been noted in a secondary piece by Politics Daily (there is no reaction at all as of this moment to the Wyoming story, although perhaps there will be some later today):
The words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender neutral terminology, the State Department says.
“The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. “They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’”
A statement on the State Department website noted: “These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families.” The statement didn’t note if it was for child applications only.
The State Department said the new passport applications, not yet available to the public, will be available online soon.
If you think that this is “some kind of psychotic cyber society eliminating family distinctions in favor of PC federal bureaucratic numbers,” then you are in good company.
If you think it’s both odd and disheartening that changing “mother/father” to “parent one/parent two” appears to be of more concern than Wyoming state legislators attempting to make it a felony to implement or enforce a federal law that passed Congress and was signed by the President of the United States, you really ought to get some medical assistance. Psychological delusions like that can get worse if you don’t take them seriously.
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