The Michigan House of Representatives has passed a bill barring state agencies and related offices such as universities from offering benefits to same-sex partners. The bill is predicted to pass the Republican controlled Senate and be signed into law by Governor Rick Snyder, all before October 1st when the benefits would have started:

The bills, HB 4770 and 4771, prohibit any government entity – including universities and city governments – from providing such benefits and prohibit unions from including them in collective bargaining agreements.

Here the Teaparty Republicans have scored a twofer. They played into bigotry and handicapped unions. The latter is just as important as the first in revealing conservative dishonesty. The first item in the Bill of Rights, the Very First Inalienable Right the founders wrote down, was that the federal government could never make it against the law to freely assemble and petition the government in pursuit of individual or collective interests. Which is exactly what public sector unions composed of police or professors or firefighters do.

 The usual suspects will drone on about how the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to states. What kind of whiny little armchair lawyer fuck would hide behind that flimsy excuse? You either believe in that freedom as a core universal civil liberty or you don’t, and the extreme right loves to preach on about how much they believe personal liberty trumps everything else. They claim to hold the Founding Fathers in almost religious reverence. They wring their hands and worry the government is too big, or too powerful, or too intrusive. The government has run amok they say, and is violating people’s rights with impunity. But here they’ve made it illegal for constituents to even talk to the government about changing public employee policy. And they’re proud of it.

Of course this just illustrates the not so hidden agenda: Teaparty conservatives don’t give a shit about the constitution or state’s rights or the nation, except when they think it might help them win power and force their peculiar religious practices on everyone else by force of law. They’re a bunch of ignorant fundamentalist megalomaniacs who hate democrats in general for winning elections, with a sub-bunch of good old-fashioned racist assholes who hate Obama specifically for winning while black.