Does God love a bigot?

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who has no issue about signing bills that promote racial bigotry, seems to have succumb to pressure from many sides to the so-called “religious liberty” bill passed by the Arizona legislature. To be certain, Senate Bill 1062 doesn’t require anyone to show their “papers” like in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or apartheid South Africa, or permit police to arbitrarily harass, detain or arrest anyone for no reason other than their race or “ethnicity.”  Nor does it ban Hispanic Studies in high school because they might promote “anti-white” feeling. It doesn’t even have a requirement that anyone running for president must “prove” that they are an American citizen before being allowed on the state ballot (and who would make that determination?). None of these things bothers white America much after a few days, when they think they are the only ones who have forgotten.

No, what S.B. 1062 did propose to do was to allow business owners to use their religious beliefs as a reason to deny service to certain people. It has been portrayed as an “anti-gay” bill by the media,  but there are many so-called religious types (like Christian Identity) for whom a whole range of people could be regarded as violating some religious principle, such as “race-mixing.” As might be expected, the bill itself is somewhat obscure in who would most likely be targeted, since there are groups in this country that are more easily “identifiable in fact, rather than theory. For example, a racial minority cannot hide his or her “offense,” while a gay or lesbian person—especially one who is white—cannot be identified unless they call direct attention to their sexual orientation. 

People who support this bill claim that their religious “freedoms” are under siege by the Obama administration policies in regard to the right of people to live the way they wish, which of course includes the gay and lesbian lifestyle. Some people say that this is against the law of God and is a sin, and they don’t want to have “sinners” in their midst, or provide them services. But who is really without sin? Hating another fellow human for no just cause must be a sin itself. My own belief is that if there is a God, then it is up to him to pass final judgment, not some hate-filled bigot who has this strange idea that he or she is going to be looked upon favorably at the pearly gates. People who have to answer to themselves when the time comes; if their conscious doesn’t bother them now, then it is their problem later. 

The bill should not have been that hard for Brewer to veto it, since a person whose religion preaches bigotry is perfectly at “liberty” to espouse such in private. One thing that Brewer didn’t mention in her remarks was that the bill was in direct violation of the principle of separation between church and state, as well as permitting the violation of the civil rights of whole classes of people. This is Jim Crow all over again. This is all just par for the course in Arizona, the state from which the extreme right found a “mainstream” standard bearer in Barry Goldwater. Although he was trounced in the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party slowly, but inexorably, morphed into the party of the white, gun-toting, anti-government bigots who fancied themselves as the “instrument” of “God.” 

Another recent incident reminds of the fact that Arizona resisted the creation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday; Gov. Brewer herself voted against it when she was a state senator, and it was only from the attention of the rest of the nation that a bare majority of Arizonans approved the holiday in a referendum in 1992. Last month, a white fraternity at Arizona State University “commemorated” the holiday by parodying “black” culture, wearing basketball jerseys, deporting themselves like gangsters, eating watermelons; it was the same fraternity that had been put on probation when some of its members were linked to the beating of  black student. Not only was the assumption that black college students were “gangsters” offensive, but the fact that there were allegedly “educated” white students who found it perfectly “acceptable” to express their racism openly, and this says  much about how the atmosphere of bigotry in the state is a state of mind.

Of course, this says nothing of the attitude of many whites in Arizona in regard to Latinos, regardless of their “status,” which tends to be of little consequence anyways. A roast in “honor” of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio found state Sen. John Kavanagh cracking ”jokes” about Arpaio’s racial profiling and harassment in general of Latinos: “Going out with Joe is always an adventure, because usually when we walk into a restaurant, most of the waitstaff and cooks dive out the back window, and when they don't, I never know what the hell's in my food…just to show you how unreasonable the federal monitor is, when Sheriff Joe sends his new deputies to the academy, he will no longer just train them to do the Miranda warning in Spanish, he will have to teach it in English too…The sign over the booking intake door in the jail will have to have ‘welcome’ and just not ‘bienvenido.’” Although Kavanagh’s comments have been accused of being racist, it rather seems to me that what he did was embarrass Arpaio and draw attention to the fact that his department is currently under monitor by federal officials for its plainly racially-motivated policing activities.

Of course, Arizona isn't the only place where you might find evidence of this. I recall years ago on my way to my sister's wedding in Wisconsin stopping in a Greyhound Bus station in Chicago; I was "stunned" to see in the waiting area two sections of seating: One entirely occupied by whites, the other by blacks.

Not that the state of Washington is beyond reproach, of course. At a corner gas station/convenience store in Kent there is a Mexican food van. I suppose it passed city codes because one night I saw some tough-looking fire inspector used his vehicle to block the van’s door so the proprietor wouldn’t make a run for it, but it has remained in operation since. To drum-up business, the proprietor put up a banner held up by metal stakes; it remained upright for all of one night, after which it ripped apart and lay ruined on the ground. I suspected that the culprit was an inebriated bigot from the redneck bar a half-block away, and probably “motivated” into action by the nearby signage: “Buy American – Eagles 20s”—a brand of cheap cigarettes “made in the U.S.” There is some guy on the Internet who apparently makes his living smoking cigarettes; his YouTube review of the brand notes that Eagle 20s “taste good,” produce a lot of smoke, are lightly packed and burn quickly.  

I went to a Jack in the Box near the airport to buy a couple of burgers when I noticed that it was kind of crowded with short, dark-skinned Latinos, all dressed-up nicely in dresses, suits and ties and seemingly of pleasant demeanor. I figured they were part of some church group. I found a place to sit down and decided to wait until the line shortened; after all, it was midnight and I would have expected a very small number of customers to start. Unfortunately, no sooner was I prepared to make my move that a fresh wave of the same arrived, and this continued for an hour until I decided I should just leave. As I was exiting, I noticed a grungy-looking white male with his grungy-looking white girlfriend sitting at a table. I had seen them before, not there to buy anything but sit in one of the now well-occupied sofas for awhile and make themselves “comfortable.” The male scanned the proceedings with an evil look in his eye. Me, I was just annoyed; him, his eyes were full of hate—race hate.