A disgusting bill

We second what our esteemed columnist Sheila Leslie wrote this week in Left Foot Forward. A bill, Nevada Senate Bill 192, also called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, is a heinous attack on women and women’s right to be free from constraints put on them by superstitious religious thinking from the Iron Age.

Ostensibly, it is supposed to give doctors and pharmacists the right to refuse to dispense medical care if they claim to have religious objections to it. What it really does is allow strangers to stand in judgment of how other people live their lives and to prevent emergency health care for women.

The bill’s summary is frankly hilarious in its misdirecting hypocrisy: “Enacts the Nevada Preservation of Religious Freedom Act to prohibit governmental entities from substantially burdening the exercise of religion.”

Nevada somehow managed to fly under the radar in last election’s war on women, the election where such terms as “legitimate rape,” “transvaginal ultrasounds” and “personhood,” became political wedge issues. Fortunately, women make up 53 percent of the electorate, and the misogynists got their hats handed to them.

So here we are in 2013, and the liars and rhetorical magicians have come up with a new way to camouflage their attacks. They say they’re trying to support religious rights, not diminish them.

As Leslie points out, even if the bill was written and voted out of the Senate with the smokescreen of a somewhat reasonable rationale, it’s a disgusting attack on women’s rights to health care and people’s rights to determine their own religious choices.

In the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution. In it, we allow changes to be made—amendments. Here at the Reno News & Review, one of our favorite amendments is the First: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It is unquestionable that the proposed Nevada law holds one religious view as superior to another, and it codifies bigotry against women and the gay community. It’s also based on a law that the Supreme Court has already found unconstitutional, the federal Religion Freedom Restoration Act, which was overturned in 1997.

While Sheila Leslie and others have focused on the medical aspects of this law, it in no way limits its use to doctors, nurses and pharmacists, as a quick read will show (http://tinyurl.com/bqy8u6d)—“The provisions … of this act apply to any claim or defense regarding the employment, education or volunteer service of a person who performs or will be tasked with performing any religious duties for a religious organization, including, without limitation: (a) Spreading or teaching faith; (b) Performing devotional services; or (c) Participating in internal governance.”

We defy readers to find a spot in this bill that maintains the separation of church and state in places like schools or that would prevent teachers from preaching to our children any religion to which they subscribe. This bill must be stopped. Please, write your representative.