Hoosier Republicans Bend to the Will of their Corporate Masters (Also, some great pics of weird hair)

In a little over a month's time, the self-righteous furor on all sides over the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act has trickled to a near stop. Has the onset of a sublime, sunny Midwestern spring softened the hardened hearts of social conservatives? 

Are Indiana's war-weary progressives simply tired of fighting? Are Brian Bosma, Mike Pence, and the rest of their ilk finally coming around to the social realities of the late 1990s?

The Fisher Price Village People protesting the RFRA.

How come nobody's talking about this anymore?

Clearly a big chunk of the reason is that we've moved on to such pressing questions of the day as whether the Mad Max remake is a feminist plot (Chicago Tribune) and why Raiders owner Mark Davis wears a Moe Howard haircut in the year 2015. 

ChatSports.com.

But then, much of national importance has happened since early April. Freddie Gray was murdered by police in Baltimore, which, following as it did on the heels of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and many others, has rightly claimed the spotlight in the weeks since. 

And then there's this bizarre biker shootout in Texas, which sounds exactly like the sort of thing Thompson might've had a field day with, were he still with us, and not just for the obvious reasons (bikers, booze, Texas, death). This NPR story compares the newspaper and web coverage of both events: on the one hand, the civil unrest in Baltimore over decades of glaring racial inequality and injustice ("oh, the rioting, the looting!"), and on the other what amounted to an all-white drunken shootout by a byzantine confederation of heavily-armed Hun on Harleys ("Ahem, well you see the restaurant is really at fault here . . . "). A strange and terrible saga, indeed. 

With this post, I'm hereby putting away my amateur political-hack playthings for a bit so I can get back to the "real-world" work of writing about pizza and pizza accessories. Before the political moment passes, if it hasn't already, I want to take this opportunity to highlight what I believe are the most important stakes of this whole RFRA thing and what it means for national and Indiana politics in the future. 

The logical first place to look for such answers would be local rag of record, in this case the Indy Star. Except the paper hasn't really published anything on RFRA since they blipped out this 250-word note of idle speculation a couple Mondays ago. (More recent headlines include Republican primary wins that were essentially over before they started and why the Colts had the worst draft season in pro football.)

Not even the New York Times has run a proper story on the RFRA since March, though they did run this Op-Ed penned by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (or a gaggle of post-Ivy League interns, more likely). Therein Jindal defends the Indiana and Arkansas RFRAs on the basis of "mak[ing] our constitutional freedom so well defined that no judge can miss it." 

(It helps to remember that a federal judiciary stocked to the gills with radical Leftists remains one of the Right's most cherished boogie-men, despite the fact that since the coronation of Saint Reagan in 1980, the Repubs have had 67 federal appellate appointees to the Democrats' paltry 23.)  

Still and all, it's nice to see Jindal taking a breather from defunding and dismantling higher education in the state of Louisiana long enough to confirm his support of bigotry in the face of overwhelming corporate opposition. (The balls this man must have.) By his own admission, some of the most powerful opponents to Indiana's RFRA are massive multinational companies. Jindal even got a special letter from no less a "traditional" corporation than IBM in which the authors urge him to oppose the RFRA. Read on:  

Some corporations have already contacted me and asked me to oppose this law. I am certain that other companies, under pressure from radical liberals, will do the same. They are free to voice their opinions, but they will not deter me. As a nation we would not compel a priest, minister or rabbi to violate his conscience and perform a same-sex wedding ceremony. But a great many Americans who are not members of the clergy feel just as called to live their faith through their businesses. That’s why we should ensure that musicians, caterers, photographers and others should be immune from government coercion on deeply held religious convictions. (New York Times, April 23rd, 2015.)

Note the interesting turn of phrase buried in the fifth sentence: "a great many [non-clerical] Americans . . . feel just as called to live their faith through their businesses." 

Jindal words this in such a way that the line seems unremarkable; it sort of "flows," as my students would say, from the set-up for the analogy he's trying to make in the previous sentence between being a bona fide member of clergy (which, it should be pointed out, anyone with a free e-mail address can become) and someone who bakes cakes or sings "Wonderful World" at weddings. Not only should this reasoning give pause to any reasonably sophisticated student of American political history for several good reasons, it is also a false analogy on its face. 

And yet herein lies the core assumption on which this whole RFRA flimflam is based: namely, the notion that small business owners have the right to use their businesses both as platforms to proselytize and as totemistic banners of their own spirituality and belief. There's actually a lively cottage industry on the Internet devoted to this sort of thing within the larger bizarro world of Christian publishing; read all about it here, here, and here.

Where does this notion come from that small business ownership equals socially- and community-sanctioned authority on matters of morality and religious belief? Not only is such an assumption distinctly un-American, it's not even (gasp!) European. 

In the middle ages, the small-time merchant class in Europe was viewed mostly with suspicion, owing to the dominant notion at the time that merchants, who were neither nobility, knights, nor peasants, served no vital societal purpose other than to enrich themselves through the sale of goods and services.  
  

So then I said, "Guinnevere, baby...!" 

By the time the Enlightenment era rolled around in Europe and elsewhere in the early 18th-century, the attitudes toward merchants (or "burghers" as they called them: mmm....burghers) had softened somewhat, and indeed commercial activity had a massive impact on society during this era in some rather obvious ways—the gradual transition from full-blown Feudalism to early mercantilism being the most significant. 

But even then, buying and selling were seen exclusively as pursuits proper to the civic and commercial spheres. The privilege to set up shop, sell your wares, and potentially take your place among the ranks of the comfortable petit-bourgeoisie was just that—a privilege. The recognition here was that while selling goods and services is vital in a number of respects (people need food, clothes, shelter, cakes, wedding singers, and so forth), commercial activity is one of the least important functions of society. 

All of this changed with the advent of market capitalism and then the distinctly American-style capitalism we've been pushing ever since the end of the Civil War. Now our blind celebration of all-things small business is rooted more in nostalgia for a (wrongly-perceived) golden age of American capital than any serious historical or economic precedent. Fueled by this ultimately conservative—small "c" and big "C"—nostalgia, small business has become a sacred cow in American politics, courted by politicians on both sides, and the RFRA should really be seen for what it was: a cynical attempt to elevate small business at the expense of minorities. 

It is no small irony, then, that big business (American Express, Coca-Cola, the NCAA, etc.)
stepped in to quash the bigotry of the RFRA over championship weekend, when the eyes of millions of March Madness fans were positioned squarely on Indiana. 

So what's the lesson of all this? Is small business important in America today? Sure . . . until it isn't.     

Back to pizza!

Doesn't like big gummint. (Is fine with big hair.)