Yeah, I understand why everyone's chuckling at this:
Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, is a little upset about Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's decision last night to veto a bill that would have expanded the ability of business owners to discriminate against LGBT people and others.But I'm struck by something else Phillips wrote in the same post -- something that tells us a lot about right-wingers' non-sexual delusions:
"Tyranny is on the march," Phillips declares in a piece on the TPN website that he also emailed to members of the group....
Phillips then wonders if business owners will be forced to "create a cake for a homosexual wedding that has a giant phallic symbol on it," "create pastries for a homosexual wedding in the shape of genitallia [sic]," or "photograph a homosexual wedding where the participants decide they want to be nude or engage in sexual behavior." ...
....Why is this bill so important and what did it mean for not only Arizona but America?Teabaggers and other Rand-addled idiots seriously believe that, in the absence of liberal government intervention, all American workers would have absolute "control over their labor." I suspect they believe that in the reddest of states, workers actually do have full "control over their labor."
The issue can be boiled down to one word: Freedom.
A free man or woman controls their labor. A slave has no control over their labor. A free man or woman decides who they will work for and under what conditions. The slave cannot.
Do these folks know anyone who actually works for a living?
America is full of low-wage workers who never know from one week to the next how many hours they're going to work or to which shifts they're going to be assigned; employers don't care if employees can't arrange child care because of a sudden change of shift or can't get by on suddenly reduced hours -- those are the conditions of the job, take 'em or leave 'em.
If you work at Amazon, don't get used to the pace of labor, because you'll just be expected to speed up in the future. And Amazon will electronically monitor everything you do during your shift.
And if you work in the white-collar world, you're expected to be on call 24/7 via electronic devices, otherwise you're perceived as a slacker who never deserves a promotion.
Controlling one's own labor? That's a fairy tale for most workers. But for the deluded Randians, it's reality -- they don't even acknowledge that the huge power inequity between employers and employees, so they advance the ludicrous notion that we're equal partners in contracts freely entered into.
To them, all workers are perfectly free -- except when liberalism intervenes.
They're nuts.
