Missouri Legislators Zero in on Guns, Gays and Gags in Another Year of Attempted Lawmaking
his year, the Missouri Legislature has been great fodder for late-night comedians such as Stephen Colbert, who riffed on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill on his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.
“Folks, finding out that homosexuality exists is a slippery slope to tolerating it,” Colbert said.
The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi followed up that report, butting heads with state Rep. Wanda Brown over House Bill 1621, which prevents employers from firing employees for owning guns — instances of which no one had heard before Brown’s bill.
“How many examples of gun-owner discrimination do you know of?” Mandvi asked Brown.
“Well, you know, I’d rather not get into examples,” she stumbled.
“Right, you must have thousands of them. But can you give me a few?”
“This is preventative,” she said. “I’d just like to protect the Second Amendment [rights] of everyone in the future.”
An awkward roasting ensued.
There’s a certain brand of national reporting that exists solely as political rubbernecking for eye-grabbing conservative legislation. State Sen. Brian Nieves caught The Atlantic’s attention with SJR 45, a secession-lite bill that “prohibits the Missouri legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government from recognizing, enforcing, or acting in furtherance of any federal action that exceeds the powers delegated to the federal government.”
“Whoa,” wrote The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen. “Is Missouri going to declare war on the United States? Are its citizens going to refuse to enforce laws they don’t agree with?”
Cohen followed up with a distraught update on HB 1534, sponsored by state Rep. Kurt Bahr, which criminalizes the implementation of Obamacare, punishing any federal official who attempts to enforce the Affordable Care Act with up to a year in prison.