Sam Brownback most recently starred as
Satan in a History Channel miniseries
So Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has signed the new Kansas bill insisting that life begins at conception, which presumably means all Kansas kids get to buy beer nine months earlier than they normally would (I believe the legal drinking age in Kansas is 12, although I may be mistaken about that) and that pregnant women get to drive in carpool lanes in Kansas (just kidding on that one; Kansas rightly recognizes that carpool lanes are the work of the United Nations and their manatee masters, and what carpool lanes do exist in the stateare reserved for Kansas legislators driving with their multiple personalities). It also means that a hell of a lot of miscarriages are about to land Kansas uterus-havers in jail, and it means that, most importantly, Kansas retains its historic status as the Sez-So state, the state where science and logic and booklearnin' can f--k off and die.
Brownback has always been an odd duck, a fierce racist who somehow also gets to call himself a Christian because there aren't really any tests required or forms to fill out for that, and he managed to make the bill-signing ceremony for this latest bit of Organized Religion Masquerading As Law bizarre as usual:
To add another layer of shamelessness to the whole thing, Sam Brownback decided to give up the pretense that there’s a secular justification for laws like this. The AP photographer took a picture of Brownback’s notes, where he wrote “JESUS + Mary” in big letters at the top. Besides being the kind of doodle that uncomfortably implies that Jesus is a schoolgirl crushing on his own mother, the note lays bare what’s going on with this and all other anti-choice legislation across the country: It violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government establishing religion. At their core, anti-choice laws are about imposing on the population as a whole the belief that some religions prohibit abortion, whether they are members of that faith or not.
Not sure what that's about. It might just mean that JESUS loves Mary, it might be that Brownback is dedicating that passage of the bill to JESUS and Mary, he might be engaging in that old pseudo-swear "Jesus, Joseph and Mary" but took Joseph out because, I don't know, let's say Joseph believed the earth was round and it pisses Sam Brownback off. Or maybe it's named the "JESUS and Mary law," in Kansas back rooms, and only at the signing ceremony do the rest of us poor suckers get to find that out. Still, writing
Jesus at the top of your supposedly not-at-all-religious law seems an especially odd thing to do unless you're flat-out mocking the Supreme Court, which is also a possibility. In fact, it might be the most likely possibility.
Or it could be that Sam Brownback, like Justice Scalia, has decided he plain doesn't care anymore and will just be doing whatever he wants, Kansas Pope style, from here on in. There's not really any future career path available to Brownback after this, since he's never going to be president and has already been elected to all the other Important Things, so he doesn't have to worry too much about that. As far as Sam Brownback is concerned, after this it's a life of cushy speeches and painting pictures of dogs. That, or burying himself in the backyard and waiting a few million years for his body to turn to oil. Heck, a fella could probably turn a tidy little profit that way.