By Joey Kennedy
Alabama Political Reporter
First-world pains: I’ve been without Internet for a week now. Maybe we don’t think much about it, but keeping in touch and informed is much more difficult. Between the Wi-Fi at UAB, an occasional drive-by at Starbucks or Publix, I’ve been unplugged.
My wife and I have been moving from a nice, cozy writing studio to our house on Birmingham’s Southside. I had the cable and Internet disconnected a bit too early. New service starts Saturday at our house.
However – first-world pain – driving around looking for a steady Wi-Fi signal is no fun.
Between hot spots, I’ve learned that U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks doesn’t believe sick people should have affordable health insurance. Let them eat cake, right? Brooks is blind to the fact that some people who are ill were born that way. Others – my wife, for example – have developed psoriatic arthritis and something called ankylosing spondylitis. She has lived a healthy life, worked until she was laid off by the former newspaper known as The Birmingham News (which is now the clunky Alabama Media Group or something like that) and didn’t ask to be so afflicted.
I may be another story: I’ve smoked most of my life, enjoyed lots of wine and bourbon, and earned Type II diabetes after I got a bit over 300 pounds. I’ve since lost more than 110 pounds and I am asymptomatic for diabetes, but other than that, apparently healthy as of today. Still, I can’t even afford a tier three, high-deductible health insurance policy before the literally deadly changes Brooks is hoping for.
Please note: The changes that will affect the rest of us will not affect Brooks and his colleagues in Congress. With most in Congress, it’s seemingly always “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Then I heard a snippet where new Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law a bill that’ll allow some adoption agencies to discriminate against those in the LGBTQ community who wish to adopt children. Yes, our Republican Legislature and governor would much rather children bounce around foster homes than be adopted into loving families. Ivey didn’t have the backbone even for a symbolic veto that could easily have been overridden by the bigoted House and Senate. It’s a team deal.
Finally, I just caught the news where President Donald Trump signed an executive order (yes, another in a multitude) that gives religious exemptions for churches and employers on everything from political engagement without losing their tax exempt status to employers not having to follow contraception mandates under the Affordable Care Act. Trump’s executive order was signed under the guise of “religious freedom,” which almost always means “my religion, not yours.”
“We will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied, or silenced anymore,” Trump said Thursday on the National Day of Prayer. “And we will never, ever stand for religious discrimination.”
Well, unless you’re a Muslim or don’t subscribe to the far-right religious denominations. That would be another story.
Maybe I should just stay without the Internet and TV for awhile longer. Of course, that would make it more difficult for me to file these columns, and I know my friends on the alt-right look for them every week.
Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, writes this column every week for Alabama Political Reporter, if he can find a Wi-Fi hot-spot. Email: [email protected].
