The Tennessee General Assembly's race to the punch line
begins January 14.
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Sometimes it seems as if Tennessee legislators are competing to see who can be mentioned first on late night political comedy shows for the unconstitutional, discriminatory or just plain nonsensical bills they propose.
While we’d love to think we could—fingers crossed!—make it to the end of this legislative session without the state of Tennessee becoming the punch line for a pundit, given our, ahem, extensive history, we suspect the Tennessee General Assembly just might give the comedians plenty of material to work with.
What will it be this year? As in the past, maybe we'll make it on the comedy shows for legislative attempts to censor discussion of LGBT issues in school:
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How about efforts to criminalize the practice of Islam? To make families’ access to public benefits dependent on children’s grades? To exclude important information teens need from sex education? Or do the legislators have something even more cringeworthy they’re just waiting to unleash on all of us this year?
Here at the ACLU, we’re optimists. We know legislation like this doesn’t represent Tennesseans’ core values of fairness, equality and freedom. We know you watch “The Daily Show” through your fingers too, just dreading the moment our home’s name gets dragged through the mud by a legislator pushing a discriminatory policy.
But maybe this year will be different and we’ll never get mentioned at all. It could totally happen—who knows what the legislatures from other states are gonna come up with? Maybe the Volunteer State will seem completely sane by comparison.
We, for one, would love to see how long the session can go on without Tennessee becoming comedy fodder for the anti-civil liberties antics of our elected officials. So we’re keeping track, starting on January 14 with the Tennessee General Assembly’s return, of how many days we make it without a mention by Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart.
So far, we've made it: 48 days without any mentions* on the comedy shows.
*Okay, so technically Senator Bob Corker's interference with the free market got us our very own "Daily Show" segment on Feb. 18th, but we decided it deserved more of a (dis)honorable mention, instead of an outright win, since this is about the Tennessee General Assembly's race to the punch line, and Sen. Corker's a congressman. So the fight is on!
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As the bills roll in, we'll be keeping you up to date on which gems are contenders to get us on national television for their anti-civil liberties bent.
Here are our early contenders:
We’ll also be holding contests as the session continues so you can show off your political and satirical savvy about which bills will get attention from the comedy writers.
So join us on Facebook and Twitter to learn about the legislature’s latest antics or to win some ACLU-TN swag, like posters, T-shirts, and more.
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Take action and end the laughter.
Most importantly, sign up to get our alerts to learn what you can do to stop this legislation. Because if none of the bills make it on the comedy shows, then we all win. (Not a T-shirt though, just our state pride).
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Lest you get too depressed, there are also some good bills being introduced down at the Tennessee General Assembly—really! Find out what ACLU is working on and supporting, and learn more about our whole legislative lobbying program, at our legislative action center.
Every day that we don’t get mentioned is another day that Tennesseans can keep our heads held high. Together we can lose this race to the punch line. Here’s hoping for a last place finish for Tennessee!
