Good Job, Mississippi! #SB2681

The Mississippi House of Representatives voted today to remove the discriminatory language from the religious freedom bill and set up a committee to study writing a new one. You can read the amendment here. Now the House version has to be reconciled with the Senate version, and that could go all sorts of ways, but I suspect the House version will be adopted.

I think this is a compromise to allow the people who were supporting the original bill to keep the issue in play, and now they have up to a year to build support for some form of religious freedom bill. People who oppose it have the same amount of time to organize. Thanks to everyone who read, liked and shared my posts on this issue, gave me feedback, and helped me on other social media. I’ve made my position on the need for state religious freedom legislation clear. Given where we started, the House bill is reasonable enough, and I’m happy to finally be writing a political post that says something positive about Mississippi.

The House amended this bill because people scrutinized it, and because Mississippians pressured them to change it or vote it down.  That says to me we’re making progress. So good job, Mississippi!

Azrael and the 1990s

by Jeremy DeFatta

Happy new book day, everyone! I thought for today we could look at another one of the heirs to the Batman mantle. Pretty much everyone who read comics in the 90s knows (and likely loathes) the character I want to focus on today—Jean-Paul Valley, better known as Azrael.

The 90s were a dark and twisted time in comics. Books like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns had been released just a few short years earlier and the industry was still reeling in their wake. However else fans chose to read these books, their dark turn is what stuck around the longest; death, violence, distrust of authority, and loss of identity became some of the most recognizable tropes of the decade’s superhero stories. This is the era that saw the founding of Image Comics, but that also saw many established characters in Marvel and DC broken in various ways. At DC, Superman and Oliver Queen were dead, Hal Jordan was an insane mass-murderer with godlike powers, and Batman had been thoroughly defeated and paralyzed by a new enemy called Bane.