Meanwhile, as Lopez and Pollard plan to force parents to send their boys to market-driven (re)education facilities while the girls stay home and prepare themselves for servile marriage, State Senator Joseph Silk, R-Broken Arrow, has authored Senate Bill 13, the kind of legislation that indicates many He-Man Woman Haters are using Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a how-to book for subjugating women.
Silk, known for his failed anti-LGBTQ+ restroom bill from two years ago, is trying to outlaw all abortions in the state and classify them as homicides, allowing judges to sentence women who have abortions to life in prison and for medical facilities to deny the procedure even if a continued pregnancy would be fatal for the patient.
Now, it’s one thing to write a mean bill, but SB13 is also super-dumb, as in Silk should have to go cram himself into a tiny desk at a Broken Arrow middle school and repeat eighth-grade civics. To wit, the biggest howler in the bill essentially declares Oklahoma sovereignty over all federal jurisprudence and statutory law.
“Any federal statute, regulation, executive order or court decision which purports to supersede, stay or overrule this Act is in violation of the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma and the Constitution of the United States of America and is therefore void,” reads one passage, best read aloud like a Warner Bros. cartoon character based on Lennie from Of Mice and Men.
Now, Chicken-Fried News could get high and mighty and explain the hierarchy of government to Silk, but since he appears to believe that his little, little bill carries more legal weight than the entirety of the U.S. legal system, including the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade and the power of executive order, this would likely be fruitless. So we’re just fine with pouring verbal gasoline on this garbage bill and ask Atwood if her new Handmaid’s sequel can feature a villain named “Commander Silk.”
