The five kingdoms of life are up for discussion, scrutiny and enforcement in this year’s Oklahoma legislative session.
And, yeah, we know the number of kingdoms actually varies but it worked best for the joke here, so cut us some slack for punchline’s sake.
The animal one is pretty obvious as these potential statutes — all 4,800 or so of them — were written by humans and for humans, though a good number of them could be argued that they were written by extraterrestrials as they seem so out-of-this-world absurd that no species native to this planet could have written them. And at least one of them tackles a subject so inhuman that it’s embarrassing to admit members of our species committed it.
House Bill 4152, filed by Rep. Regina Goodwin (D-Tulsa), would implement a reparations program to the tune of $300 million to pay for damages to people and property that occurred during the Tulsa Race Massacre a century ago, The Black Wall Street Times reported.
Meanwhile, the debate over critical race theory rages on in varying degrees of accuracy. Whether or not the subject is taught in public schools, it’s 100 years past the time when our state should be held to account for what happened (and more specifically what many Tulsa citizens did to their neighbors and local business owners).
There have also been more than 100 bills filed in relation to cannabis regulation in the state. Once again, legislators have learned the hard way that sticking their heads in the sand and plugging their ears with their fingers didn’t actually stop the medical marijuana program from rolling out in the state (remember when the industry called for a special session in 2018?).
But most fascinatingly, and in stark contrast to the aforementioned, bills concerning decriminalization and further research on possible psilocybin treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), severe depression and opioid use have also been filed by … a Republican?
Okay, so we don’t actually know if there are any bills specifically about bacteria and protists, but surely, with more than 2,300 potential pieces of legislation filed this session and another 2,500 holdovers from last year, there’s gotta be something in there somewhere about algae, right?
