It was obvious almost from the evening of Friday, February 21st, the day that the Arizona Senate passed Bill 1062 (“An Act Relating to the Free Exercise of Religion”), that Governor Jan Brewer would veto it whether she wanted to or not. Mitt Romney told her to; more important, so did locally influential fellow-Republicans like the state’s two U.S. senators, McCain and Flake. The “business community,” from groovy GoDaddy to Mormon Marriott, recoiled in such horror that you’d think the bill would also have raised the top marginal tax rate. When the N.F.L. strongly suggested that a new venue would have to be found for Super Bowl XLIX, the bill, already in the I.C.U., flatlined. And yesterday, just hours before Brewer stepped to the podium, Major League Baseball, invoking the memory of Jackie Robinson, did a solemn dance on the corpse.
So Brewer’s veto was no surprise. What was a surprise was the powerful, profoundly un-weaselly nature of her statement. Here it is, interspersed with my comments:
Sounds an awful lot like she doesn’t think any such concern exists, doesn’t it?
Guess what’s not on my agenda and doesn’t advance Arizona?
Nice. One red item, one blue one.
Here’s where she really picks up steam. This line drips with disgust, disdain, and contempt.
One of the week’s big Rachel Maddow/Anderson Cooper talking points.
Oh, boy. Here comes the nut—or non-nut—graf.
“Purports” implies that the bill’s sponsors acted in bad faith, which, of course, many of them did. But I didn’t expect her to acknowledge it.
She has already said that religious liberty is not under threat.
Wow. She’s saying that discrimination is at the very heart of the bill.
It’s not really “the debate” that she’s calling ugly. The ugliness is the bill, without which there wouldn’t be a debate. And what is respect and understanding if not tolerance and acceptance?
Speaking of ugliness, don’t get me wrong: Jan Brewer’s governorship has not exactly been a thing of beauty. She abolished state-administered health insurance for children whose families weren’t quite poor enough for Medicaid. She has been unbelievably cruel in her treatment of undocumented immigrants. And before she was against discrimination she was for it, supporting ballot propositions banning not just marriage equality but civil unions, too.
But it was a damn good speech—unequivocal, ungrudging, and stern. That it was delivered by a Republican governor in a Republican state—and delivered with every sign of sincerity, even passion—is simply the latest astonishment in an astonishing American revolution. The change is, as Governor Brewer says, dramatic. It is tectonic. It is unstoppable. In an otherwise foreboding political landscape, it’s a blazing sunrise.
Photograph by Samantha Sais/Reuters.