The Missouri General Assembly will gavel in its 2024 legislative session Wednesday, and all indications are that the Republican supermajority intends to take last year’s culture-war hysteria and turn it up to 11.
Pre-filed legislation for the coming session includes proposals to legally classify abortion as murder, to further restrict access to books, to make it more difficult for the public to go around the Legislature via referendum, and a spate of additional attacks on LGBTQ minors seeking medical care.
Missouri’s teachers remain among the lowest-paid in the nation, its health care is still inaccessible to too many rural Missourians, and the state has among the nation’s highest firearms death rates. Yet the ruling party is poised to focus on epic issues like restricting drag shows and policing what pronouns kids use to describe themselves.
More than 20 pre-filed bills this year would further restrict LGBTQ rights, expanding upon last year’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. New proposals would eliminate the grandfather clause that allows minors who were already on prescribed hormone therapy to continue the treatments, and would eliminate the 2027 sunset clause to the original ban.
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Lawmakers would continue substituting their own hostile ideology for the medical expertise of doctors and the decisions of parents and kids dealing with the very real issue of gender dysphoria, in other words.
New legislation also seeks to blanket schools with onerous new rules on teachers — proposals that promote an imaginary crisis of sexualized curriculum, while potentially worsening the actual crisis that is Missouri’s teacher shortage.
The so-called Parents’ Bill of Rights (), for example, would mandate that if a student confides in a teacher any “discomfort or confusion about the student’s documented [gender] identity,†the teacher would be required to immediately inform the parents.
On the bright side, teachers could perhaps use this as a real-life demonstration of Orwellian literary themes.
Another bill () would ban school employees from addressing students “by pronouns that are different from the pronouns that align with such student’s biological sex unless the public school or school board receives written permission from the student’s parent.â€
Because this is what’s important in one of America’s most underperforming school systems.
Immediately upon the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year, Missouri instituted an abortion ban as draconian as any in the nation, outlawing the procedure from the moment of conception with no rape or incest exceptions.
But that’s not enough for state Sen. Mike Moon, R-Ash Grove, who has filed legislation () that would categorize all abortion as murder, with the pregnant woman herself among those who could be charged.
As we noted in an editorial last month, such a measure would introduce the possibility of a woman being marched into Missouri’s execution chamber for ending a pregnancy caused by rape.
As Missouri’s Legislature has devolved from relative centrism to right-wing extremism over the past decade, the escape hatch for the state’s residents has been the referendum process.
Voters have used that process repeatedly to step around their radicalized elected representatives regarding labor rights, the minimum wage, marijuana, Medicaid expansion and more. And there are multiple current efforts to restore abortion rights via referendum.
Which explains multiple new bills seeking to make it harder to pass statewide ballot measures. Their sponsors have all kinds of rationales for it, but it is nothing less than politicians striking back at their own voters for defying them.
So buckle up, Missouri — the crazy car that is state politics is revving its engine. And until voters stop returning these pandering zealots to Jefferson City, it will continue to be a harrowing ride.