Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers.

For many, the current political climate seems to have taken a distinct turn. The media has been ablaze with U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning the rights of kings—I mean presidents—in regard to the rule of law, as well as sweeping changes to how policy can be interpreted by different branches. The high court has also determined that prosecuting people for being homeless is not “cruel and unusual.”

Closer to home, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that people with uteruses are not full citizens, and after six weeks of pregnancy no longer have the same rights that non-uterus-having folks still maintain to control their own bodies.

This may seem like an onslaught of bad news, or at least noteworthy and worth paying some attention to. For the first time, many are becoming a bit more carefully tuned-in to the goings on and the headlines now that democracy and basic human rights are at a serious risk of being eroded away. Yes, democracy is under threat and yes we should all be paying attention.

However, for those of us who are tuned in to what the political Right has wanted since its existence as a pro-monarchist political realm, it is so clearly not new, it was a long time coming, and it is genuinely and utterly at the feet of the Republican Party and those who support them.  

The Department of Homeland Security has decided to start seizing websites for “copyright infringement”.

See example here: http://torrent-finder.com/

Thus far there are 76 websites reported seized under U.S. Copyright Law.  Apparently this was done under the auspices of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

Our favorite Iowa senator, Chuck Grassley just voted a newer broader reaching bill, Combatting Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA) out of the Judiciary Committee.  

In the past, Internet sites deemed guilty under DMCA were allowed to remove the offending portion of the website in question until the issue could be resolved. Apparently now the Feds are simply seizing the entire Domain.

Opponents to COICA seem to believe that if enacted as written, search robots could be used to find specific words and terms on websites, and then automatic seizure would take effect.  I have not had the opportunity to review the study bill in question, so further research is needed to verify or reject these claims.

Any BH readers with a sense of this issue?

Now that we’re done with the Joe “You Lie” Wilson sideshow, I want to talk about a different kind of Republican disrespect for normal political disagreement.

Having been raised by a Republican of the now-extinct Rockefeller variety, I am often struck by how extreme the GOP has become. Chuck Grassley and Terry Branstad were on the far right in the early 1980s, but many Iowa conservatives now consider them “moderate” or even “liberal.”

Mainstream extremism in the Republican Party is depressing on many levels. It fosters ignorance, as when Iowa Republicans are led to believe that the judiciary is not supposed to interpret the constitution. It encourages politicians to put their theology ahead of civil laws.

Most troubling is when prominent conservatives use language that condones physical violence or “revolution” to resist Democratic policy proposals. I fear that people will get hurt or killed if some mentally unstable person takes these appeals too literally.

More thoughts on this subject are after the jump.