HEDONISTIC BLUE STATES….VIRTUOUS RED STATES….Another day, another slur. A rather tedious interstate commerce case got resolved a couple of days ago: one Rhonda Anne McCoy apparently got drunk one night and in the course of taking family photos, “Rhonda and [her daughter] Kala, partially unclothed, posed side by side for the camera, with their genital areas exposed. This pose was captured in one photograph.”
The 9th Circuit Court overturned McCoy’s conviction because it seemed rather remote from any legitimate federal concerns about interstate commerce, and Clayton Cramer thinks this was the right decision. He also suspects that McCoy’s behavior was not really what legislators had in mind anyway:
Unless there’s something missing here, the description of the events sound more like the sort of stupid, intoxicated behavior that I learned to expect living in California, not the sort of child-injurious conduct at which this statute was aimed.
Is Clayton seriously suggesting that getting drunk and acting stupid is somehow a uniquely California phenomenon? This from a guy who lives in Idaho?
Besides, I’ll have you know that California has earned its flaky reputation through years and years of hard and persistent work. From Sister Aimee to Ham and Eggs to the Free Speech movement, we’ve coddled crackpots and loons for longer than either Clayton or I have been alive.
And you know what? It works! All us loony, urban, free spirited ? and heavily taxed ? blue states have turned out to be the engines of progress for the entire country, providing most of the economic growth and subsidizing the hell out of all those morally virtuous red states. So any time Idaho wants to round up some of its fellow freeloading red states and secede from the Union, I guess I won’t stand in your way. But if you want to keep all the free goodies coming your way from us hard working entrepreneurs on the coasts, I’d recommend against it….
