CALIFORNIA’S STATE RELIGION, as explored by Joel Kotkin in the Orange County Register:
In a state ruled by a former Jesuit, perhaps we should not be shocked to find ourselves in the grip of an incipient state religion. Of course, this religion is not actually Christianity, or even anything close to the dogma of Catholicism, but something that increasingly resembles the former Soviet Union, or present-day Iran and Saudi Arabia, than the supposed world center of free, untrammeled expression.
Two pieces of legislation introduced in the Legislature last session, but not yet enacted, show the power of the new religion. One is Senate Bill 1146, which seeks to limit the historically broad exemptions the state and federal governments have provided religious schools to, well, be religious.
Under the rubric of official “tolerance,” the bill would only allow religiously focused schools to deviate from the secular orthodoxy required at nonreligious schools, including support for transgender bathrooms or limitations on expressions of faith by students and even Christian university presidents, in a much narrower range of educational activity than ever before. Many schools believe the bill would needlessly risk their mission and funding to “solve” gender and social equity problems on their campuses that currently don’t exist.
The second piece of legislation, thankfully temporarily tabled, Senate Bill 1161, the Orwellian-named “California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016,” would have dramatically extended the period of time that state officials could prosecute anyone who dared challenge the climate orthodoxy, including statements made decades ago. It would have sought “redress for unfair competition practices committed by entities that have deceived, confused or misled the public on the risks of climate change or financially supported activities that have deceived, confused or misled the public on those risks.”
California’s state religion has real-world consequences: “California power grid urges energy conservation on Monday due to heat wave,” Reuters noted over the weekend.
Because of California’s 45 years of radical environmentalism, the philosophy of BANANAs is omnipresent — Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. As a result, Silicon Valley is designing the hardware and software of the 21st century while being powered by an infrastructure that dates from the Eisenhower era.
Similarly, “California’s highways continue to rank among the worst in the nation — a sorry distinction the state has held for more than a decade,” the San Jose Mercury reported in 2013, which will only get worse (into less than zero territory) as Jerry Brown’s “road diet” goes into effect, to force drivers into mass transit and another aspect of Sacramento’s religion, the state’s high speed rail boondoggle.
And California’s drought was greatly exacerbated by decisions made by Jerry Brown and other radical environmentalists in the 1970s, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote at City Journal last year:
Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.
More recently, VDH has added that Brown and other gnostic priests of the California religious left have learned nothing from their past mistakes:
The California legislature has dealt with a number of issues since the beginning of the drought in 2012—mandating transgendered restrooms, outlawing the use of hunting dogs in the pursuit of bobcats and bears, and proposing a vast increase in the state gas tax in a state that currently suffers the continental United States’ most expensive gasoline prices. Yet reservoir construction was not among such high priority considerations, despite voters’ overwhelming passage in 2014 of a $7.4 billion water bond that included the building of one or two new reservoirs—none of which are even close to being started.
When my wife and I lived in Milpitas, despite the exceedingly mild winter, power blackouts typically occurred several times a year. Until we switched four or five years ago to Comcast’s cable telephony service, our telephones typically suffered from ground loops and outages in the winter, when an AT&T box dated from when our neighborhood was built in 1970 continually flooded during the winter.
The true believers of California’s state religion are willing to overlook such things, but not everyone can be that faithful:
