And okay, folks, here's the first draftish kind of thing of the SLA article, followed by notes for an article on Rep. Susan Happery. As with the Land Theft Act, the date she submits the SLA is the same date the real HR451 was submitted in 2009.
Note that this more a vague structure with notes than a real draft. Also, Happery kind of got away from me, I will probably scale her back a bit (unless everyone likes the idea of her being a full-bore gonzo all-but-flat-earther evangelical Christian).
Anyway, please feel free to offer suggestions, expansions, changes, deletions, etc.
The Subversive Literature Act of 2009
Infamous bill (H.R. 451) introduced into the United States House of Representatives on January 18, 2009 by [[Susan Happery] (R-KS), a freshman Representative affiliated with the Tea Party movement. The Subversive Literature Act was intended to criminalize the science fiction and fantasy genres across all known and future media. One of the first bills of the 111th United States Congress, it was also the very first legislation proposed by Happery, who had been sworn in as a member of the House less than two weeks earlier. Congressional observers also credit it with ''ending'' her political career as well, at least on the national stage.
The bill had nearly a dozen co-sponsors, a bi-partisan assortment composed mostly of Republicans and Tea Party members, but all of whom were known to be strongly anti-Fen. (Some of the co-signers -- most notably [[Wallace Webster] (R-NH), [[Isabella Ward] (R-TN) and [[Kendall Dixon] (D-NJ) -- would later go on to sponsor the ill-fated [[Federal Land Theft Protection Act of 2012].) Happery had spent nearly all of her first two weeks in the House pursuing, persuading and sometimes haranguing other Representatives into supporting the bill. Several co-sponsors later admitted that they only agreed to put their names on the Act to make Happery go away, and did so without reading a word of the proposed legislation -- or even, in some cases, knowing the full name of the bill.
== Summary ==
((Bill defines SF/F as "obscene" and bans its possession/viewing/reading by anyone under 21. Also claims it is "inflammatory speech",
Bill requires libraries to actively track the reading habits of all their users and report everyone who checks out more than 2 SF/F books (as defined by the incredibly broad terms of the bill) to the FBI.
the 2009 "Subversive Literature Act"... probably would not have named F&SF directly, but make references to "enabling or encouraging handwavium-related criminal activities" would be a good code-phrase.))
== Reactions ==
((Bill would have made it into committee unnoticed, except Happery decided to sweep into the Congressional press pool offices and trumpet her first piece of legislation to the reporters on duty. The reporters blink and confirm that she does really intend for the new law to criminalize a huge swath of American culture and duly report on it with surprising restraint and just-the-facts-ma'am simplicity.
It takes a couple of stunned days (of course there are a blogger or ten who go nuts right away) before people start reacting to the bill. (It takes a while to read it all and decode some of the more obfuscated parts.) The outcry starts immediately.
The ACLU, the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Lucasfilms, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and Paramount remind Congress of the First Amendment - especially if news of the bill breaks near or during Banned Books Week (Week of September 26, 2009, so it won't, but still...).
WB, Disney, other Media conglomerates all threaten to move offshore en masse if bill passes.
Let's not forget the Holy Rodent Empire. Imagine heavy-handed political advertisements featuring doe-eyed children asking their folks why they can't sing along with Elsa anymore, daddy? Why? >
(Since the bill claims that F&SF is "inflammatory speech" citing ''Brandenburg v. Ohio'' as a precedent for unconstitutionality is a common talking point http://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio )
Sadly, I can see one of their constituents who very vehemently "Did not vote for that jackass" cheerily burning a stack of "innocuous" books like Alice in Wonderland, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Bibles to "... [get] ready for when [Childish opponent nickname]'s law passes."
Spielberg, Lucas etc. hold press conference to denounce Happery.
Mention Gordon Van Gelder of F&SF.
Even FOX News is terribly unsympathetic to her, as FOX owns several very profitable SF/F properties, not the least of which are the X-Men movies.))
=== Happery's responses ===
((Makes a number of appearances on news TV, radio, etc. and demonstrates very clearly that she suffers from a profound cultural tunnelvision. She's of the strain of evangelical Christian that distributed tracts warning about the "dangers" of "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie" in the 60s-70s, organized marches against D&D in the 1980s, and were behind the "Satanic Child Abuse" flap in the 1990s -- basically disconnected from the American Pop Cultural Mainstream except where something that might be "satanic" comes to their attention. "Satanic" meaning in this case "not obviously biblical, and involving more imagination and/or critical thinking than we want our children to have".
Even on FOX News she comes across as a whacko, especially once she starts ranting about a vast Satanic conspiracy out to silence her, and how any space exploration is a sin because it involves throwing impure mortal constructions into Heaven, which is just beyond the clouds in the sky, and how wherever the Fen are it can't be outer space which doesn't really exist, so since it's not on earth it must actually be a part of Hell disguising itself as the fairy story scientists actively deceive the world exists past the sky, how Science Fiction, Comic Books, Handwavium and, well, everything else are all actually a fiendish plot by the Forces of Satan to corrupt good Christians and so on. Even Bill O'Reilly thinks she's off her rocker after one too many rants.))
((SNL gets Dana Carvey to guest star and portray Happery as the Church Lady after one such appearance on FOX. Naturally, she threatens to sue, but doesn't follow through, presumably because someone explains the nature of satire and being a public figure to her.))
== Congressional Reaction ==
((Once it gets out what's actually in the bill, her co-sponsors disassociate themselves as quickly as they can. People on both sides of the aisle stop answering her calls, and refuse to speak to her on the floor (which only fuels her "conspiracy" talk). The Republicans take a huge hit (somewhat unfairly, since there were Democratic co-sponsors, although they do get their share of unwelcome attention and blame) as would-be censors and cultural police who would deprive children of fairy tales and Disney movies because they don't like the Fen.
The bill vanishes into committee and never reappears, while politicians from both parties quietly meet with reps from the various industries and other groups to reassure them that the SLA is dead and buried and Happery is never going to be allowed to submit legislation again without a minder making sure it's not utterly insane. This mollifies (most of) the groups, and so the RNC doesn't suffer too much for Happery's behavior, but they now have incentive not to pursue cultural "solutions" to the Fen "problem".
However, Happery and all the co-sponsors are now on the radar of civil liberties bodies like the ACLU, and the ones that remain in Congress never quite get out of the spotlight, for good or bad.
Meanwhile in February 2009, after one too many disastrous TV appearances, Happery and the rest of the Kansas delegation get called on the carpet by the party. She's a liability, doing more damage than good. The Republican brand is dependent on not looking like absolute lunatics, and she's damaging it with her behavior. Meanwhile, the rest of the Kansas delegation failed to integrate her with the party framework in Congress, and didn't properly rein her in after she started harassing other members of Congress. They are told outright that the party is assigning her a babysitter for the rest of her time in Congress, whom she must integrate into her staff -- firing someone if necessary to meet the staff size limit. She'll be allowed to introduce the occasional bill, but she's no longer allowed to operate without party oversight. And come 2010, she will get no party support for re-election.))
((other co-sponsors: Montag, McClellan, Beatty...)
((where to put the following?))
According to sources from her campaign, Happery conceived of the idea behind the Act between her election and her arrival in Washington, and wrote the bulk of the proposed law herself with the help of several attorneys on her staff. The House Office of Legislative Counsel later confirmed that while Happery's staff requested an attorney from the OLC to help draft the Act, the request was apparently only for appearances. Jaye Creed, the OLC attorney assigned to Happery and a specialist in First Amendment law, later testified that she was presented with what was essentially the final form of the Act as later submitted to the House, and was told to rubberstamp it. "I had serious concerns about the Constitutionality of the Act," she said later, "but Mr. NewsomeBenjamin Newsome, Happery's chief of staff. told me that my professional opinion of the legislation was unwelcome and that my job was to be 'a glorified proofreader and nothing more'. Those were his words exactly."
{{gazetteer}}{{Mundania}}[[Category:Government][[Categoryanelaw government][[Category:Fen History][[Category:Fen Politics]
anti-Fen Jack Chick tracts?
--------------------Page on Susan Happery
Susan "Sue-Happy" Happery -- a 1-term freshman Representative (Tea Party) who basically loses all RNC support after she makes them look bad with the SLA. A know-nothing housewife-turned-Representative who suffers from evangelical Christian cultural tunnel-vision ("Star Track? Star Wars? Aren't those popular only with terrorists and teenaged misfits living in their parents' cellars?") and who wants to defund NASA because it contradicts the Gospel.
Pick a small Kansas town off the map for her home. (Smallville? heh)
She got into politics by way of a series of lawsuits filed against just about anything she didn't like, hence her nickname. She got her start by successfully getting independent comic shops shut down in her home county in the middle 1990s. After the beginning of the Handwavium age she spearheaded lawsuits that tried to shut down SF conventions in Kansas, like ConQuest (http://www.conquestkc.org/) and Kansas City Comic Con (http://www.kansascity-comiccon.com/), tried to get anime banned from Kansas libraries, and attacked the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas (http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/), calling for the arrest and trial of KU professor and noted SF author James Gunn as a subversive.
Sometimes her objections were combined with or disguised as budgetary/fiscal responsibility, anti-entitlement or other "small-government" shibboleths, even when it made no sense in context. This brought her to the attention of Tea Party organizers in Kansas, who saw the attractive and passionate thirty-something soccer mom as an ideal candidate and talked her into running for office. State-level office before congress? map out a good career path. Presidential ambitions?
Elected to Congress November 2008, took office January 2009, submitted the SLA on 18 Jan 2009. Deprived entirely of support even from the Tea Party, she failed in her bid for re-election in November 2010, not even making it past state primaries when the national party favored a less-insane person with funding and media coverage. Returns home in December 2010 and takes up her old hobbies again, but after her congressional self-destruct, she's now a local figure of ridicule/pity and a warning to the other extreme Christians in Kansas, who learn from her and adjust their tactics to look more reasonable.
{{gazetteer}}{{Mundania}}[[Category:Government][[Categoryanelaw government]
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Note that this more a vague structure with notes than a real draft. Also, Happery kind of got away from me, I will probably scale her back a bit (unless everyone likes the idea of her being a full-bore gonzo all-but-flat-earther evangelical Christian).
Anyway, please feel free to offer suggestions, expansions, changes, deletions, etc.
The Subversive Literature Act of 2009
Infamous bill (H.R. 451) introduced into the United States House of Representatives on January 18, 2009 by [[Susan Happery] (R-KS), a freshman Representative affiliated with the Tea Party movement. The Subversive Literature Act was intended to criminalize the science fiction and fantasy genres across all known and future media. One of the first bills of the 111th United States Congress, it was also the very first legislation proposed by Happery, who had been sworn in as a member of the House less than two weeks earlier. Congressional observers also credit it with ''ending'' her political career as well, at least on the national stage.
The bill had nearly a dozen co-sponsors, a bi-partisan assortment composed mostly of Republicans and Tea Party members, but all of whom were known to be strongly anti-Fen. (Some of the co-signers -- most notably [[Wallace Webster] (R-NH), [[Isabella Ward] (R-TN) and [[Kendall Dixon] (D-NJ) -- would later go on to sponsor the ill-fated [[Federal Land Theft Protection Act of 2012].) Happery had spent nearly all of her first two weeks in the House pursuing, persuading and sometimes haranguing other Representatives into supporting the bill. Several co-sponsors later admitted that they only agreed to put their names on the Act to make Happery go away, and did so without reading a word of the proposed legislation -- or even, in some cases, knowing the full name of the bill.
== Summary ==
((Bill defines SF/F as "obscene" and bans its possession/viewing/reading by anyone under 21. Also claims it is "inflammatory speech",
Bill requires libraries to actively track the reading habits of all their users and report everyone who checks out more than 2 SF/F books (as defined by the incredibly broad terms of the bill) to the FBI.
the 2009 "Subversive Literature Act"... probably would not have named F&SF directly, but make references to "enabling or encouraging handwavium-related criminal activities" would be a good code-phrase.))
== Reactions ==
((Bill would have made it into committee unnoticed, except Happery decided to sweep into the Congressional press pool offices and trumpet her first piece of legislation to the reporters on duty. The reporters blink and confirm that she does really intend for the new law to criminalize a huge swath of American culture and duly report on it with surprising restraint and just-the-facts-ma'am simplicity.
It takes a couple of stunned days (of course there are a blogger or ten who go nuts right away) before people start reacting to the bill. (It takes a while to read it all and decode some of the more obfuscated parts.) The outcry starts immediately.
The ACLU, the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Lucasfilms, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and Paramount remind Congress of the First Amendment - especially if news of the bill breaks near or during Banned Books Week (Week of September 26, 2009, so it won't, but still...).
WB, Disney, other Media conglomerates all threaten to move offshore en masse if bill passes.
Let's not forget the Holy Rodent Empire. Imagine heavy-handed political advertisements featuring doe-eyed children asking their folks why they can't sing along with Elsa anymore, daddy? Why? >
(Since the bill claims that F&SF is "inflammatory speech" citing ''Brandenburg v. Ohio'' as a precedent for unconstitutionality is a common talking point http://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio )
Sadly, I can see one of their constituents who very vehemently "Did not vote for that jackass" cheerily burning a stack of "innocuous" books like Alice in Wonderland, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Bibles to "... [get] ready for when [Childish opponent nickname]'s law passes."
Spielberg, Lucas etc. hold press conference to denounce Happery.
Mention Gordon Van Gelder of F&SF.
Even FOX News is terribly unsympathetic to her, as FOX owns several very profitable SF/F properties, not the least of which are the X-Men movies.))
=== Happery's responses ===
((Makes a number of appearances on news TV, radio, etc. and demonstrates very clearly that she suffers from a profound cultural tunnelvision. She's of the strain of evangelical Christian that distributed tracts warning about the "dangers" of "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie" in the 60s-70s, organized marches against D&D in the 1980s, and were behind the "Satanic Child Abuse" flap in the 1990s -- basically disconnected from the American Pop Cultural Mainstream except where something that might be "satanic" comes to their attention. "Satanic" meaning in this case "not obviously biblical, and involving more imagination and/or critical thinking than we want our children to have".
Even on FOX News she comes across as a whacko, especially once she starts ranting about a vast Satanic conspiracy out to silence her, and how any space exploration is a sin because it involves throwing impure mortal constructions into Heaven, which is just beyond the clouds in the sky, and how wherever the Fen are it can't be outer space which doesn't really exist, so since it's not on earth it must actually be a part of Hell disguising itself as the fairy story scientists actively deceive the world exists past the sky, how Science Fiction, Comic Books, Handwavium and, well, everything else are all actually a fiendish plot by the Forces of Satan to corrupt good Christians and so on. Even Bill O'Reilly thinks she's off her rocker after one too many rants.))
((SNL gets Dana Carvey to guest star and portray Happery as the Church Lady after one such appearance on FOX. Naturally, she threatens to sue, but doesn't follow through, presumably because someone explains the nature of satire and being a public figure to her.))
== Congressional Reaction ==
((Once it gets out what's actually in the bill, her co-sponsors disassociate themselves as quickly as they can. People on both sides of the aisle stop answering her calls, and refuse to speak to her on the floor (which only fuels her "conspiracy" talk). The Republicans take a huge hit (somewhat unfairly, since there were Democratic co-sponsors, although they do get their share of unwelcome attention and blame) as would-be censors and cultural police who would deprive children of fairy tales and Disney movies because they don't like the Fen.
The bill vanishes into committee and never reappears, while politicians from both parties quietly meet with reps from the various industries and other groups to reassure them that the SLA is dead and buried and Happery is never going to be allowed to submit legislation again without a minder making sure it's not utterly insane. This mollifies (most of) the groups, and so the RNC doesn't suffer too much for Happery's behavior, but they now have incentive not to pursue cultural "solutions" to the Fen "problem".
However, Happery and all the co-sponsors are now on the radar of civil liberties bodies like the ACLU, and the ones that remain in Congress never quite get out of the spotlight, for good or bad.
Meanwhile in February 2009, after one too many disastrous TV appearances, Happery and the rest of the Kansas delegation get called on the carpet by the party. She's a liability, doing more damage than good. The Republican brand is dependent on not looking like absolute lunatics, and she's damaging it with her behavior. Meanwhile, the rest of the Kansas delegation failed to integrate her with the party framework in Congress, and didn't properly rein her in after she started harassing other members of Congress. They are told outright that the party is assigning her a babysitter for the rest of her time in Congress, whom she must integrate into her staff -- firing someone if necessary to meet the staff size limit. She'll be allowed to introduce the occasional bill, but she's no longer allowed to operate without party oversight. And come 2010, she will get no party support for re-election.))
((other co-sponsors: Montag, McClellan, Beatty...)
((where to put the following?))
According to sources from her campaign, Happery conceived of the idea behind the Act between her election and her arrival in Washington, and wrote the bulk of the proposed law herself with the help of several attorneys on her staff. The House Office of Legislative Counsel later confirmed that while Happery's staff requested an attorney from the OLC to help draft the Act, the request was apparently only for appearances. Jaye Creed, the OLC attorney assigned to Happery and a specialist in First Amendment law, later testified that she was presented with what was essentially the final form of the Act as later submitted to the House, and was told to rubberstamp it. "I had serious concerns about the Constitutionality of the Act," she said later, "but Mr. NewsomeBenjamin Newsome, Happery's chief of staff. told me that my professional opinion of the legislation was unwelcome and that my job was to be 'a glorified proofreader and nothing more'. Those were his words exactly."
{{gazetteer}}{{Mundania}}[[Category:Government][[Category
anelaw government][[Category:Fen History][[Category:Fen Politics] anti-Fen Jack Chick tracts?
--------------------Page on Susan Happery
Susan "Sue-Happy" Happery -- a 1-term freshman Representative (Tea Party) who basically loses all RNC support after she makes them look bad with the SLA. A know-nothing housewife-turned-Representative who suffers from evangelical Christian cultural tunnel-vision ("Star Track? Star Wars? Aren't those popular only with terrorists and teenaged misfits living in their parents' cellars?") and who wants to defund NASA because it contradicts the Gospel.
Pick a small Kansas town off the map for her home. (Smallville? heh)
She got into politics by way of a series of lawsuits filed against just about anything she didn't like, hence her nickname. She got her start by successfully getting independent comic shops shut down in her home county in the middle 1990s. After the beginning of the Handwavium age she spearheaded lawsuits that tried to shut down SF conventions in Kansas, like ConQuest (http://www.conquestkc.org/) and Kansas City Comic Con (http://www.kansascity-comiccon.com/), tried to get anime banned from Kansas libraries, and attacked the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas (http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/), calling for the arrest and trial of KU professor and noted SF author James Gunn as a subversive.
Sometimes her objections were combined with or disguised as budgetary/fiscal responsibility, anti-entitlement or other "small-government" shibboleths, even when it made no sense in context. This brought her to the attention of Tea Party organizers in Kansas, who saw the attractive and passionate thirty-something soccer mom as an ideal candidate and talked her into running for office. State-level office before congress? map out a good career path. Presidential ambitions?
Elected to Congress November 2008, took office January 2009, submitted the SLA on 18 Jan 2009. Deprived entirely of support even from the Tea Party, she failed in her bid for re-election in November 2010, not even making it past state primaries when the national party favored a less-insane person with funding and media coverage. Returns home in December 2010 and takes up her old hobbies again, but after her congressional self-destruct, she's now a local figure of ridicule/pity and a warning to the other extreme Christians in Kansas, who learn from her and adjust their tactics to look more reasonable.
{{gazetteer}}{{Mundania}}[[Category:Government][[Category
anelaw government]-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.