NE3: Restoration of the Arts Amendment (Signed)

[free my dawg]

This needed to be fixed. It has quite a bit of constitutional concerns to it - though not the ones that windjammer mentioned in his suit. It violates religious freedoms, forcing, say, students in our few madrassas to dress up in Mormon garb, and obviously violates freedom of speech by throwing people in jail for playing censored songs. Not only that, I wanted to base this off of peace, liberty, and brotherhood. For the fourth, I just decided to commemorate our struggles against SirNick, Scourge of the North. For the fifth, I've simply taken out the whole Parental Advisory thing, as it seems unnecessarily edgy to me.

As I said, I don't believe that every bill should be automatically repealed or vetoed if I regret it. If I f**k up like I did here, I'll fix it myself.

[free my dawg]

This act is an improvement, that's clear. And I think it actually adds something rather than just repealing the Act altogether

Yeah, that's my point. It's been my belief that no bill is a stupid bill. If a bill is failing, we fix it. If it's still failing, we repeal it. While reflecting on Winfield's term, I reflected and realized my philosophy. Specifically, my philosophy as governor is that we should work to make something out of nothing, not just simply say "this bill sucks, so let's repeal it". Even during the Days of Repeal, we managed to shepherd good public policy through this, and I proposed this to help make this bill decent public policy.

[free my dawg]

Yes, this bill is an improvement over the original obscene monstrosity.

But has anyone ever stopped to consider that perhaps some of these songs may be offensive or objectionable to say certain faiths or to certain ethnicities or cultures?

The Northeast is multi cultural, multi ethnic, and a area of countless different faiths.

By forcing school children to be bombarded day after day after day by certain songs, we are stepping on their freedom not to be forced to be subjected to something that may be anathema to their faith or to their culture or to their ethnicity.

That's a bit of a strawman, don't you think? Two of these songs are about peace and unity, values that we all can agree with. It's also worth noting that we don't usually see people vocally protesting about people taking away our liberties either (for the only political statement that could be remotely controversial).

[free my dawg]

Playing of the same songs over and over and over and over and over to students is in fact a form of propaganda indoctrination.

So you'd support a bill to ban all songs from school?

I don't see anything wrong with preaching equality, peace and progress in school. Do you?

Mr. Speaker, get your mind beyond the songs themselves.  Although, as I have said, no matter what songs you have, they will be offensive or objectionable to certain ethnicities or faiths.

The real issue here is the high handed manner and the arrogant attitude that the Northeast government has that they presumably have the right and the authority to dictate to our schools the music they have to, indeed they are forced to listen to.

This whole concept is bizarre and just plain silly.

And by the way, we have to get rid of the original obscene monstrosity.

How anyone could dream up such an offensive bill, let alone pass it is beyond me.

That's why I'm changing the songs to something less offensive. I'll do some consultations with actual teachers and administrators, and if people are up in arms, we repeal it. But overall, I like the idea behind it and I'd like to see the general reactions to different songs before going blindly into repeal.

[free my dawg]

Governor, please clarify your statement.  You talk about repeal.  By this do you mean the original bill for repeal?  Of course, if the amended bill is passed, it will replace the original bill.

Consider it more of a trial. I am having a consultation with teachers and administrators to see their input, and I'll be reporting that input back to y'all. Obviously the original bill cannot stand as is, so I'm going to get a consultation from professionals to see whether the general community would be okay with these songs. If it succeeds, we try it for a year. If it fails at any time, we just scrap it and move on.