I’m thinking about the “Jesus Take the Wheel Law” (HB 132) passed by the Mississippi House earlier this month, “exempting,” The Clarion-Ledger tells us, “mid-sized church buses from the state’s commercial driver’s license requirements.”
The bill, HB 132, would help congregations lacking a CDL-certified driver transport up to 30 passengers in a church-owned vehicle. Although applying equally to all churches, it’s primarily aimed at smaller congregations with fewer members and financial resources.
Raise your hand if you think this sounds like a good idea. It didn’t to State Rep. Toby Barker, R-Hattiesburg, self-proclaimed “First Millenial/GenY in the Mississippi Legislature,” who tweeted,
Maybe we should rename HB 132, which would exempt church vans and buses from CDL requirements, the "Jesus Take the Wheel Act."
— Toby Barker (@toby_barker) February 5, 2015
I get that you’re a small church, and maybe nobody in the congregation has a CDL, but c’mon, that doesn’t give you the right to murder innocent people in other vehicles. That is exactly what it would be with a bus carrying up to 30 people, driven by a person not trained to drive such vehicles.
Because you’re a church. Even though a CDL isn’t just training to drive a larger vehicle, but requires a CDL Medical Card, showing you have good vision and hearing, etc. You know, so you don’t murder other motorists.
Just to prove Democrats can be idiots too, we read in the Clarion-Ledger,
“This just allows small churches, some don’t have people with commercial licenses at all, and they can pick a person to drive the bus,” said state Rep. Robert Johnson III, D-Natchez, who chairs the Transportation Committee which had passed the bill earlier in the session.
Oh. That’s all it does.
What happened to personal responsibility? Is Jesus supposed to drive the bus while he’s not busy forcing the Islamic State to its knees? Presumably, the church would care if people were killed due to its irresponsibility? Maybe not.
God wills it! As the crusaders of old used to say. Deus volt!
I remember a number of years ago listening to an American Idol contestant sing Carrie Underwood’s Jesus Take the Wheel. In case you don’t remember it, it’s the song about a woman driving who hits some ice and instead of releasing the breaks and turning her wheel in the appropriate direction, throws “her hands up in the air” and shouts,
Jesus, take the wheel
Take it from my hands
Cause I can’t do this on my own
‘The hell you can’t!” you are probably thinking. If you couldn’t, you shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel in the first place.
Just like those people in small churches can get CDLs if they’re smart and fit enough to obtain one. There is nothing separating them and the rest of us except their professed belief, after all. And driving isn’t about belief. Jesus isn’t going to drive your car for you any more than he’s going to drive that church bus.
And other motorists depend on you knowing how to drive, not on your belief in God.
This is man’s law now, not God’s. Safety on the road is about competence, not strength of belief.
I’m thinking about the song’s lyrics again, now, in relation to this legislation. Which, need I remind you, has actually been passed by the Mississippi House. If the State Senate passes it, it becomes law the moment the governor signs it. That governor is Republican Phil Bryant. Who is all about religious tyranny favoring his own religion.
I could mention this bill also does not mention mosques or synagogues. Let alone Heathen temples. It specifically references “churches.”
I remember thinking that no Heathen woman would take the coward’s way out of appealing to the gods to drive her car for her – and as an abrogation of responsibility that is exactly what this is – as the woman in the song does to Jesus. Rather, she would take responsibility for her own actions, and for the fate her own actions have brought her to. This is what Beowulf did when he came face to face with the dragon.
The only option at such a time is either to surrender to fate, to either let your car crash or the dragon eat you, or to rise above it, to overcome it. Your actions brought you here: get yourself out of it. You might call on Thor for strength, but you don’t hand him the wheel of your car or the hilt of your sword.
So speaking as a Heathen, I find this whole “Jesus take the wheel” thing completely incomprehensible. When I hear that Carrie Underwood song, I keep thinking to myself that I wouldn’t want a god who is going to direct my life for me. Or worse, somebody who says they are speaking for that God.
Which is maybe why I have been a Heathen since 1979. By stepping outside the bubble, I was able to separate myself from something that was directing my life and become something else, something of my choice. A choice, I think, which saved my life.
I am not arguing that you become a Heathen like me. I am arguing that you step “outside” for a minute and become you – and better yet, take responsibility for what you are. It might save you from making mistakes you expect God to get you out of. After all, unless you’re a Republican thinking about the highest office in the land, God probably isn’t telling you to do anything.
But conservative Christians do it all the time, “surrendering” their lives to Christ, putting themselves in “His” hands to direct them.
Here too is a surrender of personal responsibility. How about you take personal responsibility for your lives and take your own damn wheel and steer into that spin and save yourself and your child in the backseat?
And if you really think Jesus is going to drive that Church bus, you should not be on the road in the first place.
I know, doesn’t sound like personal accountability to me either, letting others run your life. But then the Religious Right is a topsy-turvy entity, where tyranny is freedom and freedom is tyranny, and hatred of life is pro-life. The calculus is inscrutable. And I like my sanity.
Personal accountability becomes an anti-accountability, a surrender of personal accountability to the majority, to the hive-mind. They’ve outdone each other in extremism and I think the movement drives itself at this point. Press to be more extreme or fall out of the picture. It’s a self-sustaining hate.
I wish we could use irresponsibility to fuel the planet.
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