State legislators: Please keep your religion out of your lawmaking
By Native Sun News Today Editorial Board nativesunnews.today There are those who think that the elected members of the South Dakota State Legislature live in caves for 9 months out of the year and then come out, blinking at the sunlight like a gopher, and then report to Pierre and then try to set South Dakota on a track to return to the 1800s. Every single year a bill on abortion, usually a law to take away the rights of women to decide what is best for themselves, is drafted and usually defeated as it was by the voters of South Dakota several years ago when it was put on the ballot. But they come out of their caves carrying their Bibles and set about trying to make laws they believe are guided by the hand of God. As we said in an earlier editorial regarding the SD legislators, when you report to Pierre to carry out your duty as an official elected by the people remember that you are not there to convert others to your religious beliefs. There are thousands of South Dakotans, mostly over looked, who are not Christians. Most are Lakota people who practice the traditional beliefs of their ancestors. There was a Farm Bill that passed in the U. S. Congress in which Governor Kristi Noem, then a member of the House of Representatives, voted in favor of, and yet she is reluctant to allow the same law to be introduced in South Dakota. Out on the Pine Ridge Reservation there is a man named Alex White Plume who has been planting a crop of Hemp annually only to see it cut to the ground by the feds. Nonplussed he continues to plant his crop every year. Hemp is not a plant that can be compared to marijuana as some would suggest. It is a crop that can be used for a multitude of purposes, including medicinal, and could turn into a good cash crop for farmers throughout the state, and this is a point that White Plume has been making for years. In this case the State Legislators seem to be fully awake and on the same pages as White Plume. It is only Gov. Noem who seems to be out of step.
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