#2551: Matt Bevin

Matthew Griswold Bevin is a fundie wingnut madman and the 62nd governor of Kentucky, representing the Tea Party, from 2015 to 2019. A lot of positions taken by Bevin on issues are exactly what you’d expect – including opposition to marriage equality – and we won’t cover his antics in any detail.

 

We can’t, however, quite overlook Bevin’s claims that government employees refusing to do their job (while demanding to keep them) is a “free speech” issue – yes, Bevin was a firm supporter of the antics of Kim Davis. In fact, Bevin thinks Davis is an inspiration “to the children of America”.

 

Bevin is also a creationist and climate change denier who supports. creationist attempts to “teach the controversy” on issues like evolution and global warming – issues on which there is no relevant scientific controversy but on which fundies don’t like the facts and want others (school students) to be confused about the facts, too. Bevin was an ardent defender of Ken Ham’s attempts to obtain tax breaks for his Ark park while simultaneously adhering to hiring practices that discrimate on religious issues. Indeed, Bevin ensured that the Ham’s deranged creationist roadside show would get substantial state funds instead. Bevin also declared both 2016 and 2017 “Year of the Bible” in Kentucky. He has, on numerous occasions, voted to authorize Bible classes in public schools.

 

Of course, as you would think given his views on facts, Bevin is no fan of public education or teachers. In 2018, he angrily “guaranteed” that teachers’ labor stoppage resulted in unsupervised children being sexually assaulted, physically harmed, or exposed to poison and drugs. But then, Bevin has a curious understanding of things that cause other things to happen – in the wake of the Parkland school shooting and the Marshall County High School shooting in Kentucky, Bevin declared that it was time to address what he falsely thought of as causes, namely video games (“it’s the same as pornography. They have desensitized people to the value of human life, to the dignity of women, to the dignity of human decency”) and zombie television shows. In 2017, he linked the violence at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville to the Bible no longer being used as a textbook in public schools. He has also suggested roving prayer patrols as a solution to violence (and suggested that critics of the idea would go to hell). On the other hand, he has also suggested that violence might be needed to protect the biblical values he protects.

 

When he lost the election in 2019, Bevin did a Trump and claimed massive election fraud, referring for instance – of course without a shred of evidence – to “thousands of absentee ballots that were illegally counted”, people allegedly being “incorrectly turned away” at the polls, “a number of [voting] machines that didn’t work properly”, and ballots being stored in open boxes. He seems to have gotten his info mostly from his “good friend” Erika Calihan, a random woman whom Bevin appointed to a state government position and who appears to have found the conspiracy theories on facebook.

 

Bevin has also admitted to exposing his kids to chickenpox to give them immunity – which is … not a good idea and reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the point (as well as of the efficacy and safety of vaccines).

 

Diagnosis: A dreadful character, and too much even for Kentucky, apparently, who at least had sense enough to vote him out. He is, unfortunately, probably not completely out of the game yet, however.