Pushkin was referring to a bill to legalize the sale of raw milk (HB 4911) — legislation advancing in the Legislature some eight years after a bunch of delegates poisoned themselves by drinking raw milk in celebration of passage of legislation permitting personal consumption of the same. But Pushkin’s quote is an excellent encapsulation of the 2024 regular session thus far.

It’s as if, to the legislative supermajority, Louie Pasteur never existed. (Ironically, Pasteur also contributed to the development of many vaccines, vaccines that some legislators would like to see be made optional.)

They would like to take us back to a time when modern science and medicine were in their infancies, and many were skeptical and distrustful of advances being made in those fields.

They certainly want to take us back to a time when books, art and other creative works could be banned if a vocal minority found something in them that offended them.

Many would like to return to a time before public schools were widespread, when parents taught their children the ABCs, scripture lessons and little else.

They’d like to return to a time before alternative energy sources were prevalent, when we relied on coal for our electricity, when regulators looked the other way when coal operators flaunted environmental and safety regulations. (Oh, that’s right, we’ve never left that time, which is why our electricity prices have been soaring.)

Yes, the legislative supermajority is attempting to move the state back, if not to the 18th century, at least to pre-1960s and ’70s, before passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the rise of feminism and LGBTQ rights, and the establishment of women’s reproductive rights via Roe v. Wade.

It seems that, as of the 39th day of the 60-day regular session, the legislative supermajority has spent an inordinate amount of time pursuing legislation to codify discrimination against transgender individuals in particular and the LGBTQ community in general.

Given that, according to Gallup surveys, just 4% of West Virginia’s population is LGBTQ and an estimated 0.4% is transgender, that means the Legislature is targeting populations of approximately 71,000 and 7,100 respectively, while largely ignoring issues and problems facing all 1.78 million West Virginians.

The most publicized of those bills is the supposed “Women’s Bill of Rights” (HB 5243), which passed the House of Delegates Wednesday on a mostly party-line 87-12 vote.

Proponents of the bill didn’t attempt to hide that its basis is theocratic, not scientific, with both Delegate Kathie Hess Crouse, R-Putnam, and House Judiciary Chairman Tom Fast, R-Fayette, citing its origins in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them.”

Recognizing the reality that the purported Women’s Bill of Rights is a bill that would codify discrimination against transsexual women but otherwise provides no rights to women — and may actually undermine provisions of the state Human Rights Act and other rights provisions in state code — House Democrats attempted to amend the bill, proposing adding actual rights and benefits, including pay equity, affordable child care, paid maternity leave for state employees, and the elimination of the marriage exemption for sexual assault.

Ultimately, after some maneuvering by House leadership, only one of the proposed Democratic amendments remained, the one that would criminalize marital sexual assault.

However, even that was too much for some House Republicans, prompting leadership to park the bill on the House’s inactive calendar for two days seemingly to get members in line.

Additionally, the House had earlier passed HB 4233, requiring that birth certificates designate the individual’s sex at birth as either male or female, and prohibiting using the term “nonbinary” on birth certificates.

Again, the Legislature is attempting to codify the Biblical, not scientific, notion that there are only two sexes.

Meanwhile, the Senate is advancing a bill that would require schools to notify parents if a student requests accommodation with regard to the student’s gender identity, including asking to be addressed by a name or pronoun different from the name or pronoun assigned to the student in school registration forms and records (SB 515).

Fairness West Virginia has dubbed this the “forced outing” bill, and says it will put transgender students who live in what they charitably call “unsupportive homes” in potentially life-threatening situations.

What possible rationale could there be for mandating that schools out transgender students, other than some perverse desire to make those students’ lives miserable on the basis of some convoluted religious belief?

With the nation’s latest mass shooting, this time at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory party Wednesday, the media noted that Missouri has some of the weakest gun safety laws in the U.S., with no background checks, no restrictions on gun ownership for persons convicted of violent crimes, unlicensed conceal carry and open carry by anyone age 19 or older, to name a few.

Not coincidentally, Missouri has the 9th-highest rate of gun deaths in the U.S., according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics.

Strictly coincidentally, I got a news release the day before the shooting from Ammo.com, ranking what it calls the “Most Gun-Friendly States in 2024.”

How one can be friends not only with an inanimate object, but a potentially lethal inanimate object is beyond me, but Ammo.com is an online bulk ammunition retailer, so one presumes its business profits when more people in more places have more guns.

Ammo.com rated Missouri as the 6th-most gun-friendly state, citing the same data as the media, and noting, “Missouri’s governor, Mike Parson, is a former law enforcement member and lifetime NRA member, and has continually expressed support for upholding the Second Amendment. At this time, we’re confident Missouri will remain high on the list of best states for gun owners.”

(Gov. Parson was at the rally Wednesday, and had to flee to safety when the shooting began.)

I kept reading down Ammo.com’s top five list, and saw the usual suspects:

No. 5 Mississippi (ranked first in gun deaths), No. 4 Montana (7th in gun deaths), No. 3 Arkansas (8th in gun deaths).

Then I saw that Ammo.com ranked West Virginia as the nation’s second-most gun friendly state, touting the state’s permitless conceal carry, lack of background checks or firearms registration, the pending effective date of campus conceal carry and sales tax exemptions for most firearms and ammunition purchases, among other “friendly” provisions.

“Legislative actions that remove firearms restrictions are a good indicator that this state will remain on this list for some time,” Ammo.com noted.

Indeed, bills are advancing this session to allow public school teachers, administrators and support staff to conceal carry in schools (HB 4299); to prohibit cities from using municipal zoning to restrict locations for firearms businesses (HB 4827); and to expand the firearms sales tax exemptions to include firearms receivers and frames (SB 351), just to name three.

(Notably, the federal ATF adopted rules to subject receivers and frames to traditional firearms regulations in an effort to slow the proliferation of ghost guns, a rule that was struck down by a federal appeals court last fall.)

West Virginia has the 19th-highest firearms death rate in the U.S., and an older population and low population density are probably factors in keeping the state from being ranked among the top 10deadliest, like the other “friendly” states cited above.

To date, West Virginia has avoided inclusion on the long and ever-growing list of mass shooting locations, but that clock is ticking.

Finally, longtime Legislative Auditor Aaron Allred started a well-earned retirement late last year, and now we may have an inkling as to what influenced that decision.

For those not intimately familiar with legislative functions, the Legislative Auditor’s Office is effectively the Legislature’s watchdog over state agencies. It conducts regular performance evaluations of individual agencies, often finding areas where agencies are failing to comply with legislative mandates or otherwise have operational inefficiencies or failures. The office also has great latitude to investigate possible fraud, waste and abuse through its Post-Audits Division, most recently disclosing a serious error by the Tax Division in calculating valuations of natural gas properties, a blunder that cost eight counties some $30 million in property tax payments.

Frequently, those audits delve into issues raised in news reporting by this paper and, occasionally, other media outlets.

However, under legislation now at passage stage in the Senate, the Legislative Auditor’s Office would be stripped of its powers, and would be able to conduct audits only at the direction of the Senate president or House speaker (SB 687).

Most troubling is that, under the bill, the findings on whatever audits are allowed to be conducted would no longer be public documents. (Currently, audits are presented at legislative interim committee meetings and are released to the media and the public at that time.) Under the bill, copies of audits would be provided to the Joint Committee on Government and Finance and to the president and speaker, and it would be at their discretion whether to make them public.

When Republicans first came to power in the Legislature, they made a great show of how they were going to uncover waste, fraud and abuse in state government, although that initiative frittered out pretty quickly.

Now that their control of state government appears secure for the foreseeable future, they have apparently concluded that the inner workings of state agencies and offices must be hidden from public scrutiny. The question is why?