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Many legislators sought a total ban on abortion, eliminating exceptions for rape and incest, which would have effectively required crime victims to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Indeed, a bill (SB 584) this session to eliminate those exceptions had 13 cosponsors in the Senate.

This session, legislators are nearing final passage of a bill (HB 2007) that would effectively eliminate physicians’ ability to treat transgender youth, not on the advice and counsel of medical professionals — indeed, doctors speaking at a sole public hearing on the bill warned it will cause grave harm to young people — but because of fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs held by legislators, many of whom conceded that the medical science involved is beyond their comprehension.

Also this session, the Senate unanimously passed a bill (SB 251), now pending in the House, that would require public schools, colleges and universities to prominently display “In God We Trust� signage.

The bill doesn’t explicitly reference a Christian God, but we know from the history of the motto that it was enacted during the rise of the Cold War as a response to the Soviet Union’s state-sanctioned atheism, and that prominent evangelical Christian pastor Billy Graham was the prime mover for its adoption.

(Notably, nearly 100 years earlier, the Confederacy had used “In God We Trust� as a motto to make the distinction that the Confederate Constitution invoked God, while the U.S. Constitution does not.)

Then there’s HB 3042, which supposedly will forbid “excessive government limitations on the exercise of religion,� but considering that delegates soundly rejected an amendment that would have clarified that the legislation does not apply to any federal, state, or local nondiscrimination law or ordinance, it’s clearly intended to permit discrimination on religious grounds — particularly to nullify LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinances enacted in more than a dozen West Virginia cities.

(And secondarily to allow noncompliance with laws such as mandatory vaccination requirements on religious grounds.)

Senate leadership, in its ongoing rush to trample legislative principles and protocols, suspended Constitutional rules and passed the bill mere minutes after receiving it from the House, sending it to Gov. Jim Justice, who undoubtedly will sign it with the same enthusiasm he displayed when signing campus carry into law last week (SB 10).

Delegate Todd Kirby, R-Raleigh, left little doubt about the bill’s intent when he claimed that public schoolteachers are being forced to wage a “war on traditional families� by promoting transgenderism and homosexuality in school.

Notably, the bill specifically excludes abortion rights as an exercise of religion, which as Delegate Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, noted, imposes fundamentalist Christian beliefs on other faiths, including Judaism, which believes life begins at birth, not at conception.

It was also pointed out that in 2016, then-Senate majority leader and current state Economic Development Secretary Mitch Carmichael helped kill a version of a RFRA bill over concerns of the chilling effect that state-sanctioned bigotry would have on the recruitment of Fortune 500 companies to the state, the vast majority of which include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies.

That the Senate rejected the 2016 RFRA bill by a 27-7 margin, but passed the current RFRA bill on a 30-3 vote shows just how far to the right the Legislature has moved in seven years.

Meanwhile, a bill (3018) to raise the legal age to marry to age 18 passed the House at the crossover day deadline Wednesday, having spent time in the purgatory of the inactive House calendar.

(West Virginia is one of seven states with no minimum age requirement for marriage, permitting minors 16 or older to marry with parental consent, and permitting youth of any age to marry with parental consent and a circuit court order.)

With the bill facing a tight deadline of less than a week to get through the Senate, the fundamentalist Christian West Virginia Family Foundation is busy fighting the bill, sending out fliers claiming its passage would make it impossible for future courts to uphold a state law banning same-sex marriage should the U.S. Supreme Court at some point overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which made the state prohibition unconstitutional.

That’s supposedly because the bill would remove the phrase, “for both the male and the female� from the section of state Code establishing the legal age of consent for marriage.

(The Wyoming Legislature recently passed legislation raising the legal age for marriage to 18, over objections from the state Republican Party, which argued that setting a minimum age denies “the fundamental purpose of marriage,� with one opponent stating, “For minors to whom God has given a child, states should allow for the best interest of that child.�)

Just as West Virginia legislators feel compelled each session to pass one or more bills further repealing or gutting what’s left of state gun safety measures, we can anticipate the Legislature, as currently composed, will continue to enact additional fundamentalist Christian theocratic measures year after year.

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I’ve written at length this session about how legislative leaders have used subterfuge and stealth to advance legislation in the darkness of backroom deals.

However, the Senate struck a new low last Saturday by originating a bill in Senate Rules Committee.

For those not intimately familiar with the nuances of the legislative process, the House and Senate Rules Committees function as gatekeepers, with the authority to move bills on and off the floor calendar.

At times, Rules Committees function as traffic control, assuring that the body does not have an unbearable crunch of bills during one floor session, with few bills pending for the next day’s session.

However, the Rules Committees’ ability to remove flawed, controversial or duplicative bills from active consideration makes them the most powerful committees in the Legislature.

It is not uncommon, when crossover day or end of session deadlines are looming, for Rules Committees to pull bills off the calendar that are likely to provoke extended floor discussion and debate to assure those bills don’t result in time running out for consideration of other pending bills.

One thing the Rules Committees do not do, normally at least, is to amend, revise or change the text of bills, or originate bills.

In my 30-plus years covering the Legislature, I can’t ever recall a bill originating in a Rules Committee before now.

Rules Committee meetings are open to the public, but tend to be sparsely attended. (Senate Rules meets in a small conference room with very limited seating for the public.) A key reason for the lack of attendance is that the actions of the Rules Committee — i.e. which bills have been taken off or put on the active floor calendar — are immediately announced on the floor when the session begins or resumes.

Also, the meetings are not very sexy, a matter of reading the number of each bill on the active calendar, with each committee member having the opportunity to make a motion to move any bill off the calendar, and then going through each bill on the inactive calendar, with a motion in order to move any bill to active consideration.

The published agenda for the Saturday Senate Rules Committee meeting stated there was no agenda — which is the norm for Rules Committees, given the process described above.

Therefore, if one wanted to sneak a bill through under the cover of darkness, Rules Committee is a perfect — if morally bankrupt — way to do it.

By the time Capitol observers realized Monday that SB 739, imposing a moratorium on all carbon capture agreements, had been conjured into being by the Rules Committee, it was already on second reading on the Senate floor.

Ironically, the bill would place a moratorium on a carbon sequestration bill that had been rushed through the Senate in a single day on Jan. 12, without committee reference or availability of a fiscal note, and was signed into law by Justice just 12 days later (SB 162).

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Finally, the Center For American Women and Politics at Rutgers University has released its 2023 rankings for women’s representation in state legislatures, and West Virginia is ranked 50th, with women making up just 11.9% of the Legislature.

(Nevada has the highest female representation, at 60.3%.)

As CAWP notes, West Virginia consistently was among the top 20 states for women’s representation throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but has consistently fallen since, and has been dead last every year since 2019.

I’m reminded that senators had a big haw-haw early in the session upon discovering there now are more Mikes in the Senate (five) than women (four).

However, one wonders if this legislative session would have been quite as appalling if women were more fairly represented.