Opinion: 'The devil is working overtime,' but where, exactly?

"Children are dying from gunfire in school. Waves of refugees uprooted by drought and famine are knocking at the door. And we find ourselves obsessed with drag queens and legislative decorum," Storm Lake Times Pilot Editor Art Cullen writes -- mainly about Iowa's Legislature but with references to smiliar goings-on in other states, in an editorial titled "The devil is working overtime."

Art Cullen

On the day "the Tennessee House expelled two Black representatives for staging a protest from the House well over a refusal by Republicans to consider gun safety laws following a mass shooting in Nashville," Cullen was invited to appear on "The 11th Hour" on MSNBC. Host Stpehanie Rhule "wanted to talk about the crazy things going on in state legislatures in Florida, Iowa and Idaho. The Iowa Legislature has been busy bashing gays and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Waterloo native Nikole Hannah-Jones on the history of Blacks in America, The 1619 Project. . . . Pope Francis recently said that gays are not criminals, so why do we have to pass a law to preserve our moral order?"

Cullen writes that he "had just returned from a trip across the Great Plains, where the future of food production is under assault from decades of heat and drought. That’s the issue that nobody really wants to talk about. It cannot get a hearing in Iowa. Although transsexual rights had never been a political issue in Iowa, all the sudden I am on TV talking about it. . . . We did not have the chance to talk about how climate is driving a world food crisis, which drives refugee migration. That’s why Cubans and El Salvadorans are coming to Storm Lake, not because they are protected from being in the presence of gays."