8 December 2016

Another raw milk bill requested, this one by Diane Sands

Yesterday, Sen. Diane Sands (D-Missoula) requested LC2098, short title “Revise laws related to the sale of raw milk.” No public draft is available yet. Sands voted against HB-245, Nancy Ballance’s bill to legalize selling raw milk, in the 2015 legislature.

Sands is the third legislator, and first Democrat, to request a bill on raw milk, which may put her in a position to broker a deal between the menaces to public health who want to legalize the sale of unpasteurized milk, and opponents of legalization who are weary of the fight and may be seeking a face saving way of retiring the issue with as little damage as possible.

Such a deal, of course, would best be characterized as a little bit of pregnancy, and certainly as politics at its worst.

Legislators, tired of the issue splashing on their agenda every session, may be looking for a deal simply to end the constant pressure from the raw milk proponents. The advocates of selling raw milk are not that numerous, but they’re righteous, loud, adept at flooding legislators with pro-raw milk messages, and show up at the circuses known as committee hearings to testify, with the fervor and sincerity of the lately come to Jesus, that raw milk is the elixir of life and the key to wisdom and longevity. They argue with Trumparian conviction that banning it, especially on the bogus basis that it’s unhealthy, denies its drinkers and drumbeaters their divine right to feed anything they damn well please to their little children.

Therefore, there may be a temptation to let the little children suffer from raw milk just to end the suffering of legislators bedeviled by the parents of those children.

Legislators who succumb to that temptation should know their sin will go neither unnoticed nor unremarked.