Compassionate Conservative – The Ultimate Oxymoron

From a LCYD Member:

These days we hear a lot of talk about the compassionate conservative. This is a Republican who cares, truly cares about the people. They believe in raising teacher salaries (link to Chris Petley’s article), in freedom to live in the way you choose, and in the discrimination against all those that are dissimilar to themselves. They believe in the ability to choose, in equity of access to important social structures, and the privatization of programs so that millions will be put below the poverty line. But above all they believe in liberty, in the freedom that America was built on, and that if you ever piss them off you are a terrorist and have no right to phone calls, bail, or the justice system.
Hold on a second. Those ideas aren’t nearly as congruent as they should be. How can freedom and discrimination live together? How can tax breaks and social programs be friends? Quite simply, they can’t. The Republicans are lulling the nation into complacency while they destroy the government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Nothing can illustrate this more than the failure of house bill 1303 this past week; a bill entitled “Student Safety and Campus Violence Prevention Act”. The bill was one designed to help protect students within schools by requiring that each district develop a set of comprehensive anti-harassment/anti-discrimination rules. Some of these rules included things such as providing teacher training on bullying and harassment and using the Florida hate crimes statute (section 877.19(2)) to define categories of discrimination and harassment. Sounds threatening, doesn’t it?
For some reason, it did. Advocates for the bill were told by the chairman of the education committee, Representative Arza, that he would make sure the bill died in committee. And he did. As the bill came into debate Rep. Arza began to walk around the committee, laughing and joking with the other Republicans there. A student who had traveled all the way from Miami out of support for the bill spoke for about four minutes about the horrors she faced every day before the “compassionate conservative” Rep. Arza rudely interrupted. He then called on a known “right wing nutcase”, forced a vote (while one of the bill’s main supporters was out of the room; coincidence? I think not) and the bill was slaughtered, even as Rep. Gottlieb tried to table it for further consideration. The “compassionate” Rep. Arza shot a hateful glance to the students standing there and left with a half smile upon his face.
Two weeks ago ten people were murdered in a school shooting fueled by the discrimination and harassment that student faced in the school. Studies show that thousands of students drop out or do not attend school every year because they are afraid. Florida has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country. Yet, the “compassionate conservatives”, those who supposedly believe in freedom, education, and the people, literally butchered a bill that at no fiscal cost offered a chance for students to stop feeling afraid. The question now to ask is: How many thousands of lives have been destroyed because of the failure of this bill and others like it at the hands of the “compassionate conservatives”, the Republicans?
The Republicans are playing the oldest game in history. They are using blanket lies to screen their actual goals and actions. The scariest part is that the nation is believing it! “Compassionate conservatives” cannot exist because compassion is what creates the party lines -- in politics you can’t play for both teams. It is time to hold the Republicans accountable for their lies and to wake up the nation so they can see the Republicans for who they truly are: the Cruel Conservatives.