How the GOP Governs

In Arkansas, as in much of the United States, grocery, fuel, and rent prices are climbing. I paid ten dollars for a dozen eggs last week, and flour prices have doubled over the past few years. Even things I used to live on because they were cheap -- rice, chicken, potatoes -- are now expensive. A whole chicken is $4.99/pound, when you can find one. You can't always even get a whole chicken. And white meat and thighs are even more expensive. 

In Arkansas, our education system is failing. We're 44th in the Nation. 

Housing prices have skyrocketed over the past ten years.

Farms are failing.

Health insurance prices are climbing.

What is our GOP government, led by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, doing in response? Why, they're mandating that every school, including universities, including our flagship university, put copies of the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. This is, obviously, blatantly unconstitutional, which bothers absolutely no member of the GOP, which daily wipes their asses on the Constitution.

They're making it illegal for trans people to pee in the bathroom that matches their gender.

They're keeping all three trans women in the state from playing sports.

They're forbidding Fayetteville from becoming a "sanctuary city." (Fayetteville was not a sanctuary city. We're just relatively liberal compared to the rest of the state, which is, of course, a crime.)

They are, in other words, appealing to their bigoted base by harming the least powerful people in the state. That's how the GOP operates. It doesn't solve any of the problems, it doesn't help the people. It just gives them someone to hate, and makes their bigotry feel virtuous.

That's our country. That's what conservatives want.

Why does it matter if Sanders forces universities to put religious displays in university classrooms? Let me tell you a little story. This is from when I was teaching History of the English language. One day early in the semester I was explaining the Great Vowel Shift, and how it worked. To do that I had to back up to the Proto-Indo-European language, and how sounds diverged as dialects grew into separate languages over the vast arc of time.

After class, one of my students came up to me and asked why I hadn't talked about the Tower of Babel and how that had caused the one language that everyone spoke to become many languages. She was a sweet student, who had been educated in an Evangelical church school, so I had to gently explain to her the difference between religion and science. "In universities," I remember saying, "we use evidence-based data to understand how things happen, how they came to be. Religions rely on revelation and faith, and that's not how we work in the academy."

Imagine me trying to say that with religious texts plastered on the wall. Imagine trying to do science, or explain about deep time, or get students to understand evolution, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders has told them their religion, their version of that religion, is the ultimate authority, in the universities as well as in their churches.