By Robert Romano — Yet another indication that our political culture has become so poisoned that the nation is no longer dealing with mere civil disagreement, but pure hatred.
A New Hampshire Democrat lawmaker writes on her blog she would support legislation to keep conservatives and libertarians out her state, or to drive them away.
“What we can do is to make the environment here so unwelcoming that some will choose not to come, and some may actually leave. One way is to pass measures that will restrict the ‘freedoms’ that they think they will find here,” wrote Rep. Cynthia Chase, a member of the state’s House of Representatives, on Dec. 21 at progressive site BlueHampshire.com.
Chase’s post came in response to the so-called Free State Project, an activist network that seeks to “recruit 20,000 liberty-loving people to move to New Hampshire” in order to “live in strong communities where your rights are respected, and people exercise responsibility for themselves and in their dealings with each other.”
Specifically, the group wants “reductions in burdensome taxation and regulation, reforms in state and local law, an end to federal mandates, and a restoration of constitutional federalism, demonstrating the benefits of liberty to the rest of the nation and to the world.”
Not having any of that, Chase stated, “Free Staters are the single biggest threat the state is facing today.” Pretty harsh.
New Hampshire blogger Steve MacDonald writes that Chase “thinks we should use legislative authority to restrict [people’s] freedoms and drive them away. Sounds more like tyranny than civility.”
Breitbart.com reporter Warner Todd Huston agreed, adding, “here we have a legislator that doesn’t just want to pass laws that are tangentially restrictive. She wants to purposefully use her powers to write laws to target individuals with whom she disagrees, take away their freedoms and liberties, and all in the hopes that the citizens she is oppressing might move away from her state.”
What if a Republican state lawmaker had suggested something similar? One imagines it instantly becoming national headline news in the mainstream media, with the GOP instantly likened to fascists not only seeking the squelch dissent — but to apparently make legal persecution so pervasive that dissenters would self-deport themselves.
Instead, as far as media coverage goes, except for some prominent conservative bloggers, and a mention on the Rush Limbaugh national radio program, so far the story has been largely ignored.
But the point is not merely that there is a media double standard, which is obvious and disconcerting enough. Really, it appears indicative of a wider trend, which is that conservatives and libertarians are not merely disagreed with by the left and left-leaning elected officials.
It is that those who espouse limited government and free market reforms are actually hated and despised for their political beliefs.
And, so accustomed to that hatred was one lawmaker that she saw nothing wrong with entertaining publicly the thought of using the law to persecute people who share those beliefs.
As an isolated incident, one might be able to write off Chase’s comments as a kooky lawmaker not to be taken seriously.
But they come at a time when the liberal Boston Globe endorsed Republican John Boehner to be House Speaker to “keep Tea Party extremists out of key committee assignments.” Why? Because of their support for cutting spending and other “extreme” measures like making tax relief permanent not for some, but for all Americans.
They come at a time when calls for gun bans and other restrictions, forbidden by the same Second Amendment that conservatives and libertarians seek to defend, are taken as the only acceptable starting points in all discussions on the Sandy Hook Massacre in Newtown, Conn.
They come at a time when, based on a cursory reading of some of the absurd reactions on social media sites like Facebook to former senatorial candidate Rep. Todd Akin’s inane comments on rape and abortion, one might have concluded that the country via some imminent legislation was somehow on the verge of back alley abortions and the disenfranchisement of women.
Or when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was likened to Adolf Hitler because of his proposals to restrict collective bargaining by public sector unions — a process that is in fact bankrupting states like California and Illinois here and assisted in Greece’s collapse overseas. Unions even stormed the Wisconsin Capitol to express their displeasure when the legislation passed, prompting Republican lawmakers to leave the building under police protection for fears to their safety.
In this wider context, it is hard to escape the conclusion that were Chase’s call to use the law against conservatives and libertarians simply because of their political beliefs proposed by a more prominent elected official, it might actually find widespread public support. Just saying.
As some political analysts suggest the country’s political demography is indeed headed leftward, is this sort of treatment what conservatives and libertarians should expect in the future from liberal and leftist administrations at the federal, state, and local level?
Maybe conservatives and libertarians really do need a Free State.
Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.
if you know who I am. I'd love to live in free state project land.
