March 23, 2012--Stand Your Ground

At first under the radar and now coming to wider public attention is what mobilized conservative Republicans have been up to for many years at the local and state levels.

The most recent example--the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

The shooter, a heavily-armed community watch volunteer, was not prosecuted nor even investigated because he was allegedly following the Stand Your Ground law passed in 2005 by the Florida legislature. It allows anyone who just feels threatened to shoot the person who is making him nervous or aggressive.

We have been spending a part of each year in Florida since about 2005 and, though I try to keep up with the local news, this was my first awareness that this law exists. Now I know as do millions of others who likely also did not know about it. Nor did I know that more than a dozen other states have similar laws.

Also recently, even the relatively well-informed have been learning about the laws being promulgated at the state level around the country to make it more difficult for women to obtain contraceptives and, of course, abortions. The trans-vaginal-probe outcry in Virginia was the first extreme proposal to gain national attention; and with the spotlight on Virginia and its reactionary governor we also learned about similar kinds of legislative aggression against women's reproductive rights. Among many other places the "war on women's health" has been underway in Texas and Arizona (to limit insurance coverage for contraceptives), Mississippi (where there is a "personhood" debate about when life begins), and Utah and Arizona (where legislation would require that abstinence be the only topic taught in sex education classes).

This Republican counter-cultural movement began, also substantially unnoticed, a few decades ago when there was a grassroots effort to get ultra-conservatives elected to local school boards so that they could end bilingual teaching as well as ban from the curriculum the inclusion of evolution and the history of American diversity.

Many of these newly-empowered school board members next ran for city council seats and after that became state legislators, members of Congress, and in some cases governors. Wisconsin's Scott Walker, who with other like-minded governors has declared war on unions, is a living example of this sort of political trajectory.

The current race for the Republican nomination has brought some of these realities to public view. Rick Santorum, more than anyone else, because of his emphasis on religious, cultural, and so-called "values" issues, has motivated the media to pay more attention to what has been happening locally until now largely out of national scrutiny.

So thank you former-senator Santorum for helping to expose how effective conservatives have been in waging the culture war. It is now up to those who have been paying attention to other matters to get their act together.