Thursday, March 11, 2010
   
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The Purple Veil

The Purple Veil

When Lindy Boggs went to Washington with her husband the young Congressman from Louisiana, she was 24-years-old and FDR was President.  Turned away at the door of a Congressional hearing where Congressman Hale Boggs was delivering a speech for appearing to be too young to belong there, she remembered a New Orleans woman telling her the most sophisticated thing a woman could wear was a purple veil.  After a quick trip home to pin a purple veil on her hat, she returned to be ushered to the front of the hearing without question or hesitation, taking her place among Washington's power circles  for the next 70 years.  Look through the Purple Veil for a collection of political observations, stories, rumors,  anecdotes and insight  presented for your reading pleasure. 

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Wednesday, 10 March 2010

"Demographic Equity" Plan Aimed at Reapportionment

The mission of the Louisiana Family Forum is “to persuasively present biblical principles in the centers of influence on issues affecting the family…”
 
So where, may I ask, does it say in the Bible that you shall scatter the majority black legislative districts in New Orleans throughout the state in order to form a more conservative state? Where does it say that our state legislature should redraw our representative districts, not based on an official population count, but by asking themselves, what would Jesus do?
 
Because that is what, in its divine wisdom (no pun intended) the Louisiana Family Forum has proposed. Having teamed with African American State Senator Elbert Guillory, they have developed their own reapportionment plan for Louisiana, getting a little ahead of this year’s census, and are actively promoting it around the state. 
 
They call it “demographic equity”, but it’s really a plan to shift African American representation to rural areas and merge black districts in New Orleans to reduce that city’s voting clout. New Orleans officials see it as an assault on the state’s more liberal voting region with a plan to dilute voting power by anyone who does not subscribe to the conservative agenda of the Family Forum. 
 
Guillory pitches it as a plan that recognizes that African Americans left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and settled in other areas of Southwest Louisiana. 
 
Let’s lift the purple veil from “demographic equity”. The reapportionment districts they have proposed were drawn by their political consultant, Dan Richey, who served as the state’s first Abstinence Czar under Governor Mike Foster, urging high school students not to have sex. 
 
Everyone has a right to an opinion, but if this group wasn’t the powerful religious lobby, but some liberal leaning organization out to manipulate our representative government, we would have an American jihad on our hands. Fortunately, Senator Guillory and the Family Forum have not found much support down at the Capitol. But they’re out there pushing their plan a full year before the legislature is set to reapportion the state based on census data…so you can’t count them out before the count is in. 
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