Jackson Free Press

Conservatives love to rail against the size of government and the prospect of more government intrusion into American citizens' lives. However, in looking at the bills the Mississippi Legislature is concentrating on, the trend toward hypocrisy and away from solutions should be apparent.

Take, for example, the proposed anti-immigration legislation. The conservative theory, debunked by think tanks and immigration experts, is that immigrants steal jobs from hard-working Americans and tax dollars from their pockets. Leaving aside for the moment that no white American can claim "native" status in this country, conservatives seem hell bent on using already stretched-thin government services—police, sheriffs and jails—to duplicate enforcement of federal law by a special federal police force that taxpayers already pay for. Reproducing immigration law at the state level simply does not fit the conservative "small government" mantra, regardless of how you spin it.

Another example: Conservatives do not want the federal government intruding into their personal lives to mandate purchasing health insurance. Once again leaving aside the obvious, how then can they then justify reaching into every woman's business and dictating how and when she can control her natural reproductive functions? The obvious can't be left aside, of course, and that's the fact that Mississippi has the least healthy citizens in America. Those problems already cost taxpayers billions, especially among the hundreds of thousands of uninsured Mississippians.

The level of disregard for health issues in favor of enforcing fundamentalist religious ideology in the bedroom is the apex of government intrusion and completely antithetical to stated conservative principles.

What is clear is that our newly Republican-majority Legislature is favoring bluster about ideological wedge issues over getting to work on the real issues facing Mississippians in 2012.

Where, for example, are the jobs programs in a state with a higher-than-average unemployment rate? Where are the programs designed to keep kids in school? Mississippi's high-school dropout rate is, again, higher than the national average. Low rates of education feed directly into the cycle of poverty, poor health and high crime rates (and subsequently, reach into every Mississippi taxpayer's pocket), yet the Legislature can't seem to gather the will to fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program as mandated by law. That law—one that is actually on the books already—is simply not the concern of Mississippi lawmakers. Much better, apparently, to make new laws privatizing education.

If you're tired of your lawmakers playing games with our state's future, give them a call, write them an email, make your voice heard. And lawmakers? It's time to do the job you were hired to do: govern for the people.