Pariah State
If Louisiana’s brain drain accelerates, it’s because -- with their bigoted and clownish behavior --John Kennedy, Clay Higgins, and Jeff Landry are urging our best and brightest to leave
With all the problems Louisiana already has — child poverty, environmental degradation, and low educational attainment, to name a few — why would our leaders want to further tarnish our image by making the Bayou State the Bigotry State?
Louisiana already offers plenty of good reasons to leave. I wrote about them at length a few years ago in my New Orleans Times-Picayune column. But, to review and add a few:
No reproductive rights for women
The dangers of sea-level rise and climate-change-enhanced monster hurricanes
The nation’s highest incarceration rate with little or no return in the way of increased public safety
The absolute worst state in which to raise a child
Pitiful air and water quality and a state environmental regulatory agency in chaos
Rampant environmental racism and structural racism
A tax structure that punishes the poor and rewards the well-off
Crumbling infrastructure and little or no willingness to address it
Poor access to health care, especially in rural areas
We’ve already got all this and lots more against us as we struggle to retain our best and brightest.
Just as challenging is the impact all this has on those trying to attract new industries and recruit bright, new minds to our colleges and universities.
Imagine how hard it already is for a medical center or medical school to retain or recruit OBGYNs to move to Louisiana. This state has criminalized the treatment of certain pregnancies. Who would would want to jump on that train?
No physician in his or her right mind would wish to set up a practice in a state that proposes to imprison him or her for providing life-saving care to a pregnant woman in distress.
No woman of child-bearing age should want to risk a problem pregnancy in a state where the government has tied the hands of doctors, substituting radical right-wing ideology for accepted medical science.
The status quo here is awful enough.
That’s one reason it’s so tragic that some of our top leaders are working so hard to make things worse.
We have a U.S. senator, John Kennedy, who regularly makes national news because he’s said something cruel and bigoted to a witness before one of his committees. Many times, his target is a woman of color.
One of Kennedy’s colleagues in the U.S. House, Clay Higgins of Lafayette, seems to be competing with Kennedy to see who can make the most outrageous, idiotic, and cruel statement each month.
I cannot tell you which man holds the lead in their Hateful Words Derby.
Back home, our governor, Jeff Landry, has turned the state’s Department of Environmental Quality over to a right-wing fanatic whose assignment, it appears, is to create so much chaos and dysfunction that the best people will leave.
Down the street, Landry has larded the highest echelons of the state Department of Health with anti-vaccine kooks who are telling the public to forgo the COVID shot in favor of horse dewormer.
And Landry just appointed an election denier and peddler of anti-vaccine lies to head the state’s top higher education board.
Twenty years ago, when I was Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s communications director, I led an effort to get better information about what the rest of the country thought about us. I worked with Louisiana Economic Development and the Committee of 100 for Economic Development to fund and conduct a national survey of CEOs and site selectors (all of them outside Louisiana) to determine what these people thought about Louisiana and its business climate. We also wanted to know how they made their decisions about where to move or expand. LSU’s Public Policy Research Lab conducted the survey.
I do not remember all the details of this study’s findings. But I will never forget one part: The high percentage of executives who relied on word-of-mouth and press reports about Louisiana's politics and general political and business environment.
In other words, beyond the data they wanted about tax rates, regulations, and government subsidies, these decision-makers wanted to know if the state’s leaders were sane and reasonable or raving lunatics.
Few CEOs want to negotiate a big, multi-million-dollar deal with a crackpot and his aides.
And not many gifted and reasonable young people will choose to stay or move here when the people leading our state are doing so much to sully its already-tarnished reputation.
So, while Kennedy, Higgins, and Landry might anger you and me with their bigotry and deranged behavior, save a little fury for the many ways they also have slandered our state.
Their deplorable behavior — much of it on a national stage — not only makes you and me look stupid and backward; it makes Louisiana look far less desirable as a place to live and work.
And that, over time, makes us poorer.
Remember, we already have two strikes against us when it comes to attracting the best and brightest to our shores. So, why would our leaders think it’s worthwhile to advertise that those running the state are the worst and the dumbest?
And Landry and his crew will make things even worse by reducing taxes on the wealthy, further gutting higher education, and who knows what else. I long to leave Louisiana, wishing I had never left the sanity that was Missouri. When Missouri looks good, you know you have problems.
There is no excuse for continuing to reelect Higgins other than a lack of a sense of urgency to find good candidates without splitting the vote. Let no future election go by without Higgins facing a tough primary race.