A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

I See Dead People: Charter Schools in Indiana

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This should probably be a hearse.

The joke is that dead people vote in Chicago. Apparently they go to school in Indiana. Stephanie Wang, reporting for Chalkbeat Indiana, has an article about the Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathway Academy which, among a number of other abuses, kept a dead kid on their claims for state money for two years after he died.

Five years after two students moved to Florida, they reappeared on enrollment records for Indiana Virtual School and its sister school.

And nearly every one of the more than 900 students kicked out of Indiana Virtual School and its sister school in the 2017-18 school year for being inactive were re-enrolled the next school year, included in per-pupil funding calculations that netted the two online schools more than $34 million in public dollars last year.

These were among the ways that Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy allegedly inflated their enrollment to at least twice its actual size, according to the findings of a state examiner’s investigation released Monday.

Definitely click through to see the whole article. If the allegations in there are true, someone should go to jail. Heads would roll if this was a public school manipulating its Average Daily Membership (ADM) in this fashion. The virtual school superintendent responded by reminding everyone that these weren’t great students and also freedom.

In a written response to the state education board, Clark did not address the enrollment discrepancies but defended the online schools for serving “last-chance students” who have dropped out of or been expelled from traditional public schools — even if they weren’t active.

He accused state education officials of trying “to remove educational choice and force students to remain in school environments in which success has evaded them and where hope has abandoned them.”

“The beacon of hope has just been doused,” Clark concluded.

Also, I’d add that if you make public money for voucher schools contingent on providing actual services to actual students then the terrorists win. Obviously.

There are studies that suggest that, with rigorous oversight and a generally solid public education system, charters can sort of work a little bit. That is not at all the route Indiana is going. Subsidizing religious schools, busting teacher’s unions, and diverting public money to friends and well-wishers does not require that sort of oversight. So, we’re not likely to get it.

[Edit: I improperly used the word “voucher” in the title, edited to reflect that these schools were charters. As the article points out, “Daleville Community Schools, the rural district that oversees Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy . . . receives 3% of the virtual charter schools’ state funding, a fee for monitoring the schools that amounted to about $1 million last year.”]

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

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It’s the breaking of bonds, and the reasons submitted to a candid world, that make the 4th of July important. It’s not so much thanking the military or our forefathers. It’s not the flag. It’s not the fireworks. These are all part and parcel of the larger idea. The Founders broke the bonds of blood and tradition in service of a larger idea.

The larger idea is that individuals are self-determining beings. Liberty is their natural right and their natural condition. Authority should not be suffered solely for it’s own sake. Proper government is designed and maintained by the citizenry, it is not revealed and handed down from on high.

I am thankful that the Founders were products of the political culture of the Enlightenment and not of our own day. It is not plausible that our current Representatives would pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their honor to break from Authority that no longer serves its purpose: to secure the rights of the citizens.

So, when we are at our parades and  picnics and what not, by all means, celebrate our history, revel in the patriotism, thank the troops, love our country, honor the Founders, but spare a thought for the Declaration:

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refuted his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred. to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. –And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

–John Hancock

New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts:
John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut:
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York:
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey:
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware:
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland:
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina:
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia:
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

The problem with nice things is that they get taken away or broken

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I had an exchange with Chris Hardie about Mayor Pete. He said:

I’m excited about Pete’s campaign, especially as a Hoosier tired of how our state is usually seen politically. Just hoping we don’t trade our appreciation of his candor, authenticity & thoughtfulness for the buzz of celebrity.

To which I replied:

I share your concern, but this is a very Hoosier reaction. Like when the weather is nice, and the assumption is that we’re going to have to pay for it with bad weather.

(And, as Chris pointed out, it was glorious and sunny yesterday; rainy, cold, and windy today.)

So, the assumption is that if Mayor Pete rises too high, a hammer of some sort will pound him down. Maybe there will be a Milkshake Duck situation (though I kind of doubt it). More likely that the zeitgeist and his political opponents will just kneecap him with some variant of a Dean Scream attack.

But it’s not just the weather or in politics where we can’t have anything nice. Last week, the news came out that a group of scientists were able to essentially use the planet as a giant telescope and coordinate data collection that resulted in the first ever imaging of a black hole. The work of Dr. Katie Bouman in developing an algorithm to process that data was instrumental to the imaging. There was a great picture of her excited as her work came to fruition. An earlier Tedtalk on the matter where her knowledge and enthusiasm about the subject was clear. At 29, she’s relatively young for a scientist. So, it was a good story.  Moreso in my household because she went to high school where my kids go and she grew up in our neighborhood. The message around here was “work hard and you can achieve great things”

But, the Internet being what it is, it was utterly predictable that trolls would try to bring her down, because having something nice is intolerable to some folks. In her case, there was a strong thread of misogyny — a sort of bitterness that a woman would become the face of an achievement where men were also involved. Social media having turned into a click-driven sewer of misinformation, the emotion-provoking misinformation featured as prominently on, say, YouTube as hard news because their algorithm and advertisers value eyeballs more than accuracy.

It’s difficult to resist the onset of cynicism. Why strive for greatness? Why seek to create something new and good? Why seek to improve upon the status quo? Any achievement of value will just get dragged down into the muck. Nevertheless, I guess like the song says, you gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.

The Internet and Empire

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Stephen Dowling, writing for the BBC, has an article about the transient nature of the Internet and how so much of what was posted in the first ten years just isn’t there anymore.

If Brewster Kahle hadn’t set up the Internet Archive and started saving things – without waiting for anyone’s permission – we’d have lost everything.

. . .

“It’s not only the early material. Most of the internet is not being stored,” he says.

“The Internet Archive first started archives pages in 1996. That’s five years after the first webpages were set up. There’s nothing from that era that was ever copied from the live web.” Even the first web page set up in 1991 no longer exists; the page you can view on the World Wide Web Consortium is a copy made a year later.

The article also mentions the shift from tangible media to electronic media in terms of what we have in our private collections — email and pictures and whatnot. Almost none of that is going to be gathered by archivists. It notes that the British Archives, for example, has collected a lot of letters between people. MySpace recently lost years of music and photos. Google Plus is gone.

This isn’t entirely new or different. There are huge gaps in historical records, and I imagine future historians are going to have a wealth of material regardless of how much we lose. In the early days of television, they didn’t necessarily keep tapes of the broadcasts. But, I was put in mind of Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications. I’ve only read pieces of it, so take my descriptions and Wikipedia pastings with a grain of salt.

[He] argued that the “bias” of each medium either toward space or toward time helps determine the nature of the civilization in which that medium dominates. “Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone,” he writes in his introduction. These media tend to favour decentralization. “Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper.” These media generally favour large, centralized administrations. Innis believed that to persist in time and to occupy space, empires needed to strike a balance between time-biased and space-biased media.

What we have now in electronic communications do not emphasize time. With the Internet, we have an ephemeral media that almost entirely negates space. “While time-biased media favour stability, community, tradition and religion, space-biased media facilitate rapid change, materialism, secularism and empire. . . . [S]ocieties that depend on space-biased media . . .  tend to favour abstract thought and control over space. They have little regard for tradition and when compared with oral societies, their ways of thinking are apt to be more rational, linear and impersonal.”

I’m not sure I entirely buy Innis’ theories, but he was a smart guy, so there is probably something to this. Our preferred communications are going to shape our culture and politics. If Innis is right, we’ll tend toward more rapidly changing, materialistic, secular society governed in a centralized, imperial manner. Right now, it feels as if things are splintering, not centralizing. But, that could be the old power structures giving way before centralized structures develop. Or maybe it’s all a bunch of hooey and things will stay more or less the same.

Cable News is Mostly Garbage

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Another installment in my media navel gazing: cable news is mostly garbage. I don’t want to both sides this too much, but even if your cable news source is on the side of the angels, politically speaking, it’s still probably toxic. The cable news business model relies on keeping you engaged through the commercials. Pushing emotional buttons of various kinds, many of which are anxiety inducing, is the way to do that. Cable news ends up being a kind of fun house mirror in which you are asked to see the world through a particularly stress inducing filter. I think it tends to worry more than it informs.

Cable news is not the sole offender. I think even the most straight forward news outlet is guilty of this to one extent or another. Even if their editorial bias is simply toward novelty (e.g. they’ll run a “man bites dog story” but not a “dog bites man story”), there is still a tendency toward warping your perception of the world. (“Hmm, the ratio of people biting dogs compared to dogs biting people seems more skewed toward the former than I would have thought. That’s troubling.”) Social media is getting pretty terrible as well. Algorithms give you more of the kinds of stories you engage with. You, me, and pretty much everyone else is more likely to click on the junk food than on the vegetables.

This isn’t to say “don’t worry, be happy” or to encourage you to disengage from news altogether. But, we all have to be mindful of whether our anxiety is well placed or in proportion to the actual threat. We have to pay attention to how much of our anxiety is being caused by viewing the world through a skewed lens.

Quick thought on what makes good media

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I’ve been struggling for a pithy way to articulate this to myself and haven’t quite made it, but I wanted to get it down on paper, or pixels or whatever. It seems to me that a good, responsible, useful news story will either discuss a news event that’s important to people’s lives in and of itself or, if not independently important, is a fair representation of something larger that is important.

War erupts, a tax is imposed, your street is going to be closed – these are things that have their own importance. Family struggles because job is displaced by automation; Joe, like many others, is an addict and here are his struggles – both are important stories even though they don’t necessarily have a direct impact on readers if it’s in fact true that there is a statistically significant trend in job displacement or addictions.

Local politician or important politician says something awful – maybe news worthy. Random college kid, celebrity, back-bencher from far flung district says something awful – not so much. Again, I think the question is: does the news truly have an impact on our reader’s lives and/or is the story truly representative of something significant in the world? There is obviously a lot of grey area here, but I guess what I’m getting at is that if the media outlet is telling stories about something not particularly representative or substantial, just to push your emotional buttons or sate your desire to laugh at freak shows, that outlet isn’t doing you or society much good. It’s just manipulating you for profit and likely eroding the community by showing you the world through a fun house mirror.

Pete Buttigieg is smart, but if you like him you won’t dwell on it

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Mayor Pete is gaining some momentum in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary. As a mayor from a mid-sized city in Indiana, he has to be considered a very long shot, but I’ve enjoyed seeing his profile raising a bit. His auto-biography has been well-received and he made effective use of a town hall slot on CNN. However, I cringed a bit when I saw a tweet making the rounds talking about how he’d learned Norwegian to read more books by a Norwegian author for whom he could not find translations. I mean, that’s obviously very impressive, but talking about how smart he is doesn’t do him any political favors.

In a blog post about him I wrote about nine years ago when he was running for Treasurer, I mentioned, “we have an anti-intellectual streak a mile wide in this country where we want politicians to go with their gut and not any silly book-learnin’.” At the time, I believe I was still irritated a bit about Jill Long-Thompson’s campaign against Mitch Daniels for governor where she seemed to mention that she had a Ph.D. about every fifth sentence. That stuff does not impress American voters (and probably impresses Hoosier voters even less). We prefer “common sense” and “street smarts.” (Obligatory Einstein quote: “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”) I think our ambivalence about education has something to do with discomfort about the class system we like to ignore having in the U.S.

We don’t have titled nobility, and class warfare is for Communists. This is America where all men are created equal, and you rise and fall on your own merit. This cherished belief creates a blind spot which makes us ill-equipped to explain the success of mediocrities like George W. Bush or Donald Trump. Blue collar workers are resentful of the out-sized influence the professional classes like lawyers, doctors, and accountants seem to have on their personal lives — they feel keenly that these white collar types are looking down their noses at them. But, because we pretend to live in a classless meritocracy, we lack the vocabulary to talk about structural impediments to people rising or falling based on individual merit. So, to some extent, I think the unspoken resentments over social class gets translated into a distrust of highly educated, intellectual types.

Anyway, that’s a long way to go to say that I don’t think Pete’s self-teaching himself Norwegian will win him many votes. I suppose it’s some sort of progress that I think his educational achievements are likely to cost him more votes than the fact that he’s gay. (We’re maybe getting better at talking about social justice issues than we are about social class issues).

School Vouchers are not to help “poor kids escape failing schools”

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In The Beginning — or at least early on in the school voucher program discussion, the talking points were often along the lines that vouchers would help poor students escape failing public schools. Steve Hinnefeld, writing for School Matters, has a post with numbers showing that if that was ever the real intent (it wasn’t) the structure of Indiana’s voucher program is such that it’s serving a wealthier, whiter population that never went to public schools in the first place and probably wouldn’t have even in the absence of vouchers. Over 1,300 households participating in the voucher program make more than $100,000 per year. Overall:

The state is paying $161.4 million to fund the program, which provides vouchers to pay for private-school tuition for students who qualify by family income and other criteria. Some 36,290 students, about 3 percent of Indiana’s school-age population, participate. Nearly all the 329 participating schools are religious schools. Most are Catholic, Lutheran or Evangelical Christian schools.

Fifty-eight percent of voucher students are white, 21 percent are Hispanic and 12 percent are African-American. Given that three of five voucher students come from what the state classifies as “metropolitan” areas, that suggests white students are disproportionately represented.

This reinforces my view that the real intention of voucher supporters was and is: 1) hurt teacher’s unions; 2) subsidize religious education; and 3) redirect public education money to friends and well-wishers of voucher supporters. Also, a reminder: vouchers do not improve educational outcomes. I get so worked up about this because the traditional public school is an important part of what ties a community together — part of what turns a collection of individuals into a community. And community feels a little tough to come by these days. We shouldn’t be actively eroding it.

(Updated to include a link provided to me by Up North Progressive with notes from an early strategy session with regard to the Michigan “school choice” movement showing that the damage to traditional public schools was premeditated.)

HB 1113 – Telecoil in Public Address Systems

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HB 1113, introduced by Rep. Miller, passed the House by a vote of 94-0 and is moving to the Senate. It requires a person building a Class 1 Structure with a public address system in a Class 1 or Class 2 city to consider installing an audio frequency induction loop system (AFILS). (Class 1 structure in Class 1 or 2 city basically means a public building in a city with a population of more than 35,000 people). It also requires audiologists and hearing aid dealers to provide information about telecoil and audio frequency induction systems when they are fitting or dispensing hearing aids. Telecoil and AFILS is a technology used to transmit audio directly to the hearing aid which lets the audio be heard despite the crowd.

This bill has a pretty light touch, requiring only that people building these structures consider telecoil so it’s tough to argue against it from an undue burden standpoint. Advocates of the hearing impaired might argue that it doesn’t go far enough. The one concern I have — and I’m not at all well versed in the subject matter, so I don’t know how valid it is — is that the telecoil technology might become outdated in the near future. I don’t know how hard it would be to swap out or supplement the newly built PA systems with something new when that comes along. Nick Hunn (in a blog post urging the FCC not to approve the new or modified proprietary standard Apple wanted to substitute for telecoil requirements in smartphones) says of the technology:

[T]elecoil tech is now long in the tooth, and the limitations of its 1970s-era capabilities are becoming all too apparent. Take frequency response. That’s just one area where it no longer cuts muster. Telecoil tech is still adequate for speech, sure, but it’s miserable music. And there’s the antenna problem: Telecoils need them, but try fitting these antennaes into modern phones and hearing aids. Talk about an engineering challenge.

There appears to be work afoot to develop “a new version of the Bluetooth specification that will replace telecoils. This new standard will at once provide better audio quality and be simpler and more cost effective to install in buildings.”

Because its intent is laudable (help those with difficulty hearing) and its impact is minimal (only requires “consideration” of telecoil), I imagine this will pass. Hopefully people building these structures will be able to perform their construction in a way that lets them help hearing impaired people now while allowing them to upgrade to the new standard when it comes along.

 

 

 

Senate Guts SB 12 on the Floor

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You said you wanted a baby. We’re still giving you a baby. We think *all* babies are wholesome and cute.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Senate Republicans gutted SB 12 concerning bias motivated crimes. The version that came out of committee seemed to be pretty solid, passing by a margin of 9-1 with only Sen. Phil Boots voting against. The meat of the legislation was specifying that, in imposing a sentence, judges are allowed to consider as an aggravator whether:

The person committed the offense, including an offense involving the property of an individual or a group of individuals, with the intent to harm or intimidate an individual or a group of individuals because of a perceived or actual characteristic of the individual or group of individuals, including: (A) race; (B) religion; (C) color; (D) sex; (E) gender identity; (F) disability; (G) national origin; (H) ancestry; (I) sexual orientation; or (J) age; whether or not the person’s belief or perception was correct.

As it passed out of the committee, the legislation also had a variety of requirements that law enforcement receive training in recognizing, investigating, and reporting on bias motivated crimes.

As the bill moved to the floor of the Senate, the legislation took a turn for the worse-than-doing-nothing. Senator Freeman offered an amendment that was the legislative equivalent of #AllLivesMatter. His amendment removed the language quoted above and instead added two words to section (c) of that statute, having it say, “The criteria listed in subsections (a) and (b) do not limit the matters that the court may consider, including bias, in determining the sentence” There is no guidance in the amended legislation as to what constitutes bias. In other words, it deliberately and disingenuously misses the point of the original legislation. After extensive behind closed doors discussion in the Senate Republican caucus and a floor debate where Democrats spoke passionately against and Republicans mostly kept silent, the amendment passed by a vote of 33-16. Notably, the bill’s Republican author (Sen. Ron Alting) voted against.

Ultimately, I think the significance of Sen. Alting’s bill, as it passed out of committee, was as a recognition that groups have often been excluded from society’s definition of “us” based on the criteria in his list (e.g. race, sexual orientation, etc.). By passing Alting’s legislation, we as a people would be saying to these historically discriminated against and excluded groups, “that’s not how it is any more. You are one of us, and the people who persecute you are no longer us. If they come for you, we’re coming after them.” By dispensing with all of that and mumbling something non-specific about bias, the Freeman version of the bill cuts out its heart and makes it worse than doing nothing. It’s like the legislative equivalent of “All Lives Matter.”  In its current state, the legislation is a ghoulish mockery of what could have been. I’m reminded of a book I read when I was a kid. There was a line that said:

“There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”

Hate crime legislation that’s this broken is worse than no legislation at all.