PrintFebruary 20, 2010
Is this the most pressing problem in California?
California's mismanagement is so acute that the state cannot even afford bread and circuses to distract the public from the state's looming insolvency. Instead, 30 State Assembly members, including the outgoing and incoming Speakers, are focused on the pressing problem of an off-campus, unofficial party in which racial insensitivity was on display.
That's right. A bunch of late teens and young adults, members of a fraternity, partying off campus in an unofficial party, mocked Black History Month, and the attention of a legislative body that spends roughly $100 billion a year is focused on rude kids. Even the liberal Sacramento Bee thought this a bit much:
... does the Legislature have much weightier matters to attend to? Absolutely.About 30 state lawmakers - mostly Assembly members, including outgoing Speaker Karen Bass and incoming Speaker John A. Pérez - took to the south steps of the Capitol to vent their outrage in a made-for-TV event Thursday. One after another, they stepped up to the portable lectern, the Assembly seal affixed with packing tape, to denounce the party, to make clear that such behavior will not be tolerated in 21st century California, and to demand accountability.
Free speech is apparently a meaningless concept to some solons:
[Assemblyman Isadore] Hall [D-Compton] and other lawmakers seemed to prejudge the case and say the fraternity's charter should be revoked and any students involved should be expelled.
Does California need to enact speech codes for adolescents? Does Assemblyman Hall want to ensure that his younger constituents in Compton, some of them students at public high schools and colleges, never get together and mock other ethnicities?
