“Brilliance” = Hypocrisy

I’m an unabashed liberal when it comes to social issues. I could go into a long diatribe about my personal whys and wherefores but it’d probably bore you. I’m just saying it up front because, if it’s a problem for you, I would suggest you stop reading.

I’m currently all het up because of a recent political maneuver in the Virginia General Assembly. As detailed in this summary, the House recently acted to divert funding from a proposed pro-choice license plate away from Planned Parenthood. Look, I don’t really care if there is a pro-choice license plate. But some people care enough about at least the appearance of fairness in government and these people acted to create an alternative to the already-out-there “Choose Life” license plate. I’m cynical enough to feel convinced there is actually very little fairness in government but I’m willing to play along.

While I frankly don’t care enough to lobby for something trivial like a license plate, I do get steamed when politicians, in what “pro-life advocates are hailing as a brilliant legislative move,” target this effort in a specific and prejudicial way. This is not brilliance, it’s simple hypocrisy. It’s Virginia politicians saying that they want to change the rules that apply to everyone else because they don’t like this one group and its perceived agenda. I’m sure there was plenty of high-fiving among douche bag legislators when they came up with this plan. Personally, I’d like to see them banished to a specific level in hell.

The Virginia Senate passed the original bill where the funds generated by the license plate will go where they were originally targetted. If you care at all about this, you’ll encourage your legislator to support the Senate version when this bill is reconciled.

Perhaps most ridiculous to me is that this is what our politicians are wasting our tax dollars on. I’d love to see such legislative “brilliance” put to use in lowering our taxes while maintaining our infrastructure, or into innovative ways to improve social services, or into moving Virginia up from its rank as 31st in the country in state support for the arts. That would be the sign of a forward-looking, solution-oriented legislature of the kind that would truly be serving the interests of Virginians. This license-plate manuever is classic hypocritical, spiteful, and tricky politics at its worst. The only “brilliant” thing about it is that those who engineered it will probably end up being praised for ingenuity instead of vilified for their lack of principles.