Louisiana-- bastion of Fox-inspired conservatism

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Region doesn't define political, religious viewpoints
By Wiley Hilburn Jr., April 12, 2013

The young nurse didn't know me and I didn't know her. She was taking my vital signs as part of a prescribed cancer treatment while I was recuperating, in grateful remission, at my home in Choudrant.

The nurse seemed pleasant enough until she referenced an item heard on talk radio while driving to my house: it set off an anti-Obama explosion.

The president, she mused, while checking my pulse, was not born in America, he was an Islamic agent and bent on destroying the nation. We were in bad trouble.

This rant was delivered calmly, as if the nurse was merely confirming some belief we already shared, that all of north Louisiana embraced. We all hated Obama; nobody white and Christian around here had voted for him.

I stopped her. This was an assumption I have stopped living with at age 75. "I just want you to know that I voted proudly for Barack Obama for president," I said as calmly as she did.

"What's more, my wife voted for Obama," I said. "My three children all voted for Obama," I went on, "and my brother in Houston voted for Obama."

The nurse looked at me in astonishment, not anger. A white man in Lincoln Parish who had voted for Obama? A whole family? She looked at me like I was some alien species.

"Well, it's the end times anyway and nothing we say matters," she concluded. We parted, if not friends, then not enemies. No voice had been raised.

Indeed, I could understand why the woman didn't understand me. In Louisiana, the über-conservative Fox News, where Benito Mussolini would have felt right at home, is not only providing the political talking points de jour, it's your big brother at barber shops, dentist offices and various waiting rooms.

Louisiana was once widely and admiringly seen as a pot of gumbo, rich in diverse culture, politics and religious viewpoints. We are the state of Huey Long, Big John McKeithen, Edwin Edwards and, just recently it seems, the wonderful Kathleen Blanco.

Now under GOP governor Bobby Jindal, intent on destroying higher education and public education with his conservative chimeras, we are white, religiously Republican, intolerant and, above all, boring.

In this kind of greenhouse climate, it's no wonder most people just assume God is a Republican and nobody in Louisiana — nobody white, anyway — voted for Obama.

I'm not cynical. America elected its first African-American president in 2008 in an historic milestone. Even former President George W. Bush congratulated Obama. Now Obama has been re-elected, if not in a landslide, then a rock slide. Good for the American people.

In fact, 40.6 percent of the Louisiana electorate voted for Obama, but we are the silent minority in a state that once celebrated diversity.
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