Jimmy, Don’t Be A Hero
WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH SOLDIER LEGISLATOR RETURNING TO VOTE AGAINST SCHOOL KIDS?
FITSNews - March 31, 2007 - Our friend Rep. James Smith is about to head overseas to protect our freedoms. One of which is free speech. Which, as it turns out we’re going to avail ourselves of now as it relates to … well, James Smith. So yeah, there’s more than a little irony going on in this post.
Let’s make a couple things clear up front: James is a friend of ours, we’ve been keeping him and his family in our prayers ever since he left earlier this month, and there’s not a soul who can claim that his willingness to put his life on the line over in Afghanistan is anything other than unflinchingly heroic. Unfortunately, none of those things make Smith’s decision last week to interrupt his military training at Fort Riley, Kansas so he could vote against a key school choice amendment any less regrettable.
We don’t care who paid for Smith’s trip, or whether protocol was broken or exceptions made to permit him to return to Columbia and vote (something he can already do remotely, incidentally). All of that’s just scenery distracting our attention from the real question: Why is someone who is so selflessly giving of himself to protect freedom half way around the world so incapable of seeing how his vote helped deny it to thousands of school kids living here in South Carolina?
Interestingly enough, Gov. Mark Sanford and Smith both avail themselves of private school choice at Columbia’s Heathwood Hall Episcopal School. Good for them, but it’s too bad that at the precise moment when thousands of parents with lesser means and fewer options were relying on their leadership, the governor was MIA and Smith was preoccupied with playing hero for the wrong side.
Look, James is always going to be a friend of ours no matter what, and again, our prayers for him (and his family) will be just as fervent this week as they were last week (and in the week to come). But we are bound to call it like we see it, and no matter how unpopular the sentiments expressed in this post may be, in the long run they’re precisely what he’s fighting for.
In the meantime, the fight for educational liberty in South Carolna goes on …
Comments
By Thomas Simuel on April 11th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I have a friend, James Miller, an African-American, a machine shop operator, that also went to Iraq, which fortunately allowed him to free his son from a “failing school” to attend a private christian school. Fortunately, hazard pay allowed him to afford a private education. While James Smith fights to keep Blacks on the “plantation” folks like my friend James Miller fights to free us all.
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