Watauga County Commissioners Try To Bully the School Board

The joint meeting between the Watauga County Commission and the Watauga County School Board, to discuss future budget projections, was “derailed,” according to the Watauga Democrat, when the three Republicans on the commission decided to grandstand about how outraged they were that “despicable filth” in the form of a world-renown novel was being taught in a high school English class. Another witness described what happened as an “ambush.”

Ah. It’s always a bright and lovely day when political hacks become literary critics, not to mention blue-nosed censors of what other people read but what they themselves have not and will never actually read.

Oh I know that Commissioner David Blust claimed that he had read “parts, not just excerpts” of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, as though there were some self-justifying distinction to be made between “parts” and “excerpts.” I think it’s likely that he read “the good parts,” as that phrase would be understood by a smutty-minded teenager. I never read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but I knew “the good parts” almost by heart when I was 15 years old. Which begs the question ... how old emotionally is David Blust?

Nathan Miller is no stranger to bullying, and he has not in the recent past hesitated in extending his power to the Department of Social Services board, so it was wholly characteristic of him to demand that the School Board scuttle its own process for reviewing the charges against teaching The House of the Spirits and simply declare the book an “egregious violation” of all that is holy and decent.

We know what’s going on here. Commissioner Yates (who declared himself a HUGE Christian at the meeting) just stood by and watched as his wife led the Republican Party into a disastrous ass-whupping in the recent municipal elections, and the Republican majority on the commission are behind the eight-ball with their own Party members over the way that County Attorney Stacy C. Eggers IV (“Four”) has manipulated the Board of Elections for attempted partisan advantage.

So what do you do as a Republican majority to overcome this bad hoodoo? You change the subject radically and try to stir up the worst emotions you can in your base. “Look, people, we’re protecting your kiddies from filthy literature, so put us back in control of the county in next fall’s general election!” In the process, they appear to the idle observer as "rude and arrogant." To the informed observer, they acted like "swine."

What we see are cynical opportunists willing to use their religion to divide and conquer. Which means they need to be out of power, not installed into more of it.