CenLamar | Est. 2006

  • Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana Legislature Cower and Pander to the Radical Right on Creationism

    Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana Legislature Cower and Pander to the Radical Right on Creationism

    When I was seventeen years old, I wrote for The Town Talk as a member of its Youth Council, a small group of would-be journalists and writers who were graciously given barrels of ink every Sunday. It gave me my training wheels and, for the first time in my life, an audience. Looking back, I’m not entirely proud of everything I wrote under their masthead (mainly my music reviews), but I’m still proud of a few things: I criticized one of my own teachers for publicly campaigning to ban the movie “Teaching Ms. Tingle” because she believed it promoted violence against teachers.…

  • Louisiana Family Forum’s Financials: More Questions Than Answers

    Louisiana Family Forum’s Financials: More Questions Than Answers

    Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the financial statements, specifically the “990” forms, submitted to the IRS by the Louisiana Family Forum (the LFF), an organization that is roundly considered the most powerful lobbying group in the State of Louisiana. These forms paint an intriguing, albeit incomplete, picture of the operations of an organization responsible for a litany of controversial laws. Among other things, the LFF was the principal force behind a statewide ballot initiative against gay marriage. The organization has vociferously opposed a bill that would have better protected public school children against bullying. And in 2008, along…

  • Nearly Half of All Living Nobel Prize Laureates in the Sciences Personally Endorse a Repeal of Bobby Jindal’s Science Education Act

    During the last two months, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has attempted to assert his commitment to meaningful and substantive public education reform, introducing a series of controversial bills that would, essentially, defund struggling public schools in order to bankroll private, parochial, and charter schools. Mr. Jindal, who unveiled his plan in front of the largest business lobbying group in Louisiana, wants to give private schools almost unfettered access to public education dollars ($8500 per student per year), a program that is politely and deceptively couched as “vouchers” but is, for all intents and purposes, really just an effort to massively…