The title says it all for me. A Sunday article in the WSJ (no link yet), never once was the question asked why conservatives would need the names of teachers who protests at the Capitol, in their open records request.
How does a list of teacher names "inform the public" with regards to how the government works? Is this request more intimidation, a warning to others, that if you protest Republican government policy “we’ll get your name and publish it?”
School districts across the state are being asked to release the names of teachers who called in sick…conservative groups have made public records requests for teacher names.
Shockingly, most districts released them. But wisely, not Madison and a few others.
The Madison School District (said) the release could risk the safety of teachers and students, and disrupt morale and the learning environment in schools.
Why do conservative groups need the names of teachers?
Attorney Bob Dreps, who’s handled WSJ cases before, never asked that question either. Neither did open records zealot Bill Lueders, formerly of Isthmus and now president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.
Why do conservatives need the names of teachers? According to Lueders, what will be, will be! Lueders acquiesces to what is basically a right wing threat to public dissent.
“Unfortunately, if a teacher participates in an action and it becomes known and a parent wants to write a note that they should be fired…if they say, ‘I’m going to come to your house and kill your children,’ that’s a different story.”
So we should just take our chances? Who can predict the future? Again, why do conservatives groups need the names of teachers?
According to the radical think tank The MacIver Institute’s Brett Healy;
“No one really believes that someone would use the information to do something that crosses the line.”
Really, no one? I do, and so do many others, since it’s hard to imagine any other reason why conservative groups would need to know the names of protesting teachers, or anyone else for that matter.
Besides teacher vilification and harassment from what is now a gun carrying radicalized Republican Party, it’s a threat to future dissent, and a radical step that could become a conservatives list of known enemies of the government.
Maybe we should have a list of all concealed carry gun owners in the new law, and post that every year?
Those teachers whose names were released should sue their districts. Yes I am serious. It is against the law to release personal employee information.
ReplyDeleteIt just is. Now these teachers are up for the death threats and other forms of intimidation that are becoming more frequent.
Some of them must have been sick, That was cold and flu season and just locally many people had viruses during that period of late winter. This is harassment. But as I said, employee confidentiality laws prohibit this.
and by that I mean not onlyt the girl who asked to debate Bachmann, I know of increased threat levels and calls to people's homes for simple free speech. i.e. letters to the editor etc.
ReplyDeletePeople are already crossing the lines. It's just in a way that is hard to arrest people for (yet)
The time is coming. It is now clear to me someone is going to get hurt.
The Repugs on the fringes are stepping up their game.