Opinion: Florida sliding back to its Old South ways

TALLAHASSEE -- William Faulkner once said, "In the South, the past is never dead, it's not even past." Faulkner, Mississippi's second-best product (after the Delta Blues), knew what he was talking about: His great-aunts would get up and walk out of Gone With the Wind the minute Gen. Sherman's name was mentioned.

Florida likes to think of itself as New South -- if it admits to being Southern at all. But old times here are not forgotten, either. Journalists across the state recently received an e-mail from the League of the South exhorting them to mark Jan. 10 as "Florida Freedom Day." On that date in 1861, a not-very-democratic cadre of planters and other rich white folks got together in Tallahassee and voted to secede from the Union.

We all remember how well that worked out.

In his message, Steve Walker, "Provisional Chairman" of the Northeast Florida League of the South, says it was "an oppressive national government" that drove the state to "declare her independence" 141 years ago, and urges the press to "proclaim her day" in headlines.

In case you've missed some of their other crusades (rallying for the Confederate battle flag, calling the renaming of a street for Rev. Martin Luther King a "heritage violation," insisting the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery) the League of the South is an organization advocating the re-secession of Southern states to form a "Christian Republic" where men are men, women are ladies and black people are welcome as long as they don't get uppity. The league loathes multiculturalism, feminism, secularism and taxes of all kinds. You might note a number of similarities to far-right fringe of the Florida Republican Party.

Progressive Democratic governors such as LeRoy Collins, Reuben Askew and Bob Graham did much to lead the state out of the torpid and hateful days of Jim Crow, fighting for integration, fair courts, equal rights, access to quality education and health care. But now for all its superficial New South patina, the state is sliding back to its Old South ways.

At the secession convention of 1861, the rulers of Florida were obsessed with states' rights: chiefly the "right" of one group of people to own another group of people. Now what the rulers of Florida care most about is the "right" of the affluent to pay as few taxes as possible, no matter who suffers. It wasn't just the recession or the attacks of Sept. 11 that hurt the state's economy, it's two years of tax cuts, sponsored by Gov. Jeb Bush and the Republican-controlled Legislature. In this failure of responsibility, you could say that Florida has seceded from a commitment to a just society.

We have seceded from decent education funding. In the recent budget-slashing frenzy of two special sessions, our Republican-led government has zeroed-out money to recruit and retain new teachers. Florida used to want to compare itself to New York, Michigan, Massachusetts and California in the quality of its public education. Now we do worse than Georgia and North Carolina. And we are losing teachers to better-paying jobs in Alabama.

We have seceded from a serious university system. By junking the Board of Regents in favor of politicized boards of trustees, we will have warring tribes competing for each pitiful higher education dollar. Tuition will go up, making it even harder for lower-income students to afford a four-year degree.

We have seceded from responsibility for the poor and the old. The Legislature cut prenatal care to women who will never own stocks and bonds and so aren't too bothered by the intangibles tax -- now they just have to worry about bringing a healthy baby into the world. And 23,000 elderly people will have to find a way to pay for their own prescription drugs because of the budget cuts. Many of them will just do without. This coming legislative session, there's no telling what Florida will secede from. There are bills filed that will hamstring Florida's strong public records laws, allowing the government to close arrest records and keep many of its operations secret. There are legislators hell-bent on once again attacking Florida's independent judiciary. They want judges appointed solely by the governor or elected in partisan races -- just like they were 30 or 40 years ago when Florida's legal system was a disgraceful swamp of corruption and graft.

Maybe the biggest difference between the League of the South and the radicals running Florida is that the league at least understands and acknowledges that they want to return to a pre-modern society. Jeb Bush and Tom Feeney (John McKay, the senate president, actually has ideas for tax reform, making him a bit of a freak in the party) seem convinced that they are taking Florida forward. But forward to what? Some kind of banana republic where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and everybody who can goes to college in Georgia?

Maybe we should commemorate (though not celebrate) the day in 1861 the rulers of Florida chose to separate the state from the core American values of liberty and justice for all. Remembering our history might at least slow down our repeating it.

- Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.

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