Someone alert LUS: There's something in the water on the south side of Lafayette and it's causing widespread paranoia.
Someone alert LUS: There's something in the water on the south side of Lafayette and it's causing widespread paranoia.
Freshman Hub City state Rep. Stuart Bishop has before the House Tuesday a concurrent resolution, HCR 89, that "[r]ecognizes the destructive and insidious nature of the United Nations Agenda 21." Bishop's District 43, formerly represented by now-Sen. Page Cortez, spans much of south Lafayette.
The conspiracy theory that radical environmentalists are infiltrating all levels of government in an effort to stamp out private property and automobile ownership, private farms and other American luxuries and cram everyone into New Urbanist communities where we walk or cycle to work and eat granola is a favorite of tea party groups, the Tea Party of Lafayette notwithstanding. And the Agenda 21 bug has infected the Georgia Legislature and the Republican National Committee, both of which passed resolutions condemning Agenda 21, which was a framework for sustainable growth adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Yes, 20 years ago.
Tea party groups have used Agenda 21 paranoia to stoke opposition to urban planning, and based on the local group's website, suspicion about Agenda 21 is alive and well, further evidenced by Bishop's non-binding resolution. Unfortunately, this comes just the Lafayette Comprehensive Plan gets under way with community forums across the parish this week.
Here's the essential language in HCR 89:
WHEREAS, the United Nations Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control that was initiated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development... and WHEREAS, the United Nations Agenda 21 is being covertly pushed into local communities throughout the United States of America through the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) through local "sustainable development" policies, such as SmartGrowth,Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, RegionalVisioning Projects, and other "Green" or "Alternative" projects; and WHEREAS, this plan of radical so-called "sustainable development" views the American way of life of private property ownership, single-family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms all as destructive to the environment; and WHEREAS, according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialists and communist redistribution of wealth; and WHEREAS, according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, national sovereignty is deemed a social injustice.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of Louisiana does hereby recognize the destructive and insidious nature of the United Nations Agenda 21.
For more on Agenda 21, read our Feb. 15 cover story, "Hidden Agenda."