Guest Commentary: Gowan not good for Green Valley

Last Tuesday I was among a group of nine Green Valley residents that met in the House of Representatives office with our representative David Gowan, Republican, Sierra Vista.

Our purpose was to get him to “tone down” HB 2632 of which he is the sponsor.

This proposed bill is the House version of Sen. Russell Pearce’s SB 1070, a draconian omnibus bill of all the anti-immigration bills he introduced last year, but were defeated.

Pearce’s bill has passed the Senate, and now only the House can stop passage of a bill that will make every government agency and every government employee in Arizona criminalize and marginalize immigrant families in Arizona.

In addition it will result in a huge loss of economic contributions by the approximate 100,000 to 300,000 people who will be deported if apprehended, plus their families (many of whom are U.S. citizens).

This bill is an unfunded mandate which many police departments in Arizona are opposing because they lack sufficient manpower to track down all of the alleged violations which, incidentally, are only misdemeanors.

We were not only not successful with Rep. Gowan, but were appalled by his obvious intolerance on a number of levels.

He stated that he sees everything as “black or white”, missing, somehow, the grey areas and subtleties that come with maturity.

He was so upset with one of our members for suggesting that corporate America needs reform that he yelled at him: “You should go live in Russia!” apparently unaware that Russia today is not on the State Dept’s. list of communist countries because it is in fact a Federal Republic, complete with elections, etc.

His backward looking emphasis on discredited cliches from earlier decades didn’t end there as he referenced Ronald Reagan as his “hero” because he cut taxes. I pointed out that because of such tax cuts, the Reagan budgets in the ’80s resulted in a more than doubling of the national debt.

What is “heroic” about our country not paying it’s way now, rather than burdening our children and their children with huge debt?

He also wanted to characterize almost any issue as a contest between “capitalism and communism.”

On the topic of immigration reform, he was unaware of the process for citizenship as well as quota limits for countries like Mexico. His solution to unwanted immigration from the South is to have the United States somehow go down and reform Mexico! (I am not making this up).

He seemed to base much of his philosophy of government on his religious beliefs without understanding that ours is a government that separates church and state.

We were glad to have had our 25 minutes with our representative, as only face-to-face conversation could reveal his biased attitudes and “knee jerk” opinions.

His expressions, simply put, lacked any evidence of critical thinking. Green Valley deserves better.

Jack Mattox is a Green Valley resident. The views expressed above are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this newspaper.