Fourth graders from Lincoln Akerman School in Hampton Falls received a warm welcome at the State House last Thursday. They and their teacher, James Cutting, were guests in the Gallery.
That reception quickly turned chilly as students got a glimpse of the cold, harsh realities of politics in the Granite State.
The idea seemed pretty straightforward. The fourth-grade class, made up of 9-and-10-year-olds from the Southeast corner of the state, worked on a proposal to make the Red Tail Hawk the official State Raptor of New Hampshire. The kids and their teacher brought their proposal to the state capitol, and it was approved by the Environment and Agriculture Committee.
But as the report from NH1.com’s Shari Small makes clear, on the floor of the state House, the children ran into unexpectedly fierce Republican opposition. The kids heard one GOP lawmaker argue, for example, in reference to the Red Tail Hawk, “It grasps them with its talons then uses its razor sharp beak to basically tear it apart limb by limb, and I guess the shame about making this a state bird is it would serve as a much better mascot for Planned Parenthood.”
Those comments, from state Rep. Warren Groen (R), were apparently the harshest of the debate, but he wasn’t alone. In fact, the Republican-led New Hampshire state House killed the proposal from the 4th graders on a 133-to-160 vote.
