I Can’t Like Bobby Jindal

His ultra-conservative outlook is not limited to faith-related issues. He is adamantly pro-gun, for instance, and favors a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.

Why can’t I like Bobby Jindal?

After all, the Louisiana governor, whose ethnic background I share, seems to be going places. At the grand old age of thirty-six, he’s on the shortlist for being chosen as John McCain’s running mate. (Talk about an age gap!) He made history as the first Indian-American governor earlier this year (the second Asian-American governor ever on the mainland), and became a Congressman at the age of thirty-three.

Jindal is a wunderkind. By the time he was twenty-five, he was the secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals for the state of Louisiana, an astonishing achievement. He’s a graduate of Brown and a Rhodes Scholar.

So, in spite of all his accomplishments, why don’t I care more for him?

The answer has to do with Jindal’s obnoxious views. Jindal has embraced a really conservative version of Christianity, which he converted to as a teenager. He launched his first, failed gubernatorial bid in 2003 while standing besides Louisiana Christian Coalition leader Billy McCormack. One of his radio ads in that campaign asked, "What's so wrong with the Ten Commandments?" He has stated that he is “100 percent against abortion, no exceptions.” He has supported the teaching of intelligent design and opposed stem-cell research. He is backing as governor a statehouse bill, with the Orwellian title of the Louisiana Science Education Act, to allow intelligent design in schools, as Clancy DuBos, the editor of the Gambit Weekly in New Orleans, informs me.

His ultra-conservative outlook is not limited to faith-related issues. He is adamantly pro-gun, for instance, and favors a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.

“Anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-secular, pro-war, anti-science . . . the list is endless,” wrote Professor Vijay Prashad for the Progressive Media Project when Jindal was sworn in as governor a few months ago. “Jindal is not only at the extreme end of the Republican spectrum, but he continues to be a loyal soldier in the Bush army.”

So extreme that, as Prashad points out, he stooped to using timeworn coded racist language to deride Jena protesters as “outside agitators.”

And Jindal has run away from his Indian heritage as a way to ingratiate himself with the majority. Shashi Tharoor, former U.N. undersecretary general, reveals that Jindal once mangled the pronunciation of his own brother’s name while accepting an award. As a Congressman, Jindal pointedly skipped a function organized by the Indian community to commemorate Diwali, the festival of lights, the biggest religious celebration among Hindus. (Not that this has stopped him from showing up at Indian-American fundraising events.)

“Indians beam proudly at another Indian-American success story to go along with Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, Hargobind Khorana and Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, Kal Penn and Jhumpa Lahiri,” writes Tharoor. “But none of these Indian Americans expressed attitudes and beliefs so much at variance with the prevailing values of their community.”

I really wish I could be more fond of Jindal, especially since he is now in the running for the second-highest office in the land, a startling achievement for someone who is a member of a tiny ethnic minority and so young. But his ideology keeps coming in between.