Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.
Iowans today find their rights limited by private, partisan, and parochial interests, where the in-group gets the freedom to flourish and the out-group is free to leave.
State logo and slogan adopted by the Reynolds administration in 2023
Iowa Republican candidates and elected officials have been quick to claim the mantle of “culture” and “heritage” in our state. Back in February, then Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate, Zach Lahn told Tucker Carlson, “the primary catalyst for me doing this was I believe we are losing our culture and our heritage as a people. That’s my honest belief…Are the traditions and the heritage and the value[s] of our ancestors important to us?”
From Plato and Aristotle to the books of the New Testament and the writings of the American Founding Fathers, thinkers in the Western tradition, to whom our religious and cultural heritage are often credited, were careful to temper individual freedom with civic virtue defined as a moral obligation to the common good.
In a pluralistic society like ours, civic virtue means recognizing that some constraints on individual action contribute positively to the freedom of society as a whole. So what are we supposed to make of Republican claims to this Western cultural heritage, appeals to agricultural ancestry, and what it means to be an Iowan today? It’s more than just Click It or Ticket, where we can all agree to put on our seatbelt regardless of religion or party affiliation, it’s acknowledging that private, parochial, and partisan interests, however fervently held, must be checked for people of all kinds to freely flourish.
But today’s GOP has a problem with individual freedom and the common good, where the freedom to flourish is selectively granted when it isn’t checked by Christian nationalism.
This apparent contradiction between freedom, responsibility, and the common good in GOP governance gets smoothed over by a redefinition of terms best understood through Wilhoit’s Law, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Freedom to flourish becomes the freedom of the in-group to act but not be bound by legal or moral responsibility, where the out-group holds no rights the in-group must respect, and laws that bind the in-group become an illegitimate obstruction of freedom. As French satirist Anatole France quipped, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.”
Iowans now have “education freedom” in the form of hundreds of millions of public dollars to spend on private religious schools that do not share the same admission rules and accountability measures that bind their public counterparts. Critics long suspected the function, if not the explicit purpose, of Iowa’s voucher program was state validation of Christian identity. Then-gubernatorial candidate Adam Steen made this purpose plain when he claimed “even your Christian schools won’t be safe” from attempts to level the playing field for private schools that accept public funding if it means welcoming “children with two mothers” and “mentally ill transgender students.”
But it’s not enough to create an unregulated parallel private education system. The out-group must also adhere to a litany of new restrictions on public school curriculum limiting the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and banning books that offend sectarian religious sensibilities. As France quipped about bridges, begging, and bread, we are all free to get public money to attend a private Christian school.
Iowans also now have “freedom of conscience” to deny medical care to patients on the basis of religious belief. If you’re a licensed pharmacist you can exercise that freedom to refuse a birth control prescription, but if you require medical care that conflicts with the religious beliefs of providers, you are free to leave the state to get it (for now, anyway). If you’re the parent of a transgender child, for example, your child is legally prohibited from receiving gender-affirming care. And if you are pregnant, you are not allowed to terminate your pregnancy after six weeks, a window that may shut before many people even learn they’re pregnant.
Iowa Republicans went even further, making us the first state in the nation to remove previously granted civil rights protections by stripping “gender identity” from state civil rights law and banning municipal governments from maintaining local codes with old language. We are all free to exercise our conscience to deny housing to transgender people.
Where sectarian Christian interests aren’t explicitly favored, political interests that appeal to the cultural identity of Iowans as pioneering settlers and small family farmers also get special treatment. The pioneer identity persists despite the fact that two-thirds of Iowans now live in urban areas. No longer limited to revolvers and muzzle-loading rifles, this new urban pioneer is entitled to “constitutional carry,” defined as the freedom to carry a semi-automatic handgun with no permit, no training, and no background check, a right Iowa Republicans extended in 2025 to anyone as young as eighteen.
From 2015 to 2024, Iowa’s relatively low rate of gun deaths rose 53 percent, more than three times the national increase over the same time period. This includes a high-profile shooting at Perry High School, where the firearms used by the 17-year old shooter were acquired from an unsecured family collection. Without obligation to the common good, rights are made absolute for those who hold them, and the cost is paid by everyone who doesn’t: we’re free to carry firearms, and as guns proliferate the rest of us are free to bear the consequences.
While most of Iowa’s farms are still family owned, Iowa’s hog industry, the largest in the country, has been consolidated and dominated by massive corporate owned farms. Compared to 30 years ago, we have one-third as many hog farms producing 70 percent more hogs along with over 100 billion pounds of waste each year. Many of these factory farms aren’t even owned by Iowa companies. Prestage Farms, which owns and operates hundreds of hog confinements in our state, is based in North Carolina.
While the profits go out of state, those billions of pounds of waste stay here, and when they aren’t excessively sprayed on fields as manure fertilizer, they’re kept in large waste lagoons that leak or flood into the soil. The result is nitrate contamination, and Iowans end up double-paying. First, for water treatment to make contaminated water supplies drinkable, and again at the oncologist, where Iowans have the second-highest rate of new cancers in the country. This is allowed to happen because of the sweetheart deal Republican lawmakers made with ag polluters who don’t have to report what happens to their waste or how much is sprayed on crop fields.
In the age of the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, the identity of the family farmer straight out of a Grant Wood painting is on life support, but that hasn’t stopped politicians from invoking American Gothic in their appeals to our agricultural heritage. Big Ag is free to pollute, and we are free to drink the water.
Zach Lahn asked whether the heritage of our ancestors still matters to us. But I would ask Lahn, how would his own German ancestors, who settled in Belle Plaine, feel about what our state has become under Republican governance?
Our once nationally respected public schools have been undermined by decades of underfunding and political attacks with hundreds of millions of dollars of public money going to unaccountable private religious schools. Where Iowa was once the first in the Midwest to legally recognize marriage equality, it is now the first in the nation to strip civil rights from a protected group. While gun violence is the second leading cause of death for Iowa children, school library books are subject to more scrutiny than handguns. And while Iowans have no right to clean, safe drinking water, factory hog farms enjoy the freedom to pollute on a scale that would be unfathomable and unconscionable to Nan Wood Graham.
The Iowa GOP’s promise of freedom without responsibility is conventional wisdom among the class of right-wing pundits, but it would be unrecognizable to the authors of the Bible, to any Greek philosopher or American Founder. As the apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians (5:14–15), “For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”
Instead of the expansion of rights and equality under the law as the defining feature of American life, and civic virtue at the center of governance for the common good, Iowans today find their rights limited by private, partisan, and parochial interests, where the in-group gets the freedom to flourish and the out-group is free to leave.