An unlikely group of Ashland High School students has come together to create the newest club on campus, The Young Republicans Club, and they have one simple goal, to create a better America. Led by club president Kyle Weinberg, the club will have weekly meetings to discuss what they want in their America.
Weinberg, a junior and the starting quarterback for the football team, opened the inaugural meeting by handing out sheets explaining the differences between Democrats and Republicans and the issues that divide them. Weinberg then explained the clubs mission of “bringing America to its peak potential through conservative values.”
Before moving on to discussing issues Weinberg made it clear that in the future the club, which had around ten people come for the first meeting, welcomes people with different points of view.
The first item on the docket was brought up by junior Wyatt Ireland. In the end the group agreed that capital punishment should be allowed, but that the laws allowing it need to be tightened and that it should be a federal law, not state by state. This differs from the status quo mainly on the change to the death penalty being federal. Interestingly, conservatives are usually advocates of states rights, however this group felt that in this scenario that allows the death penalty to become discriminatory towards individual groups in a state.
The conversation then moved towards patriotism in America. The club viewed that patriotism was on the decline in America and specifically at AHS. Weinberg told of how he is the only one to say the Pledge of Allegiance in one of his classes and many members spoke of similar experiences. Juniors Walker Shibley-Styer and Jackson Risner connected this to informal class surveys of student’s political parties in both of their government classes. Both told a similar story. A few are independents and undecideds, but an overwhelming majority of students are democrats. On the other end of the spectrum only one Republican was in both of their classes. While the numbers may fluctuate class by class the fact is that AHS is very liberal politically.
To end the meeting Weinberg presented his own idea for the better America. Weinberg advocated that college should be free for all Americans, and that by doing this government welfare would go down as would the prison population. This plan is extremely social, something most commonly associated with Democrats, and an interesting choice to accomplish their conservative goals.
The most intriguing part of the club was its demographic. Almost every member was either a football or baseball player. While stereotypes usually assume that “jocks” are dumb and don’t care about things like politics, this group is showing that is definitely not the case at AHS. The club meets every Wednesday at lunch in room 204.
