For a hundred years now, progressive educators have pleaded with teachers to help their students learn by doing. In New Hampshire recently, a bold teacher who tried to do so with a fourth-grade class got a brutal public smack-down from a conservative legislator. The vicious culture-war politics of abortion took over.

Teacher James Cutting had helped his fourth-grade class engage with real-world issues. The students, he told NH1, took the initiative and proposed a bill to make the red-tailed hawk the official state raptor. They delivered their bill to the state house and watched as it moved through committee. When the bill had a hearing in the full legislature, the students were in the gallery to watch the proceedings.

What they saw there might have blown their minds.

One conservative legislator, Warren Groen of Rochester, took the podium to denounce the bill. The students’ choice for state raptor, Representative Groen intoned, was a vicious bird.

It grasps [its victims] 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.

This was not the first time that Representative Groen used his time in Concord to fight against abortion. In an earlier speech, Groen compared abortion to slavery.