He was a terrible mayor of Shreveport, and now he’s a terrible state legislator (again).

How bad is Cedric Glover? So bad that he’s coming after the beer.

With much fanfare, LSU and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette joined a growing trend of allowing brewers to pay them for making “official beers.”

Reading that news in his Shreveport kitchen, Democratic Rep. Cedric Glover said he was appalled. “It struck me deep in my heart. This is wrong.”

For health reasons, for moral reasons, for religious reasons, Glover said he vowed at that moment to use one of his five allotted bills in a legislative session that’s supposed to focus on fiscal matters, to ban public universities from licensing “official” alcoholic beverages. His House Bill 610 also would forbid LSU and UL-Lafayette from renewing the contracts with local brewers when they expire.

Bayou Bengal Lager supports LSU and Ragin’ Cajuns Genuine Louisiana Ale is the official beer for UL-Lafayette.

“Why would we have wanted to officially license and brand and tie an alcoholic beverage to a school?” Glover said. Louisiana doesn’t allow anyone under the age of 21 to drink, and that age limit applies to most every student on most campuses.

Given ongoing efforts to combat underage drinking on college campuses and all the problems that follow excessive alcohol use, while at the same time endorsing an “official beer” sends a conflicting message, said Glover, the former mayor of Shreveport.

HB610 will be debated first in the House Education Committee, but a hearing has not been scheduled.

“It’s nonsense. Glover likes to throw stones,” LSU President F. King Alexander said. “He’s never been a fan of LSU.”

Alexander is, for once, correct. Beer is a legal product and both Bayou Bengal Lager and Ragin’ Cajuns Genuine Louisiana Ale are products marketed far more to alumni of LSU and ULL than to the students. Universities around the country are licensing beer – Coors is the official beer of the University of Illinois, for example – as a way of capitalizing on their brands and raising cash without hitting taxpayers or even students in the wallet.

We want LSU, ULL and the other public universities in the state to find more ways of earning revenue that don’t involve the general fund, and licensing brands of beer which would probably exist regardless of their partnerships with the brewer – Tin Roof Brewery would likely be brewing that lager whether LSU was involved or not; they might just call it something else – is a smart way to do that.

Cedric Glover, who never graduated from college – his bio says he had “brief” stays at Grambling and at LSU – and has meager experience in business at best but lots of experience as a politician, wouldn’t know a damn thing about marshaling resources to earn business revenue. And what he knows about health, as morbidly obese as he is, would easily fit in a beer bottle. We’d all be better off if he’d just shut his mouth on this and lots of other subjects and not attempt to govern the daily lives of LSU, ULL or the state’s beer drinkers.