South Carolina Lt. Governor Compares State’s Poor to “Stray Animals”

(The last line of this piece is the clincher)

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux for AOL News Service. 1/25/09.

The office of the South Carolina governor has not been particularly distinguished of late - but Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, who is currently running for that position on the Republican ticket, made some comments on Friday that made Mark Sanford look positively respectable.  During a town hall meeting that included 115 South Carolina citizens and several state lawmakers, Bauer compared government assistance to the poor to “feeding stray animals.”  Yes, you heard me correctly.  Stray animals.

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer said.  “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

To contextualize Bauer’s comments (and believe me, the context makes them even worse), he was talking about students who receive free or reduced school lunches, and saying that because they received government aid, they “owed something back.”  Bauer suggested that we raise those test scores by creating requirements for people who were on government assistance - like forcing them to pass drug tests or taking away aid if they didn’t attend PTA meetings or parent-teacher conferences.  Bauer concluded, “We can’t afford to keep just giving money away.”

These remarks are, frankly, terrifying.  Bauer later tried to retract his statement, telling the Greenville News that he wasn’t saying people on government assistance “were animals or anything else,” but he didn’t deny any of the sentiment behind what he was saying (and he did kinda draw a pretty straight parallel between impoverished people and stray animals).  Although Bauer said that it’s time for people to become more engaged in government, you can certainly understand why people have become more and more disillusioned with the fact that we’re electing people like him - who simply don’t understand any of the realities of poverty.  Bauer went on to say that we reward the poor for having “more and more kids, and the reward is there’s more and more money in it for them.”  Because the stereotype of the welfare mom has proven to be oh-so-true - it’s very, very lucrative to be a single mother in this country. 

The issue is not that the parents of free or reduced lunch students can’t attend PTA or parent-teacher conferences because they don’t want to - and taking away their aid will certainly not make it easier for them to do so.  Poverty is not a choice.  This isn’t about lazy parents.  And Bauer’s sudden realization of the correlation between poverty and bad test scores indicates just how out of touch he is.  And simply as a character issue, does anyone else find it disturbing that he seems very ready to starve stray animals?

Notes

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