While discussing a state-funded children’s insurance program at a Fiscal Review Committee meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Republican state Rep. Curry Todd, likened undocumented immigrants to rats.
“They can go out there like rats and multiply then, I guess” Todd mumbled in to a microphone. His comment was in response to the state’s CoverKids program that provides free health coverage to children under the age 18 was not verifying the immigration statuses of pregnant women.
In the Nazi propaganda film, "The Eternal Jew" the Nazis justified their inhuman actions against the Jewish people by comparing them to a hoard of rats. Now I'm not calling Rep. Todd a Nazi or that he is a racist. In fact, I feel all too often opposition groups are quick to label someone as a means to shut them up. What I am saying is that we are moving into a time where there will be major cut backs in social service funding and some may find this process easier if they can see these people as not being human. In short, I feel Todd's comment is part of the Republican's Final Solution of the poor.
As the founder and executive director of a nonprofit agency that provides support to foster children and families in crisis I have a good understanding of our limited role. When President George W. Bush back in 2001 proposed and implemented the Faith Base and Community Initiatives under the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services I expressed concern that this had nothing to do with "compassionate conservatism," but in fact was a gradual means of getting government out of the social service business.
In my view nonprofits are here to be a patch where the government's safety net has come unraveled. We were never designed to be the safety net. By turning responsibility over to nonprofits Bush was insuring that Republicans could then turn around and cut funding to these nonprofits. This way it's the nonprofits that are failing and not the government; protecting the jobs of these elected GOP's (or SOB's if you want the truth.)
Already you are hearing about cut backs in social services. Why? Because the poor and disenfranchised do not vote, so they do not count. So let's call them rats, or welfare queens, or freeloaders - just as long as we don't see them as human beings.
1 comment:
People can make mistakes. What concerns me is that Rep. Todd was not willing to apologize for his comment.
To me this it seems he is sending a message to those Republican voters who think the same way he does.
When politicians can make comments like this and have no fear, that's when we should be afraid.
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