While claiming to be the Party of Christian Values, today's Neo-Confederate GOP have thrown Jesus' repeated admonitions to care for the poor and sick, to judge not lest ye be judged, and to love one another as I have loved you, into the trash can and then set them on fire.
Not only are they fighting for their right to discriminate with "every ounce of our being," against our LGBT sisters and brothers, they are also reaching new lows in demonizing and punishing the poor for being, well, poor.
In landlocked Kansas there are Republican legislators who think those needing help to buy food are instead using their food dollars to buy cruise ship tickets. Those same legislators are concerned that on hot days poor parents might be taking their children to the local pool for some fun and relief from the heat.
To make sure poor folks weren't taking their kids swimming, at the end of March the Kansas House passed a law limiting the amount of money the poor could withdraw from their welfare benefits to $25 per day. Of course, I don't know how the poor are going to pay their rent or other bills with only $25 a day either, never mind cruise ship tickets.
Laws like this are springing up all over the country and they have nothing to do with any fiscal reality or supposed fraud occurring in the system. If Republicans were truly concerned with fraud they'd be screaming from the mountain top about the white collar crime that destroys lives and costs us billions. But they don't. They have more fun stomping on the poor, sick, and hungry.
In spite of the Right's decades long efforts to portray social programs as riven with fraud, reality disagrees. The fraud rate for Welfare is vanishingly small - 1.8%
"...according to the USDA, SNAP benefit trafficking has "remained relatively steady at approximately one cent on the dollar," and the program "continues to have one of the lowest fraud rates for Federal programs." Furthermore, rates of trafficking have declined since the 90s and the current rate of trafficking remains near historic lows..."
What is happening in Kansas and other states, including unfortunately my own, is yet more of the Right's perpetual effort to misrepresent
"the SNAP program and its beneficiaries in an effort to demonize food assistance and malign low-income Americans."
That includes approximately 50 million American low income and poor children.
Children under 18 years represent 23 percent of the population, but they comprise 33 percent of all people in poverty. 1 Among all children, 44 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Among our oldest children – adolescents age 12 through 17 years – 41 percent live in low-income families and 19 percent live in poor families. Being a child in a low-income or poor family does not happen by chance. Parental education and employment, race/ethnicity, and other factors are associated with children experiencing economic insecurity. This fact sheet describes the demographic, socio-economic, and geographic characteristics of adolescents and their parents. It highlights the important factors that appear to distinguish low-income and poor children in this age group from their less disadvantaged counterparts.
How many young children under age 6 years in the United States live in low-income families?
There are nearly 24 million young children under age 6 years in the United States.
48 percent – 11.1 million – live in low-income families
25 percent – 5.7 million – live in poor families
How many children in middle childhood (age 6 through 11 years) in the United States live in low-income families?
There are more than 24 million children in middle childhood (age 6 through 11 years) in the United States.
45 percent – 10.9 million – live in low-income families
22 percent – 5.4 million – live in poor families
How many adolescent children age 12 through 17 years in the United States live in low-income families?
There are more than 24 million adolescents age 12 through 17 years in the United States.
41 percent – 9.9 million – live in low-income families
19 percent – 4.7 million – live in poor families
Note: Above low income is defined as at or above 200% of the federal poverty threshold (FPT), poor is defined as below 100% of FPT, and near poor is between 100% and 199% of the FPT. The low-income category includes both the poor and the near poor.
Millions of those children live in families with at least one parent working full or part time. And
contrary to some common stereotypes about America’s poor, at least one-third of the 13 million children living in poverty are white.
But the dog whistles keep being played to America's far too fearful and racist heart. Inner city. Drugs. Fraud. Not knowing the value of work, which of course really means shiftless, lazy. Now we can add wanting to use the local swimming pool.
It is all designed to make Americans distrustful of one another and the Safety Net there for us all. It is designed to make us blind to how vulnerable each and every one of us is to needing that net to catch us if we fall. It is designed to make Americans amenable to the Republican plan to drown that safety net, our public schools, the agencies designed to protect our air, food, and water, and all government in a bathtub of distrust and anxiety.
Our children - LGBT or straight, the ill and disabled, the unemployed, the working poor, and even those who serve in the military, are being sacrificed on an altar to the fearful and powerful.
The number of military families who have needed help with keeping food in the house has risen sharply since the Bush Recession - from $31.1 million dollars in food stamps or Snap in 2008, to $103.6 million in 2013.
Republicans, the first to beat the war drums, are the last when it comes to taking care of our military personnel and Veterans.
The same is true when it comes to our children, disabled, and workers.
Republicans are addicted to tax breaks that benefit Fortune 500 companies, while harming the middle and working classes, and the poor. It is their favorite drug of choice, surpassing even their war mongering. Both were the causes of the deficit spiraling out of control and yet Republicans still can't give either up.
They keep doing the same thing again and again, and nothing changes except the rising number of people being harmed.
The GOP's beloved sequester and hatred of stimulus spending, including infrastructure spending, are quietly inflicting even more pain.
Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a piece for the New York Times in 2009 titled, "The Same Old Song." It said a few things that are still true today. The Republican answer to the economic disaster they had created was, you guessed it, tax cuts for the fortunate few.
The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.
The Republican answer to this turmoil?
Tax cuts.
They need to go into rehab.
Six years later, Republicans are still singing the same old song. They still need to go into rehab, and not just for their
addiction to big tax cuts that only cause suffering while ballooning the deficit.
They need to go into rehab for a sense of morality that actually gives a damn about people other than themselves - like our LGBT sons and daughters, our hungry children, our sick, and struggling.
Of course, they won't. But that does not mean that we should not ceaselessly expose the religious and fiscal hypocrisy they worship.
In the Bible's Gospels of Mathew and Luke, Jesus uses the language of botany and agriculture to explain how we can know a person's intentions towards us.
You will recognize them by their fruits.
Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
Fields of thorns are the poisoned fruits of today's Neo-Confederate Republican Party - suspicion, greed, divisiveness, fear, and suffering. Economic collapse. Unnecessary War and the resulting lost and wounded lives. Attacks on Voting Rights. The unceasing wars on women, the poor, students, the elderly and disabled, people of color, our LGBT sons and daughters, and working Americans.
There is nothing nourishing they offer to body or soul.
We need to plant something far better so all our people can bloom and flourish.
We can start by truly caring about one another.