Jon Stewart thanks South Carolina again for providing ridiculously comedic news stories.  This time, Lt. Gov Bauer has compared poor people to stray animals, saying that if you feed them they will keep breeding, so you shouldn’t give free lunches to poor students in school.

Then, when given a chance to explain himself and back away from what he said, he made pretty much the same analogy.

Being a former South Carolina resident, I feel I must comment on this.  First of all, I have no doubt that his use of “poor people” is code for “black people”.  And this sentiment does not seem to be very far from many minds there.  Even talking to my own step-mom, who is generally a nice and reasonable person, I heard similar ideas.  Concerning healthcare, she seemed to think that the poor people were the problem, and if you just got rid of them, there would no longer be a problem with healthcare.  (I’m fairly sure by “get rid of them” she didn’t mean to improve their economic circumstances so that they would no longer be poor…no, the phrase was said with anger: “WHY CAN’T WE JUST GET RID OF THEM???”)  I even heard the idea of mandatory sterilization (read: “spaying and neutering”) offered as a solution.  But I don’t want to single her out or anything—she’s really a nice woman and is good for my dad.  The truth is, I have heard this sort of heartless sentiment come out of lots of people I know and love in that state as well as others.

I don’t get it.  How can people seriously and sincerely believe in wiping out an entire class and/or race of human beings?  Even if they can believe something so extremely awful, how can they possibly think it’s okay to say out loud in public conversation?  We’ve been through the Holocaust, we fought the Nazis, we know how destructive such thought is…why do people continue advocating, engendering, and propagating this mindset?

I doubt they’ve even read the Bible they claim to love so much.  I think that if their Jesus were to actually come back, they’d be the ones to kill him again.