Via
The Provincial Emails:
Forty “religious leaders” (read: leftist professors and a few clerical activists) recently released a statement
attacking Republican candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum for “Divisive Rhetoric Around Race and Poverty.”
What are these two quoted as saying? The statement claims:
Rick Santorum attracted scrutiny for telling Iowa voters he doesn’t want “to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”
Then it asserts:
Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a “food stamp president” and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment.
But what did Santorum actually say?
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
As for Gingrich, the manifesto provides no citation for his statement, but the following is typical of what he has been saying:
You don’t get out of 9.2% unemployment, you don’t get out of — today it was announced [that] the largest number of Americans [are] on food stamps in history. I’ve said now for six months, this is the most effective food stamp President in history. That sounds like it is an attack, it’s just a statement of fact. It’s just that his administration kills jobs. They are driving Americans onto food stamps. Most Americans would rather have a paycheck.
Among the other clerical types signing the statement is Marquette’s Rev. Bryan N. Massingale, a fellow who has a history of
playing the race card to promote a leftist political agenda.
Massingale also routinely
trashes Catholic teaching on sexuality.
If the manifesto is particularly egregious for distorting the statements of Gingrich and Santorum, it is morally irresponsible for refusing to deal with a simple reality: dependency is far too common in the U.S. today, and it’s particularly common in the black community.
For example, in 2009, 25.1% of persons living in black households were receiving food stamps, while only 6.9% of persons in white (non-Hispanic) households got food stamps. Indeed, a bit over half of all blacks (50.9% to be exact) lived in a household getting some means-tested assistance, as opposed to only 20.5% of non-Hispanic whites.(
See Table 543 here.)
The numbers, for both blacks and whites, have increased since.
The simple fact is that liberals don’t much mind dependency, since a population dependent on government will vote for the party of government — the Democrats. The people who signed the statement attacking the two Republican candidates don’t particularly mind having a large dependent population. Gingrich and Santorum do.
Labels: Bryan Massingale, Dependency, Food Stamps, Newt Gingrich, Race Card, Rick Santorum, Social Welfare Policy
