Guest AuthorI’m privileged to live in the congressional district served by Mr. Anti-Poverty himself, U.S. Rep. Steve Southerland. The second-term congressman and former funeral home director, you should know by now, has made fighting poverty his No. 1 priority.
In doing so, Southerland has embarked on a crusade to overhaul (some would say gut) the food stamp program and require welfare recipients to volunteer at least 20 hours a week in order to receive benefits.
You may not know this about Southerland: prior to running for the 2nd Congressional District in the Panhandle, he visited his local library to learn the basics of how Congress operates. His first campaign platform was simplistic: less government and more gun rights. It fit nicely with his Southern Baptist faith.
Since taking office, Southerland found a new religion — poverty. He has toured job-training facilities and consulted poverty experts. He sounds sincere enough. Unfortunately, Southerland belongs to a GOP congressional leadership that has grown fat electorally by demonizing poor people.
Not surprisingly, Southerland doesn’t see the link between poverty and a minimum wage too low to meet basic needs. If he did, he would support raising the minimum wage. As some argue, many of the people on food stamps aren’t lazy or morally deficient. They’re working adults who don’t earn enough to adequately feed themselves and their families.
Southerland says he wants to end poverty, but he opposes extending benefits for the long-term unemployed. He doesn’t see the inconsistency. People don’t just move from poverty to wealth. In between, there is just survival, toiling and hoping for a break. Which brings me to this campaign season in which Southerland is facing a challenge from Democrat Gwen Graham.
It has been nearly impossible to watch television without having to suffer through the Americans For Prosperity political action committee’s $163,000 ad blitz touting Southerland’s steadfast opposition to Obamacare. In those ads, Southerland speaks proudly of wanting to give people the freedom to choose. He conveniently ignores that poverty nearly eliminates real choices.
Southerland is about ideology. He cares more about what conservatives think, how proposals play with the Tea Party activists back home rather than what really works. America needed health-care reform because millions of Americans are forced to choose between health insurance and rent and food on the table. Now with Obamacare, the choice, for some, is less stark.
Southerland doesn’t make the connection between poverty and Obamacare. It doesn’t fit his ideology. Unfortunately, there is a poverty that afflicts the Panama City politician and his Republican colleagues. It’s the poverty of ideas, of imagination. And that’s one kind of poverty no amount of money can erase.
Andrew J. Skerritt is author of Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial and the AIDS Epidemic in the South. He lives in Tallahassee. Follow him on Twitter @andrewjskerritt. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
