Soulmates

Remember when Cynthia Davis was busy worrying that a summer food program sponsored by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services would undercut the motivating effect of hunger on young people? Or her more recent perorations on how using part of the marriage license fee to aid domestic abuse victims, who might have been living together without benefit of matrimony, is an insult to couples wishing to marry?

You thought it would be impossible to top Davis for sheer mean-mindedness, right?  And that may be true, but South Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Andrew Bauer is at least in the same category. He recently compared feeding hungry children to “feeding stray animals,” adding that:

You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better

Davis and Bauer are soulmates maybe, heartless for sure, but sadly familar. Remember Dicken’s Oliver Twist and the cruel workhouse matron, Mrs. Corney and the corrupt Beadle, Mr. Bumble? Self-righteous meanness never seems to go entirely out of style, no matter how far we think that we have progressed since the horrors of the 19th century workhouse.