What’s behind Republican policies on food stamps that appear too cruel for most people to contemplate? For Switzerland’s News, columnist Patrik Etschmayer writes that what drives the American right’s complaints about people living off the state is a fear that the mainly White, Protestant, heterosexual, male dominated world is endangered, and a desire to punish those who appear to threaten it.
For News, Patrik Etschmayer writes in part:
While Republicans defend every tax loophole for the superrich as if it were a battle against the Nazis, every possible effort is made to make the poor even poorer. Children who are hungry find it harder to learn, have poorer job prospects, and ultimately, will remain poor. Furthermore, such children are more susceptible to disease, and when their parents are unemployed, chances are that that won’t even have the money for the child to see a doctor. To ensure things stay that way, these same Republicans are now using all means available to torpedo Obama’s health care reform.
These enemies of children, who have come into the world to simultaneously defend the rights of the unborn until they are zygotes with the same fanaticism that they battle them after they are born, show that at least when it comes to mental illness, even politicians are unable to make use what passes for health care in the United States.
The Tea Party Republicans are willing to stop at nothing because they see their mainly White, Protestant, heterosexual, and male dominated world endangered. It is almost a form of tribalism that steers these circles. Sociologists have found that Tea Party supporters feel threatened, and that one of their greatest fears is that social groups they consider inferior could be encouraged and even expand. Against this backdrop of demographic change in the United States, which will make dominant Whites a minority in the near future, the panic of those who base their identities on race and their traditional social position is completely understandable.
READ ON IN ENGLISH OR GERMAN, OR READ MORE TRANSLATED and English-language foreign press coverage as the 2013 budget battle continues to unfold at Worldmeets.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US