South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer (R) has allowed that “maybe the stray animals wasn’t the best metaphor” to use when discussing poor people. However, he also stood by his call to end the “culture of dependency” that he says government assistance has created.
Last Friday, Bauer told an audience in South Carolina that his grandmother told him “as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed.”
He compared this to receiving assistance from the government, which he said is “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.”
In an interview with CNN, Bauer apologized, sort of.
“I never intended to tie people to animals,” he said, before…tying people to animals: “If you have a cat, if you take it in your house and feed it and love it, what happens when you go out of town?”
He continued that the U.S. has a “culture of dependency” that is a “systemic problem.”
Bauer also added: “If some of these people who are currently on welfare were put to work you wouldn’t have an immigration problem. The welfare system is so entrenched that nobody wants to do manual labor jobs.”
Bauer is currently running for the Republican nomination for SC Governor.
