After a "Sorry if you were offended" non-apology apology for repeating a tasteless conservative meme equating feeding poor people with feeding wild animals, Representative Mary Franson tweeted that she wanted a discussion about creating a culture of self-dependency.
Perhaps she'll demonstrate how a three-year lifetime limit on receiving public assistance (federal law sets it at five years) will help those Todd County children aged seven and under stand on their own two feet.
Perhaps her defenders can supply boot-straps for baby booties.
But Franson isn't alone in her love of equating The Other among her fellow creatures with animals. Indeed, as Bluestem noted earlier this week in Mary Franson to bring top conservative plagiarist to state office building free lunch for legislators, the gentlewoman from Alexandria, Minnesota, is playing host to a free lunch offered to state legislators by the Heartland Institute in the State Office Building.
Will buying their lunch make Minnesota's lawmakers dependent on the Heartland Institute? I would certain hope not when it comes to pseudo-science surrounding tobacco policy. But I digress.
Rather, the special guest speaker at the event demonstrates another epsiode in which the right equated people to animals. Benjamin Domenech, who Franson will introduce to those lawmakers who choose to attend this fear-fest about health care exchanges, earned himself the nickname "Box Turtle Ben" for introducing an infamous line into the discourse about same-sex marriagewhile a speechwriter for Texas Senator John Cornyn.
Google is your friend and you can just google the phrase if you wish.
Duncan Black at Eschaton posted the goods back in 2010:
Once upon a time our pal Ben was a speechwriter for John Cornyn. A reporter given advance copy of a Cornyn speech highlighted a line about box turtle nuptials, which apparently Cornyn had the good sense not to deliver.
Good for Cornyn. To read the original comment from which Domenech swiped that lovely comparison of same-sex attraction to someone marrying a box turtle, go read the Eschaton post.
At this point, Bluestem must get on with other projects, and leave Mary Franson and her pals alone with the menagerie of their own rhetoric about The Other.
Photo: Representative Mary Franson in her now famous video, friend of the poorest of the poor and the true victim of her own rhetoric. We have no idea what she thinks of box turtles, which so don't live in Minnesota anyway.
Related posts: Heartless in the heartland: Representative Mary Franson compares feeding food stamp recipients to feeding wild animals
And for Franson defenders who will try to claim that Bluestem doesn't hold those on those left accountable for stupid rhetoric, there's also this post from earlier in the week: A free defense against the gratuitous: the case for Fairmont's Republican State Senator Julie Rosen
Franson's intellectual constipation has blocked her ability to know the history of her nation and the reason her own fellow Americans required the Food Stamp program being created in the first place. The millions of all American men being sent off to war were too malnurished to fight in the war..hence the program was instigated to provide a military that could function.
Food Stamps were instigated due to National Security issues.
Ms Franson needs a clue & a cranium colonic.
"The day this nation can't afford to take care of her sick and poor is the day this nation this nation should quit creating them"
(I am unable to credit the author of that quote)
Posted by: Mike | Mar 03, 2012 at 11:56 AM