Leave no child unpunished

This is an old one already, via ThinkProgress: Republicans in the Tennessee state legislature are proposing to cut welfare checks by 30% for families whose kids are deemed to be making insufficient progress in school.

When [Sen. Stacey] Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have “gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in school. “That’s child abuse to me,” he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education by mandating a 20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards, but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance if they don’t keep up in school.

I guess there are a number of things that might be called child abuse. But obviously only one way to respond: make sure that child gets less to eat.

Stacey Campfield, from Queerty.

Senator Campfield (R-Knox County) is the one who introduced the "Don't Say Gay" bill in the Tennessee legislature forbidding mentions of non-Levitical sexual acts in Tennessee schools (K-8), later modified into the "Tell the Parents" bill which requires teachers and counselors to inform the parents of any child who thinks he or she might be gay. No suggestion, as far as I know, of docking welfare payments to families with gay children.

Senator Campfield has a deep and abiding interest in non-Levitical intercourse, which he believes is the cause of HIV and AIDS:

In a January 2012 interview with Michelangelo Signorile, he stated "most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community – it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.... My understanding is that it is virtually – not completely, but virtually – impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex...very rarely [transmitted]." He later quoted the odds of heterosexual vaginal transmission at 1 in 5 million. (Wikipedia)

Another of his bills, introduced back in 2007,

would require death certificates for aborted fetuses, which would be likely to create public records identifying women who have abortions....  “At least we would see how many lives are being ended out there by abortions,” Mr. Campfield said. The number of abortions reported to the state Office of Vital Records is already publicly available. (New York Times)

He is perhaps best summed up in the words of his pal Senator Mark Green (chaplain of the Republican senatorial caucus):

Oops, that's from Campfield's blog! Now I'm in for it:

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