When Fox News aired a story last month highlighting Jason Greenslate, a San Diego surfer musician who bought lobster with his CalFresh support (aka food stamps, aka Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP), the response from the right was swift and vicious. Like the relentlessly demonized “welfare mothers” of the 1990s, he was the proof that social welfare programs merely allowed slackers to mooch off harder working Americans. The frenzy was so over the top that the usually conservative U-T San Diego wrote a piece putting things in better context.
Monday, when a gunman opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard, voices from the same side of the aisle raced to block any additional discussion of gun control and background checks. That would be an assault on the Second Amendment, a particularly timely argument given that Tuesday was the 226th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.
To summarize: not liking a man’s choice of menu and hobby should be an impetus for major changes to social welfare programs; twelve deaths are insufficient reason to discuss background checks for gun purchasers. Could this be any more inconsistent, if not backward?
One can imagine some of the responses from the right. “The consistency is in our opposition to government intervention.” Maybe it is, but that’s not what is really at issue here. If there are winning philosophical arguments against social welfare programs, by all means use them. This is about whether the acts of one individual should taint an entire program, and where we should set the bar for safe or appropriate participation.
Benjamin Franklin, a constitutional signatory, paraphrased Blackstone’s formulation as “it is better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.” Among the arguments against background checks is the idea that innocent buyers shouldn’t have their Second Amendment freedoms delayed, much less risk an erroneous denial. If that is the standard of presumed innocence we apply to potential gun owners, shouldn’t it be at least as safe to apply it to potential CalFresh recipients?
This is where someone will point out that the right to bear arms is protected by the Constitution, while the right to nutritional assistance is not. Perhaps. But for the all the Tea Party bluster about “We The People ….” they might read the whole sentence. Preventing starvation seems a reasonable way to “promote the general welfare,” in addition to being a prerequisite for ensuring the exercise of other freedoms. Perhaps a right to food didn’t get enumerated because farmers were 90 percent of the work force.
Or perhaps the Founders wouldn’t have liked SNAP, but that’s water under the bridge. It exists, it needs rules, and they shouldn’t be changed on the villainization of one recipient whose actions, it would appear, were completely legal. Unlike the alleged shooter.
