Arizona GOP VP Resigns After Advocating Sterilization and Drug Testing for Medicaid Recipients

From

The Huffington Post:

Former Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce resigned as Arizona
Republican Party’s first vice chair late Sunday after receiving
criticism over recent comments he made about women on Medicaid.

Pearce made the controversial
comments on his weekly radio show.

“You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I’d do is get
[female recipients] Norplant, birth-control implants, or tubal
ligations,” Pearce said, according to
the Phoenix New Times. “Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs and
alcohol, and if you want to [reproduce] or use drugs or alcohol,
then get a job.”

In resigning, Pearce said that his sin was actually failing to

attribute the controversial sentiments to someone else. Given
the general craziness of Arizona politics, and Pearce’s centrality
to America’s anti-immigration hysteria over the past several years
(see Kerry Howley’s great feature of him from 2008: “The
One-Man Wall“), I am disinclined to give his explanation the
benefit of the doubt.

Far too many self-professed limited-government conservatives
exhibit the same tic as either Pearce or his unnamed plagiarism
victim. Yes, please get the government out of people’s health
decisions…as long as those people aren’t receiving any welfare.
And if they are? Random
drug tests, dietary
restrictions on food stamps, and now sterilizations. (Keen
observers will note that such intrusive morals-testing is never
applied to recipients of corporate welfare.)

Though this particular subcategory of nanny statism is a
specialty of the right, there’s a lesson here, too, for those on
the left (as well as for everybody else). Whatever the
transaction between government and citizen, imagine your most hated
political enemy in charge of implenting it. Chances are you will
find his executive ideas
fundamentally offensive to your values. One way of limiting
such offense is to drive all your political enemies out of
government. A more realistic and attainable alternative, however,
is to limit the opportunities for government to get all up into
your tubals.