Don't get me wrong, I support giving poor people opportunities, but it is not an either/or condition. Either pro-poor or anti-abortion. i am anti-abortion and pro-poor. Poor people need to get opportunities to improve themselves. I don't want people starving, but if a person is not challenged, why should he/she get the same lifestyle as someone who works his butt out?"
Furthermore I tell them of 3 cases I personally know -
1. I helped out with Mother Teresa's roses in Bombay and trust me, there are REAL poor people. the poor in the US live lives that middle-class people in the rest of the world live and they get fat on it. I know REAL people and how they just want an opportunity to better themselves and their family. The first case is a poor illiterate father and mother who are Tamils of a low caste. Both are laborers on construction (and in India this means NO safety helmets or anything and they carry mud and bricks on their heads), but they love their two boys and are a truly loving family. We helped teach the boys at CCDTrust (as an aside, to all freepers, this is a cause worth helping) and since then we have sponsored his education. And it costs us practically nothing -- just $200 a year. But this is giving a kid OPPORTUNITY (see next example)
2. While in the US in college I met a blind kid from India (this was in the 90s) -- both his parents were also laborers, in Madras, he was blinded at the age of 8 and had a gaggle of brothers and sisters. At the age of 12 Jesuit priests helped his family and sponsored his education in Jesuit schools and colleges and he got, on his own merit a scholarship to a US Ivy league school. He's brilliant and comes from an unimaginably poor background. I have no doubt that the kid I am honored to help will reach the same. Poor people need opportunities, not hand-outs.
3. Case 3 -- we were helping a poor lady in the east of Poland for the past two years. She's a widow and had 5 kids. Education here is free, but we paid for her heating etc. We were able to do this with the help of a fine priest from Caritas. But recently we found out that she's freeloading -- asking a number of people for money and sitting back with cable tv,fancy ring tones etc. and the kids too, they have no value for money as it comes to them for nothing. The last straw was when she fought with the priest because he asked her to come and collect it from the Church and she didn't want to stand in the queue. Reason given? It was not dignified. This lady is an example of what happens if we just hand out money and not opportunity
NET-NET, the lady is an example of a Democrat voter and one who would benefit from Democrat rule, while the two kids who WORK hard and improve not only their lives, but their parents lives (oh, forgot to add -- that blind kid is now doing pretty well and has brought his entire family out of poverty and they too are working hard and doing well) are people who GOP policies would help
I think this is a pretty good set of examples of REAL pro-poor policies
These people don't want jobs so unemployment is meaningless.
I’ll re-post basically what I put in another post that I cannot find.
Taking care of the poor is the responsibility of the Church, not the government.
Jesus gave that mandate to His followers. It is the responsibility of the individual believer to fulfill. It is not to be foisted off on others, or voted off onto the government to fulfill. Voting for the government to do the job is NOT obeying Christ in that matter.
It is part of spreading the message of the gospel and sharing the love of Christ to them. The good works like that are to show them that God loves them and to motivate them to turn to Him.
Individual church members have abdicated their responsibility by voting it away.
The other problem is that the government’s only source of money is taxes, which means that it is FORCING others through extortion, basically, to perform a service which they are to do out of love and service. Since it’s the heart that matters, forcing people to pay for acts of charity through extorted taxes means nothing. It cannot be credited to their account.