IA's Rep. King Maligns Mixed-Race Military Families

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Congressman Steve King is now using a preposterous hypothetical that characterizes our servicemen as booze-hounds prone to one-night stands and black-out drunk marriages.

King, a Kiron Republican who is not even subtle with his beliefs that America should be populated by native-born whites, is a strong supporter of the so-called “widow penalty.” More than 150 foreign-born widows and widowers face deportation because their spouses died less than two years after the marriages and before citizenship paperwork could be processed.

Congress is working to end the tragedy but King doesn’t want to cut the widows a break, in large part because he questions the legitimacy of mixed-race families, believing them a product of white men wilding on foreign soils with exotic women. Read his own words:

“A soldier, man or woman, could get drunk in Bangkok, wake up in the morning and be married, as will happen sometimes in places like Las Vegas or Bangkok, be killed the next day, and the spouse who was a product of the evening’s celebration would have then a right to claim access to come to the United States on a green card,” King said during debate on the widow penalty, according to The Des Moines Register.

There are thousands of mixed-race military families that are beautiful unions, brimming with the family values King’s crowd espouses. To suggest that our military men don’t have the character to connect with foreigners in a meaningful, loving way is demeaning. King’s also saying our soldiers don’t have much self-restraint or self-respect. The lecherous imagery he conjures is more fitting for the old drafted Army (which King avoided while he wasn’t graduating from Northwest Missouri State) than the modern professional military.

If King trusts our servicepeople to do his fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan then surely they ought to be able to avoid unwanted marriages in Bangkok.

In the end, King’s comments reveal that he views non-American (white) women as toys in sexual adventures — things to be tossed aside, not loved and cherished as humans that add to our culture and families.