HRC Star Slams Welfare

Former welfare mother and self-proclaimed “conservative crusader” Star Parker blasted U.S. welfare policy and advocated a market-based approach to alleviating poverty at the Harvard Republican Club’s (HRC) fifth annual Lincoln Day Dinner last night.

“We’ve got to remove the barriers of ‘Uncle Sam’: let’s allow freedom. Let’s force them into responsibility,” Parker said of welfare recipients.

Instead, Parker advocated an emboldened work ethic, reforms in education, and encouraging charity as alternative approaches to confronting poverty.

“We’ve got to regulate behavior or we’ll have absolute chaos which will lead us to a totalitarian state,” she said.

Parker, the founder of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education, a non-profit think tank, referred several times to her welfare days in Los Angeles.

“I bought the lies of the left,” Parker said. “I listened to their lies and they absolutely destroyed my life.”

Parker said she had four abortions before getting off welfare and deciding not to “kill her fifth unborn child.”

In the 1990s, Parker helped Republican legislators enact time limits on welfare payments.

At the dinner, Parker argued in support of government vouchers, which help families pay the tuition of a private school in lieu of sending their children to public school. She said families should have the freedom to choose schools “where boys wear collars and men have sticks in their hands. Even though a principle has a paddle, it only needs to be used as a threat.”

Parker emphasized the importance of charity as opposed to the redistribution of wealth by the government.

“Americans are a charitable people. We’re extending our charity in the War on Terror—we’re trying to free people,” she said. “Iraq is like our light in the backyard trying to catch a moth. You can get all the moths in one and then you can nuke them. We’re a charitable people, we could have ended this a long time ago.”

HRC President Jeffrey Kwong ’09 said the Lincoln Day celebration was held to honor both Abraham Lincoln and Black History Month. He said Parker could be viewed as a modern-day embodiment of Lincoln because she “really looks at the dignity within each person.”

President of the Harvard College Democrats Brigit M. Helgen ’08 cited a 2005 column in which Parker said Democrats who opposed President Bush’s Social Security plan “preside over a government plantation over which they do not want to relinquish control.”

Helgen said that “if the HRC still wants to call President Lincoln a Republican, just like their guest still wants to call the Democrats a plantation party, that’s fine. But those labels are obviously a little outdated.”