Gaines' confused letter insults veterans

I suspect he’s trying to address my remarks, but it’s so hopelessly muddled it’s hard to tell.

A letter to the editor last week in the Baton Rouge Advocate by Democrat state Rep. Randal Gaines stumbled about in trying to defend the recent legal change allowing many felons to vote. I think he filed it as a response to recent my column about how Democrats had bamboozled Republicans into supporting that bad bill, which does nothing to encourage reform of or overall political participation by the felon population, but does give Democrats disproportionately the chance to harvest more votes in elections.

That Gaines, willfully or otherwise, remains ignorant of the literature that shows no link between greater civic involvement and having the right to vote among felons showed clearly in the letter, which falsely alleged that to oppose the law wouldn’t help to prevent recidivism. But he also introduced a new creative reason to make the law acceptable.

Gaines wrote that it would empower veterans and people who experienced less-than-desirable childhoods. Follow his reasoning, if possible: the rigors of war and/or growing up in a household marred with violence made people with this background develop something like post-traumatic stress syndrome, which inevitably caused them to go out and commit felonies.

Of course, most veterans live as law-abiding citizens and likely many of them have no sympathy for criminals. The same holds true for people who lived in a dysfunctional environment as children. In just a few words, Gaines not only makes the breathtakingly stupid rationalization that serving your country and growing up poor turns you into criminals, but he also insults everybody from those backgrounds.

He also mischaracterizes my column, completely fabricating that I wrote that only certain parts of the community want to reduce crime, a sentiment which appears nowhere in the column. And he demonstrated poor reading comprehension when he alleged the column “adopted a vitriolic, click-bait tone and neglected to inform the readers of pertinent facts,” failing to note that at the bottom of that (and every) column resides a link for readers to access giving other links to the data on which the facts related in the column are based.

However, I suspect the “facts” in which he seems interested derive from criminal justice legal changes passed into law in 2017, a set of reforms that he then extolls virtuously – which have nothing to do with the issue at hand. The column was about the law expanding felon voting, not that package. Gaines may think that sleight of hand clever, but it’s so transparently dishonest that it only discredits further his argumentation.

Perhaps the motive for his attempting such a hatchet job comes from another column of mine over a year earlier that noted Gaines’ hypocrisy in not initially supporting a past candidate for Secretary of State, Democrat Derrick Edwards. Then, Gaines claimed, as a party official (he’s Vice “Chair” of Elected Officials) that the state party didn’t want to endorse the physically-disabled Edwards because he couldn’t run a “viable” campaign, with proof being that Edwards had incurred fines for late reporting. At the time, Gaines himself had two outstanding fines which subsequently, whether from the embarrassment instigated by the column’s appearance, he has paid off.

Voters in Gaines’ district should note that the guy they elected produced this mess of a letter, and keep its lack of factual information and poor reasoning ability in mind as he seeks reelection this year.