Letters: SC voters get what we deserve

It is often said that we deserve better than we are getting from our elected public officials.

In South Carolina, our elected officials have tried repeatedly to restrict the constitutionally guaranteed reproductive rights of women, limit the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, make voting more difficult for the poor, post the Ten Commandments in public schools in violation of the Constitution and pass countless other politically expedient and self-serving pieces of legislation.

They have simultaneously blocked all efforts to tighten up their own ethics requirements and adequately fund our schools and higher education, waffled on gun control, failed to rewrite our archaic drug laws or establish a proper funding stream for road maintenance, ignored the need to increase our state’s minimum wage and rejected Medicaid expansion that would provide medical insurance for more than 200,000 of South Carolina’s working poor and save a projected 200 lives each year.

Do we deserve better? No. As long as we keep electing and re-electing politicians who lack the knowledge, courage or compassion to tackle the important issues facing our state, we will continue to get exactly what we deserve: not much.

This story was originally published April 24, 2016 at 3:34 PM with the headline "Letters: SC voters get what we deserve."