GOP Congressman Now Campaigning On His Offensive Comments About A Teen’s Suicide

U.S. Congressman Don Young this week blamed high school students for their classmate’s suicide. Now he’s campaigning on his offensive comments, and adding one more culprit to the blame list.

Much of Alaska and many across the nation were stunned to learn this week that a U.S. Congressman had told about 120 high school students and their teachers that they were to blame for the suicide of a classmate – a suicide that had happened just five days earlier.

Rep. Don Young, the nation’s longest-serving Republican Congressman, had been invited to speak at Wasilla High School, and when asked about suicide and what his office is doing to lower the rate of teen suicide, Young launched into a diatribe, blaming a lack of support from friends and family as a cause of suicide.

Alaska has the highest suicide rate in the nation.

Young’s attack didn’t sit well with one student in particular, a friend of the teen who died, and so he told the Congressman that his friend indeed had plenty of support. Young, according to news reports, responded by publicly calling the young man either an “asshole” or a “smartass.”

During Tuesday’s meeting with students, Young also responded to a question about same-sex marriage by comparing it to sex between two bulls.

That was Tuesday.

Yesterday, Rep. Young was on the campaign trail, speaking at a local senior center.

He was asked about the incident at the high school, and without offering any apology, the Alaska Congressman decided to politicize his remarks, launching into campaign mode.

“Asked about the ‘lack of support’ comment, Young expanded on it and added that suicide in Alaska didn’t exist before ‘government largesse’ gave residents an entitlement mentality, according to an audio recording of his senior center appearance,” Alaska Dispatch news reports.

He also criticized school administrators for supporting students who disrespected him and said he refused to “coddle” them.

“And then he had the gall to say suicide is a disease,” Young says in the recording. “It is not a disease. It is an illness. Now a lot of times that illness should be recognized by a support group and it should be supported by the teachers that recognize this person has an illness. He needs help. Is it his parents or is it his friends who are not supporting him?”

“When people had to work and had to provide and had to keep warm by putting participation in cutting wood and catching the fish and killing the animals, we didn’t have the suicide problem,” he says on the recording. 

Suicide comes from federal government largesse “saying you are not worth anything but you are going to get something for nothing,” he says.

Congressman Young’s Democratic opponent, Forrest Dunbar, would only say that the issue has “gone past the point of bizarre.”

“In the last two days I have gone from shocked, to sadness, to anger,” Dunbar said. “If Don Young honestly believes that the suicide crisis in Alaska is because of public assistance programs, and he also believes that Wasilla High administrators were ‘coddling’ students dealing with the death of a classmate, then he is completely out of touch.”

 

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