A Real Christian Conservative

Ohio governor John Kasich, once a Gingrich revolution firebrand in Congress, has gotten religion. He has found a way to bypass the state legislature and take up Obama's Medicare expansion without their approval, and he has been talking a lot about Christian compassion and saying things like this:

I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy. You know what? The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.

The thing that bothers me the most about the Tea Party and their ilk is their equation of money and virtue. They seem to believe that if you are rich, that is because of your virtues, so to take that money away with taxation amounts to punishing virtue; and if you are poor, that is because of your vices, so programs that help poor people amount to rewarding vice. I think this is wrong, and more to the point it is unchristian. I don't see how anyone can spend every Sunday morning thinking about Christ's message and come away thinking that poor people are no good.