Okay, so it was maybe not the best anecdote to set up her argument. And apparently it wasn’t entirely accurate.
“Right now, in Germany, they’re paying teenagers to have sex when they go to rock concerts to have sex so they can have more babies, okay, because they need more young people to be workers,” Dr. Teresa Sue Bratton, Democratic candidate for US House District 6, told an audience at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church during her Oct. 21 debate with Republican Rep. Howard Coble.
“We have a tremendous number of immigrants who are coming in and ready to work," she added. "I think we should make them documented and have them work." The statement was a response to a question from moderator David Olson about how to keep Social Security solvent.
The audience roared with laughter, but when Olson turned to Coble to ask if he wanted a rebuttal, the 77-year-old congressman demurred with a “no comment.”
At the end of the debate, NC Rep. John Blust, who is running unopposed, exercised his privilege to introduce himself as a candidate, and then added, “I just want to know where to find these concerts.”
Bratton told me today that after the debate she and her husband tried to track down the source for her anecdote, to no avail. A Google search turned up no references. She said the information was published in a newsmagazine some time ago, but “certainly not in the last several years.”
The article “mentioned that they were in Germany," she said. "I don’t know if ‘they’ was the German government or some other group. They were setting up tents for the teenagers to have a private area in which to hook up, but I don’t think they used that term. I don’t know what the reward was, whether it was money or they were giving away prizes.”
Bratton said she suspects the practice is not currently taking place; otherwise it would be widely reported.
In hindsight, she would have said something else.
“It was not relevant to the point I was making,” Bratton told me. “I should have said that Canada has forty or so embassies around the world trying to recruit people to come to Canada. It would have been a better choice. The point is that in Canada and Western Europe they have a much lower ratio of contributors to beneficiaries. In this country we are not having as much of a problem because of immigration.”
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