Mayor Ivy Taylor of San Antonio shared her own personal theory for why poverty exists during a mayoral candidate forum on April 3: people just aren’t turning to God anymore.
Megan Legacy, the director of SA Christian Resource Center, asked during the forum: “What do you see as the deepest, systemic causes of generational poverty in San Antonio?”
“I’ll go ahead and put it out there,” Taylor said. “To me, it’s broken people…people not being in a relationship with their Creator, and therefore not being in a good relationship with their families and their communities….and not being productive members of society. I think that’s the ultimate answer.”
Nearly 15 percent of the city’s population lives below the poverty line, so this kind of answer is surely not going to sit well with her constituents and predictably caused some backlash after the comments were posted online.
Taylor claimed that her comments were “intentionally edited to mislead viewers,” though the full livestream video shows no signs of intentional editing.
“I have devoted my life to breaking the chains of generational poverty,” she wrote in a statement to the San Antonio Current. “I’ve done so because of my faith in God and my belief in Jesus’s ministry on Earth.”