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Alaska representative-at-large Don Young is known for making offensive remarks in public. Last year he referred to Latinos as “wetbacks”. Last week his spokesman declined to deny reports that Young claimed to have killed a person.
Such remarks have not prevented Young, 81, from being re-elected to Congress for 40 years. On Tuesday he may have topped them all, however, when he was reported to have belittled suicide victims in a talk to a high school class.
The school was mourning the suicide of a student days earlier, staff said.
Speaking at Wasilla high school, in former governor Sarah Palin’s home town, Young said suicide showed a lack of support from friends and family, according to the school principal, who was interviewed by the Alaska Dispatch-News. The speech was not recorded.
Then Young reportedly got into an argument with a student who contradicted him by saying that suicide was tied to depression and mental illness, according to the principal, Amy Spargo. The Dispatch-News report quotes her further:
“The kid said, ‘It’s depression – you know, a mental illness’,” Spargo recalled. As she remembers, Young replied, “Well, what, do you just go to the doctor and get diagnosed with suicide?”
At some point during the exchange, several school staffers say, the congressman also used either the words “asshole” or “smartass”.
A spokesman for Young issued a statement that the congressman had conducted a “very serious and forthright” discussion of the issue.
“In no way did Congressman Young mean to upset anyone with his well-intentioned message,” said his spokesman, Matt Shuckerow. “In light of the tragic events affecting the Wasilla high school community, he should have taken a much more sensitive approach.”
Young’s opponent in this year’s Alaska congressional race, Forrest Dunbar, said Young’s remarks showed “ignorance”.
“What Don said was mistaken, and I think he regrets saying it,” Dunbar said in a statement. “It shows ignorance about the issue, that’s all.”
Over his decades as Alaska’s sole member of the House of Representatives, Young has delivered mountains of federal money – for projects from logging to transportation – for his state. “I’d like to be a little oinker, myself,” he said in 2004, bragging about “pork-barrel” spending he had procured for the Land of the Midnight Sun.
