Why Are Conservatives Forcing Mothers From Their Kids?
I am marginally still a social conservative, but as the months go by, I find myself drifting further and further away from it (though I’ll never be a liberal).
I was a stalwart social conservative for many years, but I’ve become more attuned to some of the hypocrisy or double standards contained within some socially conservative points or views.
One of the things I’ve struggled with the last couple of years is that Republicans (I’m an ex Republican) and social conservatives claim to be “pro-family,” yet, they often want to push through policies that cut off or limit families or kids or single mothers in some way.
Yes, I grasp that Republicans are for smaller government and want to cut expenses, but I don’t see how they can do that in the area of family benefits.
How can you claim to be “pro family” and to support children, and say that liberals are the evil anti-family types, when you keep promoting legislative material that wants to cut funding for families or kids? (Please see the “Related Posts” section at the bottom of this post for more.)
By the way. Many social conservatives and Christian conservatives fret, fret, fret that marriage and baby-making are on the decline in the United States – see for example links on my blog such as this one –
And yet, they penalize women who do become pregnant and give birth. If you are a Republican, Christian, or social conservative who thinks family is great, motherhood is great, and that women should have more children, then why on earth would you penalize women who do in fact give birth?
Shouldn’t you be willing to help all mothers – whether single or not – more? I don’t understand the hatred for mothers who need a helping hand from the very people who bray on and on about how horrible it is today’s culture supposedly disregards motherhood and the nuclear family.
Many Republicans, social conservatives, and Christians I’ve seen since I’ve been a teenager reading political columns, have regularly argued that children are better off if their mothers stay at home, rather than dropping them off at a daycare to hold down an outside-the-home career.
But as this editorial by Walthers explains, some of the Republican reforms of welfare has forced women into working outside the home, thus leaving their children motherless during the day.
How is it out of one side of their mouths that conservatives are saying it’s bad for women who are mothers to work outside the home, but then forcing them into the position to do that very thing?
(Link): Why Are Conservatives Forcing Mothers From Their Kids? by Matthew Walther
What would happen, I wonder, if all the Republican state senators in the country woke up to find that all their wildest dreams had come true?
What if one day all the scroungers, the drug addicts, the unwed, unfit, lazy, entitled, stupid, backward, ineducable, non-adapting, unwilling-to-move, non-contracepting poor people were denied food and medicine and housing because they decided that they had better things to do than contribute to the continued flourishing of the Safeway Gas Rewards program in exchange for the hourly sum of $7.25 (minus payroll taxes)?
Would the destitute disappear into a sewer, leaving only the fungal detritus of their sloth behind them to be disposed of by qualified, i.e., free-market, medical waste professionals? Or just die? Who knows.
Until then, thanks to a decision made in January by the Trump administration allowing states to authorize work requirements for men and women who receive Medicaid benefits, we are going to continue having a very boring conversation about so-called “welfare reform.” …
….It’s not like we haven’t been here before. The absurdly named Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA for wonks) pushed relentlessly by House Republicans and signed into law by former President Bill Clinton, who had promised during his first campaign to “end welfare as we have come to know it,” is the ur-text.
Conceived by fanatics operating under a series of false assumptions, hashed out in a series of secret meetings, publicly promoted with bad faith arguments and crudely racist tropes (“welfare queens,” i.e., people’s moms), it was also disastrous in its consequences, especially for women and children.
It is grimly amusing to point out that its proponents readily admit this. They got nearly everything they could have hoped for from the legislation and are only too happy to observe that after 1996 a staggeringly large number of mothers who had once been able to look after their children with the assistance of the government were forced into the workplace.
By the year 2000, 75 percent of single mothers were employed. As Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution testified in 2006, “The pattern is clear: earnings up, welfare down. This is the very definition of reducing welfare dependency.”
No doubt he is right about the pattern and the definition.
The question is why in and of itself reducing welfare “dependency” is a good thing. This is an especially important question for social conservatives.
In what universe is it a better thing for a woman to leave her children in the care of strangers in order to fulfill an abstract obligation to stock shelves at a pharmaceutical retail chain or flip burgers at a fast-food restaurant?
Is the idea that mothers who are not married have less of a duty, or do we just assume that they won’t mind having their kids taken away because they in fact love them less?
[The author goes on to show that some liberals also sometimes make the same points as the conservatives about forcing single mothers to work outside the home]
Read the rest of the editorial here.
Related Posts:
(Link): These Single Moms Are Forced to Choose: Reveal Their Sexual Histories or Forfeit Welfare
(Link): FRC -Family Research Center (Christian group) thinks people should be cut off food stamps
(Link): AZ GOP vice-chair calls for sterilizing poor women: If you want a baby, get a job
(Link): ‘Family values’ Republican: Men should be allowed to grab breastfeeding women’s nipples in public
(Link): Family Values, Conservative Christian Bill Gothard Accused Of Rape
(Link): The Conservative Definition of ‘Family Values’ Is B.S. by K. Holloway
(Link): Republicans Ditch Family Values As Strategy (article)
(Link): Married, Republican Pro-Life Politician Allegedly Asked His Pregnant Mistress to Get an Abortion
(Link): Ashley Madison Data Reveals Republican Men Are More Likely To Cheat On Their Wives
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