Ehrenreich: Let Them Eat Wedding Cake

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/opinion/11EHRE.html?hp

Commitment isn't easy for guys — we all know that — but the Bush administration is taking the traditional male ambivalence about marriage to giddy new heights. On the one hand, it wants to ban gays from marrying, through a constitutional amendment that the Senate will vote on this week. On the other hand, it's been avidly promoting marriage among poor women — the straight ones anyway.

Opponents of gay marriage claim that there is some consistency here, in that gay marriages must be stopped before they undermine the straight ones. How the married gays will go about wrecking heterosexual marriages is not entirely clear: by moving in next door, inviting themselves over and doing a devastating critique of the interior decorating?

It is equally unclear how marriage will cure poor women's No. 1 problem, which is poverty — unless, of course, the plan is to draft C.E.O.'s to marry recipients of T.A.N.F. (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Left to themselves, most women end up marrying men of the same social class as their own, meaning — in the case of poverty-stricken women — blue-collar men. But that demographic group has seen a tragic decline in earnings in the last couple of decades. So I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty.

The answer turns out to be approximately 2.3, which is, strangely enough, illegal. Seeking clarity, I called the administration's top marriage maven, Wade Horn at Health and Human Services. H.H.S. is not "promoting" marriage, he told me, just providing "marriage education" for interested couples of limited means. The poor aren't being singled out for any insidious reason, he insisted; this is just a service they might otherwise lack. It could have been Pilates training or courses in orchid cultivation, was the implication, but for now it's marriage education. As recently as 2001, however, Horn was proposing that the administration "show it values marriage by rewarding those who choose it" with cash "marriage bonuses."

[SharonAnn]

1. OMG, that's almost funny! Really!

Thanks for posting this, I would have missed it otherwise.

[NMDemDist2]

2. cash bonus???

:wtf:

[Jack Rabbit]

3. Excellent work by Ms. Ehrenreich

She makes a masterful use of statistics (you'll never see Friedman do that) by citing that it would take 2.3 blue collar husbands and fathers to lift a TANF recipient out of poverty.

There's a lot more to the problem of poverty in America than simple minded fools like Bush would believe. Getting married is hardly going to solve all the problems of an impoverished family. It will take a lot more than that.

[dw]

4. An image that may just reflect reality in some parallel universe...

Lisalyn Jacobs, who tracks T.A.N.F. marriage policy at the women's group Legal Momentum, told me she finds it "obscene" that, in the face of coming cuts in housing subsidies and other services, H.H.S. is planning to spend any money at all on marriage, much less the $200 million now proposed. But she may be unaware, as I am, of the mobs of poor women who picket H.H.S. daily, chanting: "What do we want? Marriage education! When do we want it? Now!"

[dand]

5. Erenreich is brilliant, a breath of fresh air compared to Friedman,

how the married gays will wreck heterosexual marriages is not clear: by moving next door and doing a devastating critique of the interior decorating? I think that is a classic. Thanks for the post.