The Nation's Michelle Goldberg wrote this analysis of the current revival of the suggestion that marriage is a solution to poverty,
when poverty is much more complex. She integrates “A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back From the Brink,” the report by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, which she calls "rich and fascinating". The report was presented in a day-long event yesterday that was streamed over the Internet. San Francisco pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris participated.
In recent days, several Republicans have rediscovered George W. Bush–style compassionate conservatism, acknowledging poverty as a problem while promoting traditional values as the solution. “The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent,” Senator Marco Rubio said in a much-hyped speech last week. “But it isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.” On Sunday, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made a similar case in a Wall Street Journal piece titled, “How to Fight Income Inequality: Get Married.” Cleverly hijacking gay rights language to talk about poor people’s failure to wed, he wrote, “Marriage inequality is a substantial reason why income inequality exists.”
On one hand, given recent right-wing attacks on the poor as overindulged layabouts, there’s progress in the fact that some conservatives are now talking about poverty as a crisis. That does not mean, however, that marriage promotion is a serious solution, for reasons that the new “Women’s Nation” report makes clear.
The mainstream conversation about women’s leadership, “while important, really ignores the challenges that the vast majority of women are facing,” Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, told me: "Fifty-two percent of minimum wage earners are women, and the vast majority of them are parents. Seventy percent of workers don’t have sick days. These are much larger scale challenges that a conversation that’s only about women’s leadership ignores."
http://www.thenation.com/blog/177941/why-marriage-wont-solve-poverty
Comments (0)