Forget welfare. Forget food stamps. Forget Obamacare. The most shameful entitlement, at least to Ann Coulter, is sex.
In typical Coulter form, she discusses a real problem, which in this case, is single parenthood and poverty, and then, rather than blaming poverty and lack of education on a society that offers little in the way of daycare, parental leave and educational assistance, she blames single parenthood on poor and poorly educated people. She goes on to say that the kindest thing we can do about single parenthood is to be cruel. We need to shame people for having sex.
?The one thing that has really changed besides, I mean you have the government often subsidizing bad behavior, you have Hollywood rewarding bad behavior, but there’s also an overwhelming cultural sense, I think it is a political correctness, to end shaming,? she said Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. ?No, shaming is good. It’s almost a cruel and insensitive thing for the upper classes, the educated, the college graduates, to refuse to tell poor people ?keep your knees together before you get married.??
Source: Raw Story
Of course, sexual shaming is as old as sex and if it worked, I doubt we’d be around to continue the practice. But is the anti-choice Coulter right in saying that poor/uneducated people are the problem? The short answer is “no,” but it’s not that simple.
Since 1960, single parenthood has tripled. Single parents do earn less than married parents, but it’s because single moms are typically too tied down with, oh, I don’t know, being good parents, to spend time on frivolous things like having full-time jobs and getting good educations.
There is much more research to do, but this much we know: Single parents work less and learn less because they are the sole caretakers for their children. A recent report by the International Labor Organization shows that the US is the only country in the top fifteen most competitive ones that does not mandate paid maternity leave, paid sick leave and does not guarantee paid vacation time. New parents in the US are guaranteed their jobs for 12 weeks after the arrival of a new baby under the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993.
Paying for childcare can also be incredibly costly, driving down the incentives to work. Research confirms this intuition in several ways. Mothers who live near their mothers or mothers-in-law participate in the labor force significantly more than mothers who do not live close. Childcare subsidies can be incredibly important in allowing single mothers to find jobs with conventional or standard schedules.
Source: The Atlantic
Anyone who has ever read anything about single parenthood knows that it, probably more than anything, perpetuates a cycle of poverty.
The birthrate among single mothers also varied along educational, socioeconomic and racial barriers.?Sixty-eight percent of black women?who had given birth in the past year were unmarried, compared to 11 percent of Asian women, 43 percent of hispanics and 26 percent of non-Hispanic whites.?Fifty-seven percent of recent mothers?without a high school diploma were unmarried compared to nine percent of recent mothers with a bachelors degree or higher.?Sixty-nine percent of recent mothers?who came from households with incomes with $10,000, in contrast to nine percent of recent mothers with households earning $200,000 or more.
Source: Huffington Post
It is true that it is far easier to climb out of poverty if you have the time and money to go to school. Children make that even more difficult, but the blame for single parenthood doesn’t fall on nature’s most beautiful and primal (and unpreventable) act. Single parenthood would dramatically drop if people like Coulter wouldn’t also shame people for using birth control and for having abortions. The economic penalty of single parenthood would end if society helped with day care assistance, educational assistance and some paid time to take care of sick kids.
Of course, Coulter and her counterparts also shame people for simply being poor. Why wouldn’t she shame poor people for creating more poor people?
