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Rory Hester's avatar

Two comments:

1. I think this is wrong "And another camp consists of racists who don’t like to talk about family structure as a source of disadvantage because they believe it detracts from the idea that Black people are inferior."

I think it's more like racists point to family structure as evidence that black people are inferior.

2. This is going to be controversial as fuck, but there is a societal push to elevate single mothers, above and beyond normal mothers, which I don't necessarily think is healthy. The single mothers are saints and heroes canard could possibly do more more harm than good. But obviously, stigmatizing and ostracizing single mothers is also bad. But the fact is that social pressure is very powerful.

Being a single mother is such a powerful image that we sort of speak it in the same tone as we do veterans. It's use to almost boost a persons status. I don't think we do it consciously, but it's more of a thing where we overcompensated our support of single mothers and sort of in some ways glorify it. I have been guilty of this too.

Personal Story: My 23-year old daughter is a single mother. I mean it's true she is awesome. She is a full time student, working hard to raise my granddaughter. The effort she puts in versus a married mother is awe inspiring. But at the same time... she is a single mother because she slept with some loser Scottish dude who didn't have his life together and was lazy about birth control. Her life is hard because she messed up. Ok... I love love my granddaughter, and am blessed to have her, but you get the point. I would gladly love to be in an alternate Universe where my daughter was married to a guy while she went to school and shared the responsibilities and I still got to hang with my granddaughter. But... if she did that... I probably wouldn't brag on her as much. And that is the issue.

Hey everyone.

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Nick Y's avatar

It’s probably worth spreading the news that a low earning husband is adding good value to the kids life. Matt acts like this is something *everybody* knows but that’s not my experience. We can see in Wilcox proposal even he doesn’t really know what he knows—his idea is to get these low wage dads working even more hours even though they could add value spending those hours doing childcare, which is quite expensive.

And eliminating the welfare state marriage penalties is simply a must and I’m tired of liberals acting like conservatives should take care of this for them. It’s our welfare state after all, when it’s not working right we should fix it! I know the senate is sooooooo busy and unable to take up a lot of legislation but they should just move a bill on this that isn’t full of poison and make Romney etc vote against it. I doubt he will. This is quite a pernicious way for the government to nudge peoples lives and getting the other party to do the work for you down the line is just not such an amazing win as our legislators seem to think.

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