The Cult of Parenthood

Given that Google+ is set to shut down in less than a year, I've been paging through some of the things I've posted there, and thinking about bringing them over. Here's one post from a while back, edited somewhat for the different medium.

I was reading a post on Google+ that described the movement among certain conservatives to promote marriage as a ladder out of poverty as "a destructive cargo cult." It's a verbose piece for a social media post, even by my standards (it's basically the "highlights" as a were, of a blog posting, and quotes from it liberally), so I'll give you the QND (quick and dirty): Financially well-off (or maybe even financially surviving) couples are not doing well because they are married. They are married because they are doing well. Because of growing socioeconomic inequality and the more visible signs thereof, not only are good mates more scarce, but it's easier to figure out who the bad mates are. (Hint: poor people are, in this scheme, the bad mates. Not just because they are poor, but because their families are likely to be poor, and between low earnings potential and the likelihood that the family one married into will wind up in financial distress and need bailing out, the best bet is run away.) So the "socioeconomic elites" all marry one another, effectively leaving no money for poor people to marry into and take back to their destitute families. (1)

But my real quibble with the G+ post comes near the end.

As a society, we should commit ourselves to creating circumstances in which the fundamentally human experience of parenthood is available to all, not barred from those we’ve left behind on our way to good schools and walkable neighborhoods. Women unlikely to marry who wish to have children by all means should.

Now, in the source posting, this is preceded by the following:

That is to say, should we tell women who have been segregated into the bad marriage market, who on average have lowish incomes and unruly neighbors and live near bad schools, that motherhood is just not for them, probably ever?

Well... yes, actually. I don't see why not. But then the author goes on to say:

We could bring back norms of shame surrounding single motherhood, or create other kinds of incentives to reduce the nonadoption birth rate of people statistically likely to raise difficult kids. It is possible.

Good heavens. Why on Earth would you conclude that people intend something so mean-spirited? Early in the Interfluidity post, the author links to a Slate column by Matthew Yglesias: "The Phantom Marriage Cure." One of the points that Mr. Yglesias makes is that there is broad distrust between marriage enthusiasts and marriage skeptics, and he noted the following:

So I think that this is where the standoff comes from. Marriage enthusiasts are enthusiastic about marriage because not only is it great to fall in love and get married, but the initiatives that help promote marriage seem so obviously broadly beneficial that it's perverse to see liberals throwing cold water on them. Marriage skeptics look at this through the other lens of the telescope. The things that seem to promote marriage are things that are broadly beneficial—basically programs that promote job opportunity and earnings potential for working class people (and especially men). So the suspicion is that when people say "marriage" what they mean is "tax cuts for the rich and meaningless pabulum for the poor."

One of the disheartening things about the United States is the ease with which people apparently presume that political differences are due to others being stupid, credulous or unethical. And I think that's what's at work here. Marriage skeptics suspect that marriage enthusiasts are promoting marriage as a means of victim-blaming. Single women who have children outside of marriage are being willfully irrational, stubborn or licentious and thus deserve lives of poverty, and to the degree that reducing the impact on their children makes it easier for them to sustain their intentionally perverse lifestyle, it must be avoided for the good of society. This is something of a misreading. Not that there aren't people who see it this way - conservatism is a fairly broad movement, and as such is too large to be free of jackasses.

There are a lot of links in, and following, the Interfluidity post, but none to anyone who actually calls for shaming single mothers or disincentivizing births among "people statistically likely to raise difficult kids." (In this respect, the argument does seem like a straw man.) Possibly because while a search for "shaming single mothers" on Google does turn up some mean-spirited jackasses, these are people that you've likely never heard of before, using their blogs as desperately laughable pleas for a wholesale return to 1850.

(1) I'm being somewhat very snide at this point. I'm somewhat impressed that the progressive buzzwords of "socioeconomic elites" coexist so easily beside the seemingly regressive idea that the main driver of marriage is the aggregate wealth of the prospective partner's family. I doubt that many people in the married couples I know were really as aware of (or interested in) their future in-laws bank balances and insurance status when the question was popped as the article seemed to presume.