It appears that Phil Bryant, Mississippi's Republican governor, has (in the words of Ed Kilgore) "crossed the Todd Akin Line":
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said Tuesday that America's educational troubles began when women began working outside the home in large numbers.Yeah, those dames -- they started to work outside the home and the whole country went to hell in a handbasket. Won't somebody think of the children?
Bryant was participating in a Washington Post Live event focused on the importance of ensuring that children read well by the end of third grade. In response to a question about how America became "so mediocre" in regard to educational outcomes, he said:
I think both parents started working. The mom got in the work place.
Well, not all the children, of course. As it turns out, Governor Bryant thinks it's appalling that some mothers don't work outside the home.
You know -- those mothers.
You'll recall that last year the Romney campaign tried to make a big issue out of the notion that the Obama administration had "gutted" the welfare-to-work requirements of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF) -- a line of attack based on a greatly distorted reading of what the administration was trying to do. Now, keep in mind that the vast majority of TANF adult recipients are female (only 14.8% are male).
Well, Governor Bryant's contribution to that discussion was an open letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (PDF; also here) in which he expressed horror at the thought that fewer of the (mostly female) TANF recipients might work outside the home, and boasted about how many recipients were working in his state:
... By eliminating the work requirements, you are creating a dangerous policy precedent and deterring Americans from becoming more self-sufficient. The existing work requirement should remain intact and any reauthorization proposal of TANF should incentivize personal accountability to move from welfare to work.In this case, women in the workforce are good!
... Mississippi has been recognized as having the highest TANF Work Program Participation Rate in the nation. In 2011, our state's TANF Work Program Participation Rate was 70.06%....
And there isn't a word in the entire letter about the risk to education, curiously enough.
How delicious it must be to criticize the female work-force your parties political and economic policies created, when your party did everything it could to eliminate unions, to help bring everyone's earnings down.
ReplyDeleteAnd the result, was that a middle class couple couldn't continue raising families on a single income, and had to resort to the other spouse working, at first, part-time jobs, then a full-time job - to both parents, now working, if they can even find them, full AND part time jobs. And as many as they can find, and capably do, without the marriage being destroyed.
Yes, Gov, remind me of how much you're party is the party standing up for families and the middle class.
The only way you're done this, is by using wedge issues, which make people's own middle class suicide, look like them taking steps to force people in the lower classes down a notch.
Yeah, well, it worked.
The poor got poorer.
And they DID have to move down a notch or two - TO MAKE ROOM FOR YOU, YOU WHITE MIDDLE CLASS FECKIN' EEDJITS!!!
And most of the rest of us, too.
Mississippi, and bare subtenant employment. Hmmmm... what does that remind me of?
ReplyDeleteCan we give it back to the French?
No fear.