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Disruptive Christian Ethics
doing business with Wall Street stock exchange markets, there is a high
likelihood that investors will be cheated and robbed? The creation of sta
tistics for the welfare reform bill that linked violent crime to single black
mothers obviously reflects an arbitrary decision. Crime statistics could
also be linked with the degree to which people in a neighborhood suffer
from hunger, or with the quality of schools or housing conditions. For
mulating a correlation between single mothers and crime serves the par
ticular agenda of targeting poor black single mothers as blameworthy for
social ills and then leveling punitive policies against them.
In another version of this strategy of using inflammatory, stigmatizing
rhetoric, the cause ofwelfare reform was advanced by convincing the pub
lic that poor single mothers are all sadistic, abusive parents. Representa
tive Newt Gingrich based his call for welfare reform, in part, on the notion
that mothers who receive welfare benefits are such awful parents that their
children would be better off in orphanages. To promote his legislative
remedy, Gingrich used horrendous examples to represent the welfare
problem to the public:
The little four-year-old who was thrown off the balcony in Chicago
would have been a heck of a lot better off in Boys Town. . . . We say
to a thirteen-year-old drug addict who’s pregnant, you know, “Put
your baby in the Dumpster, that’s OK.” . . . Now wouldn’t it have
been better for that girl, instead of dumping her baby in a Dumpster,
to have had a place she could go to and say, “I’m not prepared to raise
a child . . .”?20
Here the speaker of the House of Representatives offered appalling
images of homicidally prone, poor mothers and children as typical of per
sons who are welfare recipients. This reasoning justified punitive public
policy for poor mothers because of their own supposed tendency toward
violent and criminal behavior.
The values in this social policy clash with the message in the Luke pas
sage. Moral lessons about the worth of Mary and of others who are poor,
on whose behalf she speaks, provoke a confrontation with the moral
claims in public policy stigmatizing poor women. The pregnant young
Mary boldly prophesies about God’s reversal of the conditions for the
lowly and the hungry, issuing a disruptive challenge with her body, mind,
and faith. Her challenge compels scrutiny of, and resistance to, linked
repressive ideas and societal practices that an* useful lor a liberalive Chris
tian social ethic.