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Disruptive Christian Ethics
DeLay (R-TX) pointedly explained his assertion at a 1994 Republican press
conference advocating passage of their welfare legislation:
. . . the number one issue in welfare, and that’s the enabling of ille
gitimacy in this country. Welfare is a major enabler of illegitimacy,
and current policy presents young girls with a terrible deal. They
make the best proposition that a young woman under the age of 18
can make. If you’ll just have a baby out of wedlock, taxpayers will
guarantee you cash, food stamps, medical care, and a host of other
benefits.28
The language of DeLay and other proponents of this view evoked the
image of prostitution. The state “propositions” poor girls, who then
accept this deal and go out and engage in sexual activity, producing off
spring in order to receive payment. In DeLay’s scenario, it is as if the State
acts as “pimp,” inviting the girl into this way of life, and then sees to it that
she gets paid. Especially with respect to younger poor girls, it is taken for
granted that cash is the primary motivation for sexual/procreative activ
ity. Do these assumptions make sense to the American public, in part,
because it is assumed that he is referring to black girls and such racist racial
logic is appealing to them?
This caricature of girls greedily viewing the performance of “illegiti
macy” or the birthing of out-of-wedlock children as an opportunity to
make money implicitly asserts that some advantaged lifestyle can be
gained by this practice. Congressman DeLay completely misrepresented
the quality of life that the supposed “host of benefits” ensures. All of the
grinding economic and stressful emotional realities that poor mothers
face are expunged from the picture and replaced by a dehumanizing por
trait of a girl in search of cash who has found a way to thrive both sexu
ally and economically.
From the highest levels of government the sexual reproduction of poor
mothers was represented as an extraordinary crisis facing this nation.
President Clinton sounded an alert when preparing to begin his second
term in office. He dedicated his very first radio message for the New Year
(1997) to the subject of teen pregnancy. In this speech he warned that
there was a lot more for his administration and the nation to do in order
to make the American dream a reality for all citizens in the twenty-first
century. He noted that “We still have some pretty big problems in our
society. None stands in our way of achieving our goals lor America more
than the epidemic ol teen pregnancy.” 9 The cnsiiinj» ir lnm rc s in the