Versión de HTML Básico
Policy: The Bible and Welfare Reform
105
ihe fathers of their children or punished if they refuse to name them and
stay in contact with them, researchers present evidence of violence and
abuse that women are fleeing. There are many women like Patsy, who was
irying to develop a relationship with the father of her thirteen-year-old
daughter when, as she explains, “One day he took me into the basement
nid he raped me. He hurt me. He put a broom up my vagina.”94Researcher
Jody Raphael studies one African American woman who was a welfare
recipient, Bernice Hampton, and her struggles with an abusive male inti
mate partner. This study reveals Bernice’s persistent efforts when trapped
by both life-threatening domestic violence and poverty. Bernice suffered
-is a result of being repeatedly raped and badly beaten by her boyfriend and
ihe father of her children with whom she lived while trying to keep her
family together. The most violent incidents usually occurred just as Ber
nice was about to succeed in a job or educational program that would have
1
1 lowed her to get the financial stability she needed.95
In these and many other cases of intimate-partner rape and domestic
violence, the researchers demonstrate that marriage is probably not the
answer to the problems of poor mothers, as President Clinton and the
Congress asserted when initially enacting the 1996 welfare reform law
ihat stands as current policy. The first sentence of this U.S. law to address
poverty pronounced that “marriage is the foundation of society.” Presi
dent Bush built upon this theme in subsequent additions to it during its
reauthorization. As part of his Healthy Marriage Initiative in 2004, Bush
added $1.5 billion over five years for promoting the idea that women who
are poor and seeking public assistance should get married or reunite with
iheir husbands (if separated).96 Bush excluded from this initiative feder
ally mandated waivers for recipients who face domestic violence. Increas
ingly, studies are being generated on the marital expectations and desires
of poor single mothers who have sought public assistance to document
that most of them highly value the ideal of a healthy, stable marriage and
that heterosexual marriage would not solve the problems that make them
seek public assistance.97
The prevailing assumptions of the social order are neglected in argu
ments that contradict accusations about a poor single mother’s intrinsic
faults, the pleadings for some compassionate concern about the brutal real-
ities facing homeless women, and other defensive claims based upon the
most intimate and painful details of their lives that the researchers get
the women to reveal. These arguments leave intact a social order where
the morality of those with the most privileges, power, and status in society
is not questioned. Spec ifically, the morality of
their
choices to use their