Welfare Moms and the Two Grooms: The Concurrent Promotion and Restriction of Marriage in US Public Policy

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s political and religious conservatives and reactionaries have constructed two seemingly contradictory threats to the American body politic: poor, presumably heterosexual, single mothers who fail to marry, and same-sex couples, presumed to be economically privileged, who seek to marry. Ironically, welfare reformers in 1996 portrayed single mothers and cohabiting unmarried couples as selfish for not getting married, and today these same politicians and pundits denounce gay and lesbian couples as self-indulgent for seeking to get married. They are also attacking gay and lesbian parenting, and lesbian parenting in particular, as being ‘as bad’ for children as single mother parenting. In both discourses about women on welfare and gay and lesbian people, a central theme emerges: bad individual sexual choices are the key causes of the problems poor women and gay people face, not flawed public policy and social stigma.