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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

the breakfast table
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from: Katha Pollitt

Headline

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 1998, at 12:40 PM ET

Re women on welfare: I have no problem with the idea of supporting poor women to take care of their own small children. But if they are to be made to work, they should be paid decent wages (for example, in New York City, the wages of the city workers who did those jobs before workfare). They should have vacations, benefits, proper clothing, recourse for grievances, bathroom breaks (and bathrooms!), and all the other things that workers get that workfare workers don't get, or get only sporadically. And their children--and the children of other working mothers too--should have good child care. We Americans profess to be so concerned with kids, and education, and early brain development, and on and on, and even today working moms are subject to tremendous amounts of disapproval for supposedly compromising their children's whatever, no matter how terrific their child-care arrangements are, but now we are taking the most vulnerable kids and saying we don't care what kind of arrangements you make, just show up for your sub-minimum-wage street-cleaning job, which will hardly ever lead to a real job, and which you have to drop out of school to get to. It's very punitive--to women and their children.
From USA Today, this stop-the-presses news on condoms-in-the-schools programs: "Condom Access Shows No Effect on Teen Sex Rate," which evoked this response from Family Research Council spokeswoman Gracie Hsu: "You are laying down a standard that says teen-age sexual behavior is fine so long as you use condoms." Well, no--isn't that like saying that giving your kids vitamin pills means you don't care if your kids eat nothing but junk food? Originally sexual conservatives claimed to oppose condoms because they would provoke more sex. If they have no such effect, why continue to oppose them?
What do you make of this from the AIDS perspective? It is as though Gracie Hsu cares more about keeping condoms away from teens than about keeping kids away from AIDS. I hate her.
Talk to you tomorrow,

Cheers,
Katha

P.S. I would be for condom access in the schools even if it did mean more teens would have sex. AIDS, STDs, pregnancy--these are much more serious problems, it seems to me, than virginity. Better a thousand rubberized deflorations than a single dead young person or another unhappy young mom picking up leaves in the park.
But have you noticed that the big conservative welfare reform fans never talk about birth control? You'd think they'd love it, but they don't.

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Katha Pollitt

Headline

Posted Tuesday, April 14, 1998, at 12:40 PM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist at The Nation. Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at the New Republic.
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