Fox News Commentator: Breadwinning Women Are “Hurting our Children"

From AlterNet:

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson earned himself a lot of detractors Wednesday night when, responding to the news that a  record number of families rely on women’s income, he  argued on Fox News that it was “natural” for men to take the “dominant role” and that women being the primary breadwinner for families is “hurting our children, and it’s going to have impact for generations to come.”

But Erickson stood by his comments on Thursday, first tweeting, “Husbands and wives should play complimentary roles w/ dad as breadwinner,” and then  penning a longer piece on the site he edits, Red State, making the case for why women shouldn’t be the primary earner in a household. In it, he said that single mothers currently are able to handle parenting on their own solely because society “will subsidize their doing it all”

More here.

Of course, I don't follow Fox News, so I don't really know this Erickson guy, but I'd bet a week's tips that he also champions Reaganomics, or neoliberalism, or supply side economics, whatever name it goes by these days, you know, conservative stuff, cut taxes for the rich, cut social services, cut regulations, let the rich and corporations go crazy, that kind of thing.  And it would be no surprise if I won such a bet: tons of economic conservatives are also social conservatives who love to trash single mothers and, more generally, women who try to do anything outside of narrowly prescribed conservative notions of what women ought to be.  So single mothers are awful because children need fathers; women working outside the home are awful because their place is in the kitchen, or something.

The great irony here, which, of course, will never be appreciated by the people who need to appreciate it because conservatives don't do irony, is that economic conservatism is exactly the reason our culture has seen such a massive rise in single mothers and two income families.

That is, when you live in poverty, and your baby's father has no job, can't have a job because none are available, he then becomes an economic liability.  Being a single mother, under such circumstances, is exactly what a mother ought to do, for the economic welfare of her child.  Likewise, if you're in the middle class, maintaining that position absolutely requires, for most Americans these days, two incomes.  That is, having a stay-at-home parent is virtually impossible for most American families that aren't wealthy--a few try, and fewer succeed, but most just can't pull it off.  It's been this way since conservative economics became the Washington consensus starting in the 1970s.  

It just seems to me that somebody pushing the traditional family as a philosophical concept ought to also push a view of economics that makes it possible, instead of wagging a shaming finger, as if people actually had a choice in the matter.

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