April 29, 2005

Hypocrite *Concerned Women For America*
by Liza Sabater

It just takes one right-wing, extremist statistician to get my dander up. There's nothing, and I mean, nothing like their manipulation of "the truth" through the false objectivity of statistical data.

Take for example the mathematical coprolytes encased in the Data Digest produced by the Beverly LaHaye Institute (PDF). The statistics presented as objective truth have given Ms. Shaw Crouse leeway to spout chesnuts of retrograde wisdom such as :

Careerism's Depressing Costs. While the wonders of modern communication technology can distract much of the time, at the end of the day --when the iPod and cellphone sit in their chargers, when the television’s relentless barrage is finally shut off-- millions are finding, through bitter experience, that there is nothing that can substitute for the hand not there to hold, for the baby not there to cradle. Such is the sad ending of one of Post-Modernism’s most “successful” offspring, radical feminism.

Careerism may satisfy . . . for awhile. But millions of women are learning --what millions of men could have told them — that the daily grind of a job, even a good job, can become a treadmill to pay the bills, and not always that. It can seem very inspiring to hum along to “Climb every mountain . . . ‘til you find your dream.” But the dream is empty when it is all just about you; it is a sorry betrayal of the great gift of liberty -- of freedom from tyranny and oppression, from torture and slavery — to focus on having what you want just the way you want it, without regard for anyone else’s needs or wants. Surely the millions thrown into concentration camps in the 20 th century desperately craved something very different than merely “getting their own way” as they were savagely uprooted from their everyday lives and their families torn apart.

The tragedy of drinking from the springs of a false ideology is that it can steal priceless, irreplaceable elements of life for a long time before its wretched consequences become apparent exposing its true nature for everyone to see. The millions of deaths from Hitler’s Nazi horrors or Stalin’s Gulag or the bloody massacres of today’s suicidal terrorists reveal all too clearly the true character and threat of counterfeit creeds . . . but too late.

Today in America we are beginning to reckon with the bitter harvest from the scourge of self-centered “me-ism” (rationalized by the moral relativism of Post-Modernism). That harvest includes a degraded culture that scorns marriage and casually embraces divorce; such values have decimated the family for the last 50 years.

The "study" goes on for another page and purports to finding "scientific" and "objective" data that proves feminism --and all the -isms Pope Rat has spent his life condemning as the scourge of Modernism are to blame for the loss of not just family values but families in the United States.

Interesting.

If Pope Rat were into chicks, he'd totally bang this babe.

And, by the way, take a gander at the article the author of this piece of think tank excrementia wrote at Town Hall. Is it me or the narrative of the article seems way more toned down that the actual study? It's as if she watered down the rhetoric because, ahem, most people really do not read PDFs.

What is astounding to me is how this so called study --aside from it's unbelievably tendencious rhetoric-- is what is left unsaid to prove the extremist Republicans' "unmarried mothers plague" talking point :

(1) Radical Feminism = Consumerism = Careerism
(2) Post-Modernism = Me-ism = Careerism = Feminism = Nazi Horrors and Stalin's Gulags = Terrorism
(3) If = Terrorism; is it = Iraq? and therefore = Islam?

But the meat and potatoes of this extremist Republican hate story is not in here. It's in the employment data that seems to point to the decline of working women and hence the decline of radical feminism and hence the re-birth of the traditional values of women being good little mommies and housewives:

The 4.3 percentage point decline from 1998 to 2003 in the employment-population ratio of married mothers of a child under age 3 was primarily the result of the 3.6 percentage point decline in mothers working full time. During this period their rate of non-participation in the labor force increased 3.9 percentage points with more than two-thirds of this change coming prior to the onset of the recession in March 2001. This would indicate that the source of the decline rests more with a change in married women’s priorities and less with economic conditions, since jobs were plentiful in 1999 and 2000.

The 5.4 percentage point decline from 2000 to 2003 in the employment-population ratio of unmarried mothers of a child under age 3 was primarily the result of the 4.2 percentage point decline in the percent of them working full-time. During this period their rate of non-participation in the labor force increased 2.6 percentage points.

Unmarried Motherhood Stops Growing. The number of never-married mothers with a child under 3 years of age reached a plateau in 1997 at 1.7 million and this total as a percentage of all mothers with a child under 3 years of age reached its peak rate of 18 percent (which is four times the 1975 level of 4.7 percent).

In 1994, never-married women with children under 3 years of age comprised 7.3 percent of all never-married women (with and without children), up from 2.6 percent in 1975; by 2004 they had decreased to only 5.9 percent of all never-married women.

In 1975 there were two widowed, divorced, and separated mothers with a child under 3 years old for every nevermarried mother with a child under 3 years old but by 2004 there were nearly three never-married mothers with a child under 3 for every widowed, divorced, and separated woman with a child under 3.

Will Married Motherhood Make a Comeback? The data are mixed. Married mothers of children under 3 years of age have not grown in numbers, but they have declined by less than the combined total of all categories of unmarried mothers of children under 3 years of age. Thus, their share of the total has increased from 73.9 percent in 1995 to 75.6 percent in 2004. This could be the beginning of significant change.

This is interesting. Ms. Crause comes from the Michelle Malkin school of data analysis. It is not what you know but what you don't know that will help you prove your point. So it's the other data that's left outside of this equation that comfortably creates proves that the decline of employment in married mothers and the decline of unamrried mothers point to a rebirth of the traditional values of married motherhood.

Interesting.

Here's some of the data I would have like to see:

(1) Numbers for the amounts of abortions for the same years.

(2) Numbers for the amount of Morning-after Pill consumption

(3) A look at the loss of full-time work by women to the possible "correction" of full-time employment among men; and especially among lower-level white collar and tech jobs --middle class job areas which have been hardest hit by offshoring.

(4) If everything has been so cheeky rosy for these years, how come the U.S. Census Bureau's findings of Income, Poverty and Health Insurance in the US (PDF) tell us that:

Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance 2003 - Press Briefing

* The ratio of female-to-male earnings in 2003 for full-time, year-round workers was 76 percent, a decline from 77 percent in 2002, because of a decline in the earnings of female year-round full-time workers.

* The official poverty rate rose, from 12.1 percent in 2002 to 12.5 percent in 2003. The number in poverty increased also, by 1.3 million people, to 35.9 million in 2003. 2 (Chart 2)

* The poverty rates for people 18 to 64 and those 65 and older remained unchanged, but the poverty rate for children rose from 16.7 percent in 2002 to 17.6 percent in 2003.

Money is the number one reason for people to either post-pone marriage, get married or end a marriage. Some say it even has an evolutionary purpose that we may have already outgrown.

I say that to look at the decline in full-time work amongst married mothers and the decline of unmarried motherhood and say it is a sign of how retrograde marriage values are winning out without looking at poverty and income statistics in this country is not only hypocritical, but out right bigoted.

For one, the decline of birth rates in this country is a fallacy. There is only a decline of birth rates among women who identify racially as white nationals. Latinos end up having 1.5 times more babies than whites BUT white non-nationals (they're called "Replacement Levels" in the Brookings study) are having as many babies as their national counterparts.

So to whom do these numbers apply?

I'd really love to know because, not only is it hypocritical in its treatment of the "post-modern malaise" that allowed women like Crause to go to college and write this extremist statistical refuse, but it comes across as a very covert way of saying "Our Women Are Not Having Babies" while everybody else's are.

Hypocritical and bigoted? Yep. And this is what is called a "study", a demographics study, by extreme right think tanks.

Posted by Liza Sabater in Abortion, Body, Christian Fundamentalism, Culture War, Culture of Life, Dominionism, Empire, Ethnicity, Extremists, Fascism, Feminism, Identity Politics, Liberalism, Motherhood, Poverty, Prejudice, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Reproductive Rights, Roe vs. Wade, Sexual Politics, Terrorism
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