The conclusion is Orwellian: If government withdraws from subsidizing illegitimacy, it is being intrusive. But the suit is light about one thing. The law does involve the state in stigmatizing behavior the state “disfavors.” It is about time.
Stanley Crouch, a black journalist, wants black Americans to aspire to re-establishing the civility of their community circa 1955, when teenage pregnancy “was not acceptable behavior” and “those girls became pariahs. … They saw that they were the ones left holding the bag and if that meant they had to abstain from sex, they did.” Measures to restore the stigma that until recently attached to illegitimacy were recommended by political scientist Charles Murray in an October essay in The Wall Street Journal. Murray noted that the illegitimacy rates for minorities, whites and society as a whole are now 68, 22 and 30 percent respectively, and by the end of the decade may be 80, 30 and 40. This is the context in which NOW, the ACLU and other liberal groups want to make subsidized illegitimacy a fundamental constitutional right. This, too, is the context:
“We just kept finding kids under blankets,” said a police officer last month when 19 children of six mothers and 17 fathers were found living in a Chicago apartment surrounded by rat droppings and dog feces and sharing a bone and bowls with a dog. “This,” said a welfare worker, “is what we see all the time.” Said another, “It’s not uncommon.” The mothers had received about $54,000 in welfare cash payments and food stamps and about $20,000 from Medicaid in the preceding year. Three of the children had just been expelled from school because their immunizations were not up to date. In some states welfare mothers who fail to keep their children immunized get their benefits cut.
The New York Times reports that a check of 1,800 of Newark’s welfare recipients found that 23 percent had been listed with the same names and Social Security numbers in Manhattan at some time between 1991 and 1993. Those 425 cheats have collected more than $1 million illegally since 1991. They were caught because they were carrying welfare identity cards for both states when they were arrested for cheating on the $1 train fare into Manhattan.
Charles M. Sennott of The Boston Globe has reported on the extended family of Eulalia Rivera who in 1968 came from Puerto Rico to the Boston housing project where she still lives. She has had 17 children. one died, two others are in Puerto Rico. The other 14, ranging in age from their early 20s to 48, are all on welfare. Rivera, 65, has 74 grandchildren, “virtually all of whom have come of age in the welfare system and many of whom are beginning to apply for welfare themselves,” Sennott reports. Rivera’s 15 great-grandchildren are a fourth welfare generation. One of Rivera’s daughters, Clarabell, was arrested after the scalding of one of her six children. When asked the whereabouts of the five fathers of those children, one of Clarabell’s brothers (he says he is on welfare because of a “nervous condition) said, “Oh, wow. I have no idea.” At the home of another Rivera son who is on welfare because of “bad nerves,” Sennott says two of Rivera’s grandchildren, ages 11 and 16, sat watching MTV at 1:30 p.m. on a school day,
The Rivera family of about 100 may be costing taxpayers from $750,000 to $1 million a year, One of Rivera’s daughters, who does not work because of what she calls “anxiety attacks,” gets $820 a month, plus Medicaid, plus a subsidized apartment. When Sennott asked her about taxpayers’ anger, she said, ‘Just tell them to keep paying,” and slammed down the phone.
The taxpayers won’t. Last week Virginia’s legislature passed a measure making welfare mothers ineligible for higher benefits when they have additional children. The measure also makes welfare contingent on work by recipients, and removes recipients from the welfare rolls after two years. Virginia’s action came three days after the Maryland NAACP endorsed a proposal to deny additional aid to mothers who have additional children while on welfare. The state NAACP said the existing system “tends to shelter unwed mothers and absentee fathers from the consequences of their actions.” A 1992 poll by the liberal Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that 58 percent of blacks thought government should not increase aid when unwed mothers have more children.
Concluding that Washington is incapable of properly reforming welfare for 5 million families in 50 “very diverse states,” Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, the Kansas Republican, proposes “a straight swap”: Washington would give, the states responsibility for welfare and would assume more or even all the states, Medicaid burdens. She says trends clearly suggest “we already have lost a large part of the present generation, and we will lose even more of the next,” so welfare reform “is at least as important and urgent” as health care reform. By fixing responsibility for welfare at the state level “with no federal strings attached,” Kassebaum’s legislation would prompt the rest of the states to do what about half of them already are doing-experiment with reform. Suddenly the nation sees that its most important problem is the conjunction of illegitimacy and welfare dependency.
