What did the nation’s press do when during his presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan spoke of the “welfare queen,” a fictitious Chicago housing project resident who had babies to collect more money from the relief system? Some publications, such as The Nation, America’s oldest mainstream leftist magazine, denounced Reagan as heartless, condescending, bigoted, and elitist.
As the poet laureate of the American left might put it, the times they are a’changin’.
The Nation magazine has located the latest outpost of the vast right-wing conspirarcy in a nursery near you. In a breathlessly outraged article in the November 27th issue, Kathryn Joyce looks at “red diaper babies” (red as in “red state,” not as in Marxism-Leninism). Along the way, The Nation examines the pro-natalism of one of my favorite authors on issues of home economics, Allan Carlson.
Interviewing conservative evangelical families who reject contraception, The Nation suggests that the large families of these Christians are not just about raising up a new generation in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but about providing troops for the American military. After all, most of these people are in “the generally low-income households of believers who feel bound to supply their children, their arrows for God,” and who are also most likely to see their children in the military.
Bless their hearts, the poor rubes and rednecks out there in flyover country, the magazine implies, they just keep having babies for the war machine and they’re too dense to know it. As Loretta Lynn would put it, one is a farmin’ and one is a fightin’, one is a preacher and one is a miner and…one’s on the way.
When the Washington Post described evangelical Christians as “poor, uneducated, and easy to command,” the editors issued an apology. When U.S. John Kerry “botched” a joke in which he seemed to suggest that academic slackers would be “stuck in Iraq,” he apologized. What are we to think when The Nation sniffs that Christians who have lots of babies are easily manipulated, hopelessly naive, “low income” Americans?
I suppose we should just remind ourselves that this is a magazine devoted to defending the poor against the wealth, privilege, and elitism of the leisure class.
