The hypocrisy of ‘Mittens’ and his ‘mommy wars’ faux controversy

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Up With Chris Hayes this morning demonstrated the hypocrisy of "Mittens" and his "mommy wars" faux controversy. Romney: Welfare parents 'need to go to work':

The presidential campaign was consumed this week by controversy over Ann Romney and stay-at-home moms. Republicans seized on a stray comment by CNN contributor Hilary Rosen, who said Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life.” Romney responded to the Rosen comments in a speech to the National Rifle Association on Friday, saying, "I happen to believe that all moms are working moms.”

But video from earlier this year [below the fold], aired today on Up With Chris Hayes, shows Romney campaigning on the proposition that meaningful welfare reform should require parents with children to get out of the home and into the workforce. Responding to a question at a town hall event in Manchester, New Hampshire on January 4th, Romney described his position on work requirements for welfare recipients as governor of Massachusetts.

“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” Romney said. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that's heartless,' and I said ‘No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”

That position has been conservative orthodoxy for years. Republicans have railed against the “culture of dependency” created by welfare programs, campaigning aggressively for policies that would force welfare recipients off the roles and “back into the workforce.”

As Romney himself put it in a speech to the Burlington Business Council during his campaign for Senate in 1994, the purpose of welfare “is to get people back into the workforce, that work is ennobling, and that we will do everything in our power to make sure that people who are on welfare have an opportunity and an obligation to go to work, not after two years but from day one if we could.”

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Sara Mead at the Political Animal blog puts this into historical context. Mitt Romney and the Cult of True Womanhood:

[T]his type of double standard is nothing new. Our political and public discourse around the family—to our great detriment—often behaves as though history began in the 1950s. But the idea that there are two types of women—White, married, virtuous, affluent “true women” and then pretty much everyone else—is an old one, dating back at least to the Victorian Era Cult of Domesticity. While “true women,” by confining themselves to the domestic sphere and womanly arts of childbearing, rearing, and making a harmonious family home, both required and deserved men’s protection from the slights of the harsh world, it was tough cookies for the majority of women who didn’t fit that model (from white working class women, to widows and single mothers, to women of color, like Sojourner Truth in her famous speech)—not to mention their kids.

And that’s pretty much exactly the attitude on display here, as well. Interestingly, the Cult of Domesticity, by placing the creation of a harmonious and virtuous home environment as a true woman’s primary objective in life, and the protection of that environment as her husband’s, actually provided a justification for huge inequalities of wealth and income and abuses of workers by these same virtuous husbands during the Victorian and Gilded Eras—and we may be seeing something of a similar dynamic today in conservative positions on economic inequality and the labor market.

The GOP bumper sticker slogan should be "Repeal the 20th Century! Back to the Gilded Era."