Purity Culture and Welfare Reform

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Why does Texas continue with abstinence education programs when they don't seem to be working? In fact, I think we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the country among all the states.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): Abstinence works.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): It works. Maybe it's the-- maybe it's the way it's being taught, or the way that it's being applied out there. But the fact of the matter is, it is the best form to teach our children.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): (Crowd laughter) But we are the third highest teen pregnancy-- we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country. The questioner's point is, it doesn't seem to be working, abstinence education.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): I'm just going to tell you from-- I'm going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works. And the point is, if we're not teaching it and if we're not impressing it upon them, then no. But if, the point is, you know, we're going to go stand up here and say, 'Listen, y'all go have sex and go have whatever is going on, and we'll worry with that. And here are the, here's the ways to have safe sex.' I'm sorry. Call me old fashioned, if you want, but that is not what I'm going to stand up in front of the people of the state of Texas and say, that's the way we need to go and forget about abstinence.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?

Media Clip Intro: ...country, very courageous young people who say, 'I'm willing to stick to my claim, make a pledge, and I will abstain until I'm married.' I'm not married yet. I made a claim a long time ago, but I want to recommit myself to say that I will wait until I'm married. So I'm going to do it with them. I'm very proud of y'all. They're so awesome in number, I'm looking at an ocean of young people. And not only do they represent themselves, but each teenager out here, each young person, represents pundits back home that couldn't make it. As they stake their individual claims, their individual commitment cards and drive them to the ground here in the National Mall.

Sara Moslener: Welcome to Pure White, podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy. I'm your host, Sara Moslener. This week we look into the relationship between evangelical purity culture and the US welfare system.

Media Clip (Ronald Reagan, Campaign speech, 1976): In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans' benefits for four nonexistent, deceased veterans husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.

Sara: Governor Ronald Reagan began campaigning for president in the late 1970s. He helped galvanize white anxiety by convincing people that the individual whom he described was a regular feature of the US welfare system. Reagan was not making up this information. He was describing a real woman named Linda Taylor, whom Chicago newspapers had dubbed the 'welfare queen.' Taylor was, by all accounts, a criminal mastermind. She attempted to kidnap children from hospitals for ransom. She may have killed a husband or two. She was guilty of many things. But when she was arrested, the charges only covered welfare fraud. Yes, she did some incredibly outlandish things that deserved consequences, but to portray her as a typical welfare recipient was not simply accurate. But because of Reagan, the 'welfare queen' stereotype became a staple of US political and economic rhetoric. The 'welfare queen' was a poor woman of color who used her reproductive capacity to have as many children as possible so she could collect even more money from the government. Today, it remains a powerful myth, despite the fact that Taylor's story has been fully debunked by journalist Josh Levin. Black women's reproductive practices and parenting styles have long been maligned and blamed for Black poverty. So the myth caught on easily. When welfare reform became a priority for Reagan, and later the Clinton administration, panic about white unmarried women giving birth arose from those who worried about the quote 'coming white underclass' that would undermine collective morality. And with it, national strength. By the time Clinton was elected, welfare reform was the theater of debate around a national moral agenda. The rhetoric of personal responsibility and self sufficiency infused both liberal and conservative politics as the presence of young people and political life grew. A little over a decade after Reagan would deploy the myth of the welfare queen, True Love Waits would enter the debate and convince the federal government that abstinence-only education was part of the solution to the welfare problem. As planned, the national impact of what we now call evangelical purity culture unfolded swiftly in the 1990s. True Love Waits and the Southern Baptist Convention pushed abstinence education into the mainstream political landscape. After staking their claims on the National Mall, 150 white ribboned attendees made their way to the White House for a meeting with President Bill Clinton. The President explained to them that personal morality, not government policy, was more appropriately suited for shaping an individual's sexual decision making, but commended the students for their commitment to premarital sexual abstinence. With no time for questions or discussion as the meeting ended, the group felt less than satisfied with their efforts to bring their movement to national prominence.

The welfare reform debate was fueled in large part by Charles Murray and the Heritage Foundation, a big influence on the Reagan administration. Murray argues that rates of illegitimacy, as he called it, among white women were escalating to agree that the white middle class was in danger of falling to the same economic level as the Black underclass. The solution, Murray claimed, was not economic but moral. Though out-of-wedlock births had long been frequent among African Americans, Murray quickly dismissed the phenomenon as old news and turned to, in his opinion, a more pressing concern: the demise of the white family and white social and economic status. Murray blamed the failures of social policies that neglected moral formation for this demise. His suggestions for federal and social adjustments were based on his belief that women should not raise children that they cannot support and that the government should not be responsible for providing them assistance, such as subsidized housing and food stamps. Dr. Jyl Josephson is professor of political science and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University Newark. She is the author of 'Rethinking Sexual Citizenship.' I asked her about the influence of Charles Murray on the welfare debate. Here's what she said:

Jyl Josephson: Charles Murray's book was distributed to every member of Congress when the welfare law was being debated. And that's-- the Heritage Foundation funded that most of his research has been funded by the Heritage Foundation. 'Research,' we should put in quotes. It's been very much. A lot of the abstinence materials as well, the Heritage Foundation has supported the research. And I talk a little bit about that, because there's an effort to make it look more factual than it is, right, some of the some of the results...

Sara: So just to interrupt a moment and institute some VH1 pop up technology: The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing Christian think tank that was founded by Paul Weyrich in the 1980s after he and a coalition of evangelical and social conservatives helped elect Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Weyrich, the mastermind behind these efforts, was able to create an effective voting block and convince white evangelicals that their political concerns were best expressed through Republican policies. So Weyrich, Jerry Falwell, Murray and the Heritage Foundation shared a vision for America that was becoming politically efficient. They are the reason I and many others who grew up evangelical were taught that if you're a Christian you vote Republican.

The intense national debate around welfare reform would keep the door open for True Love Waits, especially because welfare reform was a topic that could and did unify political and cultural conservatives. In 1996 the Reverend Robert Turner, a support coordinator for True Love Waits was invited to testify at a Senate Appropriations Committee chaired by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, at the time still a Republican. (He later changed parties.) Reverend Turner challenged abstinence efforts that focused primarily on the amelioration of pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted diseases. He claimed that this approach neglected the emotional and moral consequences of premarital sexual activity, the governing values of True Love Waits. Though numerous other groups were represented during the hearings, the particular concerns of Reverend Turner and True Love Waits emerged later that year in the language of a provision added to the much-anticipated 'Welfare Reform' bill. Section 501(b) of Clinton's signature welfare reform bill provided funding to organizations offering abstinence only education, which was defined according to several stipulations. (A ) Has as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity. (B ) Teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school age children. (C) Teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out of wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and other associated health problems. (D) Teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity. (E) Teaches that sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects. (F) Teaches that bearing children out of wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child's parents, and society. (G) Teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increases vulnerability to sexual advances. And finally, (H) teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity. Dr.Josephson explained to me that Senator Specter had tried and failed to pass abstinence-only legislation on its own. When that didn't work, a last minute addition to the Welfare Reform Bill appeared, which allowed senators one last opportunity to debate its inclusion. Though there was some opposition, none of it had to do with the stipulations of abstinence-only education itself. Senator Lauch Faircloth, Republican from North Carolina, summed up the conservative perspective, sounding like a Southern Baptist preacher on the lawn of the National Mall.

Senator Lauch Faircloth: The president in 1994-- when President Clinton sent his first Welfare Reform Bill to Congress, he stated that preventing teenage pregnancy and out of wedlock births is a critical part of welfare reform. I hope we all can agree with the President on that point. And also agree to waive the point of order against the funding for abstinence education programs. Abstinence education programs across the country have shown very promising results in reducing teenage pregnancies and reducing the teenage pregnancy rate, and it deserves to be expanded with federal assistance. This provision does not take funds from existing programs and will be a critical help in meeting the bill's goal of reducing out of wedlock births. Mr. President, our colleagues on the other side have asked us repeatedly to consider the children. Abstinence education is an effective means to help children avoid the trap of teenage pregnancy. I urge my colleagues to vote to waiver the budget act on this provision.

Sara: No one countered him. No one suggested comprehensive sex education. No one suggested that these stipulations were widely out of step with actual lived experiences of teenagers. And promoted religious views of sexuality in the public sphere. Actually, a couple people did bring up separation of church and state, but by the end of the debate, that opposition also dissipated. Here's Dr. Josephson again:

Jyl Josephson: It's again, it's a way that conservative groups have been pushing.They always argued that the public health funding that was provided through other legislation was providing comprehensive sex education, which is not the case. Until the Obama administration, there was never federal funding for comprehensive sex education. But there was federal funding for abstinence education under that 1980s law, and then with the welfare law.

Sara: By joining the concerns of welfare reform and abstinence-only education, the federal government acquiesced to Murray's assumption: that single parenting was tantamount to economic decline. An argument he supported with evidence from the Black underclass. For Murray, the crisis was not the economic standing of Blacks, whom he assumed already suffered from economic decline due to the prevalence of single motherhood and not racism, but the risk that whites would soon fall to the same level. Thus, the federal government unwittingly or not imported Murray's racist views into public law when it approved a bill that asserted out of wedlock births as a major cause of economic decline. With the federal institution of abstinence-only education and unprecedented opportunities for funding, the purity movement was launched onto the national stage at the time that Murray was raising concerns regarding the loss of white economic and social status. By constructing abstinence-only education, using the language from both Murray and True Love Waits, the US government helped mobilize a faith-based abstinence movement on the premise of racialized class anxieties. Dr. Kerri Nicoll is a Professor of Social Work at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She studies why people who are eligible use, or do not use, federal assistance. I asked her to assess the success of the Clinton Welfare Reform. You'll hear her use a couple of acronyms I should explain. First, TANF- T.A.N.F. is Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which was the name of the funding program in the Clinton legislation. It replaced another program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which is often referred to as the AFDC.

Kerri Nicoll: There are many, many claims that this was an incredibly successful program. And it's successful in that far fewer people receive benefits from TANF than used to receive benefits from AFDC. The flip side of that is that it does not necessarily mean that far fewer people need those benefits, or far fewer people are living in poverty. And in many ways, you know, if we talk about what the legislation was designed to do, there's really no mention in there of reducing poverty.

Sara: The idea of dependency, Dr. Niccol explained, is rooted in cultural assumptions about what a family is and how they function.

Kerri: The legislation... If you look back at the debates that happened in Congress around-- in the 90s about this welfare reform, the assumptions being made were that people need this assistance because they're not working. Oftentimes that went along with the assumption that they're not working because they don't want to work or don't feel like they need to work to support their families. This dependency thing, where-- why would they bother to work to support their family if they know they can get money from the government to do it for them? Right? So there was that assumption that people are kind of making choices that create their need for this program. And that if we took away that option, if we took away that choice from them, that they would be forced to take care of themselves and their family on their own.

Sara: According to Reagan, Clinton, Charles Murray, and the Heritage Foundation, a family is a self-sufficient unit, not in need of resources outside of itself. People who endorse this idea are the same, who believe that marriage and family are the foundation of US society. This serves the ends of political, economic, and religious conservatives quite well. But it means that only those kin groups that achieve middle class status are actually considered families. Anyone else is seen as undeserving because their need is perceived as a result of bad choices, being too lazy to work, or being unable to keep it in their pants. But what really happened was that the population of people receiving benefits began to change. Here's Dr Niccol again:

Kerri: In the 50s and 60s, in particular, it started to become more women of color. And as that shift happened, the backlash against those benefits and that program increased. So, by the time we got to the 1990s, we're saying, wait a minute, the stereotypical idea of who's getting these benefits is a single Black woman with multiple children. That has never been true, that the majority of people receiving these benefits fit that category, but that's the idea that society kind of put in all of our minds. And so those were the assumptions in people's minds when they're making these changes. They're saying these are Black women who never got married, they had too many children, they can't support them, they're not working because they're lazy or they don't think they have to work, And so what we need to do is make it so it's no longer possible for them to just sit around collecting government checks. Because that, you know, that was the perception, was that these are women who are sitting around letting the government provide for them, as if they're living this, like, luxurious or even, like, adequate life on the amount of money they were getting from welfare benefits.

Sara: To sum up the argument that had fully developed by the 1970s: in order for women to be deserving of federal assistance, they had to be married or widowed. Raising children without a male partner constituted a lack of self-sufficiency and irresponsibility that didn't deserve to be rewarded with government assistance. So when pundits and researchers began to see an increase in young white women having children outside of marriage in the 1980s, abstinence-only education-- as a means of curing the welfare dependency problem-- became a federal priority. The myth of the 'welfare queen' reigned over these debates haunting the white imaginations of our elected officials, Republican and Democrat. This was an entirely bipartisan effort. Today, a lot of people mourn the political division in the United States-- among its citizens and its elected and non-elected officials. In this case, political unity was the result of shared stereotypes about impoverished women being irresponsible and shady, of the singular understanding of what constitutes family, and of the belief that young people need to be taught that sex is harmful outside of marriage. That's not a platform for unity. That's a status quo created by people who believe that white Christian cultural norms are national virtues, this has been Pure White: a podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy. Special thanks to Dr. Kerri Nicoll and Dr. Jyl Josephson for generously sharing their expertise for this episode. Along with funding from the Louisville Foundation and the Luce Project on Religion and Sexual Abuse. This episode received lots of support from the Center for Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Next week is our last episode. We'll be exploring the role of white women in the capitol insurrection, women who became mascots of white Christian nationalism, and how cultural myths about white women's innocence and vulnerability were deployed in their defense. Pure White is a co-production of Axis Mundi Media and the After Purity Project. Created by me, Sara Moslener. Executive produced by Bradley Onishi. Editing, audio, and music by Scott Okamoto. And production assistance from Kari Onishi. See you next time.