Welfare Addicts. To be an advocate of gay and lesbian equality means to oppose welfare reform, according to the always dependably National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The NGLTF Policy Institute (the group's tax-exempt arm) has just released a report titled "Leaving Our Children Behind: Welfare Reform and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community." The national zeitgeist may be trending toward a greater expectation of personal and familial responsibility, but the gay left is caught in a time warp. As the authors of the new report see it, the 1996 welfare reform law is rife with dangerous consequences for us GLBTers -- such as lesbian mothers who want taxpayers to support them via welfare assistance (the expectation that the biological father, when known, should be relied on to help is part of an "attack on lesbian families"). Or, as the Washington Blade reported on Feb. 22, the failure to fulfill dress code requirements under the welfare law has resulted in transgendered people being removed from welfare rolls, "forcing them to fend for themselves in the streets," in the view of the Queer Economic Justice Network.
The NGLTF report "draws parallels among attacks from right-wing conservatives on GLBT people, people of color, and women." Couldn't you guess?
Last year, then-NGLTF head Elizabeth Toledo blasted the appointment of Tommy Thompson -- one of the most gay-inclusive Republicans on the political scene -- as head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Said Toledo, "If he punishes poor women for having too many children, how do we think he's going to treat GLBT parents who need help providing for their kids?" Not to belabor the obvious, but the assumption here is that adults need not have a plan to support any number of offspring that they might wish to bring into the world. Just why should trying to move welfare recipients into the workforce, requiring fathers to bear financial responsibility for those whom they sire, and eliminating incentives that make it profitable to have more children when you can't support the ones you already have, earn you the ire of the "GLBT community"? The ethos of the gay left, as revealed here, is that we"re all children in need of the parental state to give us our allowance, especially those who are disinclined to join the workforce. What a sorry vision of adulthood -- and of gay activism -- this all represents.
The NGLTF Policy Institute seems especially irate about the Bush administration's proposed "fatherhood initiatives" and its encouragement of marriage for welfare-dependent single mothers. There may, in fact, be legitimate issues of concern for gays and lesbians here -- but shouldn't the response be to at least try to incorporate gay marriage (or, to be pragmatic, domestic partnerships) into the vision, rather than just demanding that the state be an endless source of income for impoverished, unwed mothers, in perpetuity?