Romney Blinders on Single Motherhood

Not a nanosecond spent on equal rights and equal pay for women doing same jobs as men. Who among you awaited some kind of encouragement from Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s debate?

He spent his time gloating about “binders full of women” he sought to fill top-level Massachusetts government posts. And get this, he assured women schedule changes so they could pick up their children from day care and to go home and play good homemakers. (I’ve read that he didn’t tell the whole truth even if it is, we’re not impressed)

Imagine that! The presidential hopeful brags about his meager assistance on the part of women but failed to add a scintilla to address women issues with the exception of saying they wouldn’t want a man picking their contraceptives.  

Yikes. He committed another faux pas when he verbally slapped single motherhood. If you didn’t know better you’d hear a blame-game about disproportionate numbers of single mothers who made their own rock-filled beds, excluding husbands or “baby daddies.” I’m sick to death of this scenario from conservative  politicians. Other family specialists, social engineers, and black leaders discuss the needs without demeaning women who do herculean jobs of double parenting.

But Romney, a rich white guy who wants to run this country, uses the same old tired rhetoric. It takes a mother and a father – a two-parent household – to raise children and keep them off the streets and to prevent uncivil acts and violence.  Romney isn’t just out of touch, he’s out of order because he’s clueless why so many women are single mothers.

It’s appalling that he so eloquently excluded a family/women’s issue on national TV while President Obama correctly embraced our issues.  Let me enlighten you, Mr. Romney:

1.      African-American men are sitting behind bars – mostly in prisons, not jails. Don’t take my word. Go on line or call The Sentencing Project in Washington, DC.

2.      African-American men have troubles that people like Romney ignored or didn’t figure the importance of  health on physical and mental fronts along with good paying jobs. He excludes sensibilities of women who choose what’s best for themselves and their children.

3.      African-Americans or any other women cannot force a man to marry or remain with the women. Oh, by the way, more African-American men are in prison than in college, and those college-educated women want college-educated men.

4.      Back in slavery and Reconstruction, African-American men ran away from slave masters and later left slave territories for survival. Some sent money home, and some were never seen again. Single mothers didn't just break out in the twentieth century as conservatives seem to believe.

5.      African-American men are dying in such unimaginable numbers that it isn’t hard to fathom why there are so many single black women raising children alone.  The life expectancy for black men is at least a decade shorter than white men’s.

(Anything I’ve written about African-Americans is relevant to Latinos and other groups with similar histories of imprisonment and violent deaths)

If you don’t know the other side of single motherhood, Mr. Romney, check out Maury or any  afternoon talk show that discloses relationships between single white women and their baby daddies.
Your comments are code for “Welfare is a black thing.” You don’t care “diddley” about debating the human costs for innocent children because they should be on their own after birth.

Romney had a golden moment to give lip-service or geniune support for women pay equity, but his  missteps brought on a major blunder. Women doing equal work as men deserve equal pay as legalized by Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act 2009 (signed into law by President Barack Obama) Some women fear for its security because this inequity survived at least a hundred years without a whimper, and a disinterested president may cause harm. 

He stripped again because of self-help: Single mothers who earn equal pay as male counterparts can enroll sons and daughters in camp or educational programs in summers, place them in after-school programs or early childhood education programs that a Republican administration might cut or push off on financially beleaguered states. Teenagers could go to foreign countries for summer vacation. These children would have plenty of nutritious food to fill hungry stomachs for better learning; they’d get tutoring if needed, and they’d wear presentable clothes and shoes. Instead he preaches about two-parent families as though he has the power to unite them.

The Romneys of the political world need to include women into their inner sanctum; or better yet, respect their contributions and hire them in positions where  they're qualified. Unfortunately, Romney doesn’t share women’s dreams, their experiences, and he didn’t fake his way through such high-profile litany of women’s rights and issues left to address.  An apology won’t cover it up.