MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Dana Milbank Is Incoherent On Marriage. The title is actually incorrect. More on that in a bit.
Last week, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank mocked me and a few other women for our claim that marriage is good for women. We’d been discussing women’s happiness on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Our larger discussion centered around how, as women’s opportunity sets have expanded dramatically, our reported measures of well-being (happiness, basically) have somehow gone way down. For more on this, read Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers on the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness (2009).
The crux of the Milbank-Grieder-MSNBC objection, then, is that it’s a terrible idea to promote marriage as good for women. . . .
The day after I was mocked for saying my piece, I’ll just note that the same Washington Post published a news story headlined ”Democrats target unmarried female voters.” Hunh. Imagine that. It’s almost like if you don’t get married, you’re much more likely to have a favorable view of big government. The story was straight news, no mocking, about how Democrats are building computer models to target single women. No one made any snarky comments about whether it’s healthy for women, much less society, to have a major political party having an incentive of keeping us single throughout their lifetimes.
Amazingly, Hemingway seems to miss the point entirely, choosing instead to condemn Milbank for not caring enough about poor women and children. (Evidently, not even Hemingway cares about poor men.) The title of her essay is wrong. Milbank et al. make perfect sense when it comes to marriage. They want to discourage it, and mock those who encourage it, precisely because it is the primary threat to their vision of government.
Hemingway, it seems, was too busy employing zingers adopted from leftist feminists to see this. (She refers to Milbank misunderstanding her position with his “man-ears,” and to his position as a “mansplaining assertion.”)
The people who really don’t make sense when it comes to marriage are those libertarians and “fiscal conservatives” who want small government but don’t care about marriage because it’s a “social issue.”