I guess it’s not that hard. You can have a decent house payment $900, one car payment $300, and food for a family + bills $1000 on a pretty modest month’s salary.

I honestly thought the internet would have solved this problem by now.

This means the fathers could stay home (they are parents too).

This means that non-institutional day care should be encouraged because it would be better – which was his point later on.

He wanted government policy to be able to “deliver quantity and quality” care that is best for children.

His point was not that working mothers are detrimental to the family.

1. Being against working mothers, and
2. Being against subsidies that make it easier for mothers to go to work?

It seems to me the former is anti-feminist because it denigrates women who want to work, but the latter is a public policy choice: Do we want to use public monies to subsidize daycare to make it easier for mothers to work, or do we want to leave it up to families to decide how to make these choices?

If we decide it is anti-feminist to be against subsidies for daycare, then everything that makes it harder for women to work is anti-feminist and everything that makes it easier for women to work is pro-feminist. That may be politically correct but I don’t think it’s right.

That may very well be true, but “further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family” seems to say to me:

(a) we shouldn’t have further expenditures
(b) because they would subsidize working women
(c) and working women are detrimental to the family

so, if he wasn’t against working mothers per se, he did a very bad job of expressing what he wanted to express.

Martin: your belief that a child’s primary caregiver should be a parent, not a day care center, does not make you a troglodyte. However, asserting that i’m deliberately leaving something important out is a bit annoying; it’s not quite calling me out as a liar, but it trends in that direction.

It’s particularly annoying given that your response isn’t actually responsive to what I’m saying. I’m saying I think the writing clearly says that “a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists” will be detrimental, not that subsidies will be detrimental. Your response says that i’m ignoring the reason given for why expanding federal child care programs … would ultrimately be detrimental.

But I don’t concede that the writing says that expanding subsidies will be detrimental. Whether the writing says that is the crux of the debate. So it follows that I don’t agree that “entrenching a status-quo of non-parental primary nurture” is Mr. McConnell’s reason for thinking subsidies are detrimental; at best, I would think it’s his reason for thinking working women and feminists are detrimental.

In any event, the clause is irrelevant to the question of whether working women, or the subsidies, constituted the “trend” to which Mr. McConnell was referring. So I left it out, not because I wished to ignore its premise, but because it neither helped nor hindered the argument I was trying to make.

Only when they want to. Only when they want to.

This was 1989, the year my first child was born. The new trend was not working mothers, it was day care subsidies and institutional day care. Which is why he goes on to develop strategies to allow for working mothers without subsidies or institutional day care.

He was not against working mothers per se. He was against the government subsidizing day care.