With these families.

Editor,

A vocal constituency seems to suppose -- and resent -- that a woman who winds up raising a child without a solvent partner is morally depraved and that the child's father, who cannot afford to pay child support, deserves whatever punishment is heaped on him. Lost in this chest-thumping are children who are suffering miserably, and of course because they are no longer fetuses they, too, deserve exactly what they get.

Hatred for poor people, especially poor people of color -- with whom more advantaged, white observers have zero personal acquaintance -- is cultivated by politicians and media whose agenda is to stuff every last dollar in existence into the pockets of the already inconceivably rich. Poverty, in other words, is an ideological issue, and there are hard-ball players with absolutely no compassion for people who are -- of necessity -- crushed by the way business is done in the USA.

The issue is poverty. Broken homes, unpaid child support, are merely symptoms not the problem. Treating broken homes and unpaid child support as moral failings -- slut shaming, blaming the victim -- conveniently let people who still have a seat in the lifeboat pile scorn on poor people who are drowning all around them.

Here is a statistic for you: More than 16 million children in the United States – 22% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,550 a year for a family of four. The moral failing is not with these families.

Re: "The Child Support System Should Help, Not Punish, Poor Fathers" (4/23/2015)