Why Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments about parenting aren’t just offensive — they’re terrifying

Skylar Baker-Jordan, The Independent

I wish Marjorie Taylor Greene could meet my stepmother — or as I call her, “Mom.” Of course, it’s probably safer for Marjorie if she doesn’t. My stepmother is a wonderful woman, but telling her one of her kids isn’t hers, even one she didn’t birth, is a dangerous gambit.

Yesterday, in an exchange unbecoming for a member of the House of Representatives, the Congresswoman from Georgia asked Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, if she is a mother. “I am a mother by marriage,” the witness answered.

“By marriage,” Marjorie answered, the disdain dripping from her tongue. “I see.”

Marjorie went on to say that Weingarten is “just a political activist, not a teacher, not a mother.” According to data from the US Census Bureau, 8.7 per cent of children in the United States live with at least one stepparent or adoptive parent. This does not account for children who may have a stepparent they do not live with, but who may still play an active role in their life. It also does not account for the 2.55 million American children living with their grandparents, in what The Atlantic previously dubbed “the age of grandparents”.

I was one of those children. My biological mother was just shy of her 18th birthday when I was born, leaving me and my father a few months later. Soon after, Dad was in a terrible motorcycle accident. I was raised by his parents until I was two, at which point he married my stepmother — the woman I call Mom. I split my childhood between their home in Ohio and my grandparents’ in Kentucky, until I would later move in with my grandparents full time when I was 15. Mamaw and Papaw, as I call them, put me through high school and college.

I consider all these people my parents. I have a warm relationship with each of them, including my biological mother, who I met for the first time when I was 16. If you asked me to choose who is “Mom,” though, the answer is both my stepmother and my grandmother — not the woman who birthed me. I love her, but I know she understands the special relationship I have with the two women who raised me. I cherish my relationships with the rest of my stepfamily; from my hero stepbrother — who to me is simply my brother – to my late stepgrandparents who welcomed me into their home without a second thought.

So I certainly found Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments incredibly insulting.

In a post-Roe world, one would think this kind of altruistic parenting ought to be encouraged by Republicans. After all, someone needs to take care of the unwanted babies they are forcing American women to birth. It is the height of delusion to believe that every single one of those children will be — or even should be — raised by women who otherwise don’t want them. Yet for all their talk of “the sanctity of life” and declining (white) birthrates, the modern Republican Party does not care about mothers (biological or not) anymore than they care about children.

It is why, despite increasing evidence that children are toiling in unsafe conditions across this nation, Republicans are racing to roll back and repeal child labour laws with an understanding that it won’t be their children who must toil in America’s factories, farms, and fast food restaurants. As Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian just last month, “the children who are being exploited are considered to be ‘them’ rather than ‘us — disproportionately poor, Black, Hispanic, and immigrant. So the moral shame of subjecting ‘our’ children to inhumane working conditions when they ought to be in school is quietly avoided…”

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments were insulting enough on their own, but when contextualised alongside Republican policies and positions, they are downright terrifying. She essentially said that the Republican Party recognises only a very narrow definition of family — that of an affluent biological mother and biological father in a covenant marriage — and seeks to privilege that definition in law at the expense of any other type of family.