Politicizing Parenthood.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia

An "inclusive" and "tolerant" society can't have a government that treats nonparents as second-class citizens.

I used to think it was nobody else's business whether my husband and I planned to have children. I used to think it was rude to make such personal inquiries.

But politeness is a social construct, and my view is a minority opinion. So after nearly 15 years of answering such questions from friends, acquaintances, people I've just met at conferences or cocktail parties, store clerks, cab drivers, manicurists, and, most recently, the customer-service operator who changed my Sprint PCS phone number from Los Angeles to Dallas, I have given up. I guess my procreational plans, or lack thereof, are the world's business.

I like kids, but I don't expect to have any of my own. I'm 40 years old and spend most of my time working. I'd be a terrible mother. Now you know.

I'm telling you this not because it's any of your business--it isn't--but because, like many formerly private matters, parenthood has become a political issue and nonparents an aggrieved interest group. Despite their incessant talk of "inclusion," "tolerance," and "diversity," both Democrats and Republicans are working assiduously to divide America into two classes: parents (or, more accurately, parents with children at home), who are important and valuable, and everyone else.

The Republicans may be the party of "family values," but we can thank the Clinton administration for turning the New Discrimination into a major public policy. The first bill President Clinton signed was the Family and Medical Leave Act, whose main point is to give new parents the right to quit their jobs for three months, leaving the work to be picked up by unmentioned co-workers. Earlier this year, Clinton ordered new Labor Department regulations to encourage states to make that leave paid, by letting new parents collect unemployment insurance during their voluntary absence. (So far, no state has taken up the idea.) He has also proposed that federal law add parents to the list of groups protected against workplace discrimination--a formula that would inevitably punish companies that give childless workaholics greater pay and more promotions than they give soccer moms and dads.

When candidate Al Gore talks about "tax cuts for working families," he's engaging in not one but two forms of class warfare: against the higher-income people who pay most of the country's income taxes (and presumably vote Republican)...