Conservative disdain for the poor has reached new heights with the recent passage of the HOPE Act in Kansas earlier this month. This bill, signed into law by Governor Sam Brownback, prohibits those who receive TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) from using funds to go to movies, to go swimming, to go theme parks, to gamble, to visit strip clubs or bars.

Many Americans fundamentally believe that one’s income bracket should determine one’s access to fun, pleasure, and entertainment. The resentment and the lack of empathy that undergirds most of the social policy that emerges from the right prove just how out-of-touch and mean-spirited such social policy is. Should poor people not have the right to go swimming? Swimming is an important survival skill. There are large swaths of Black people who do not know how to swim because of long histories of segregated swimming pools and subpar swimming facilities in this country. Swimming is also good exercise, and a way to provide cheap, low-tech fun. Just last summer, while visiting home, my mom and I took my two nephews to visit a downtown sprinkler system that the city had installed for children to come and play in. As we were sitting there, I realized that most of the children playing in the water were Black. And I remarked to my mother that I hoped the city did not shut down this free form of amusement for Black children, because of the negative associations of public services and activities with the Black and Brown poor. The right has thoroughly racialized the idea of public assistance so that whenever the term is used, Americans conjure distasteful images of an undeserving poor with their hands out, asking for aid that they don't deserve. Thus, public services that are used by disproportionate amounts of Black people are inevitably constructed as problem spaces that are unsafe. Those spaces becomes subject to hyper-regulation and often are done away with altogether. I also wondered where all the white children were going swimming in the heat of a Louisiana summer. And I realized that many of those children had access to privately owned residential swimming pools and gyms, which many Black families simply cannot afford. Essentially, the argument on the right is that poor families should have no fun, and that because parents cannot make ends meet without assistance, their children should have terrible childhoods. When these children, who have no productive places of play, then get into trouble, they will be unfairly criminalized. It’s a vicious and unnecessary cycle. Apparently, struggling to keep a roof over one’s head, stay safe and healthy, eat well, and find good jobs or schools is not a sufficient enough struggle. Instead political conservatives want to create structural pathways to struggle and displeasure as a punishment for being poor. Rather than attend to the systemic causes of poverty, they remain firmly committed to a stance that has no political integrity: that poverty is caused by laziness – not by poor schools, over-criminalization, the outsourcing of jobs, and a lack of living wage. And lazy people, the thinking goes, don’t deserve any forms of pleasure. Moreover, their children should also be restricted from accessing pools and amusement parks, because clearly, the poor shouldn’t be having children to begin with. Furthermore, the poor should not have sex either, because it is the sex that begets both pleasure and children. This is the only thinking that explains the clear moral policing involved in prohibiting those on public assistance from using their money for sexually-inflected forms of entertainment. The general view seems to be that poor people spend their days drinking, carousing, and having sex. Under a conservative view, the only people who deserve to have sex, have a drink, and a see a movie – that is, have a date night – are married, middle-class people, with jobs. While my feminist politic is pro-sex worker, I recognize that others may see using public money to gamble and visit strip clubs as a problem. But politicians who receive public salaries gamble and visit strip clubs, too. Moreover, the larger point is that human being should not be subject to governmental regulation of their private choices simply because they need help making ends meet. And the very right-wing politicians who decry the reach of government into private life, have no problem, in this instance, encroaching on the very private lives of poor people. This is hypocrisy.

So there you have it: The poor are not entitled to pleasure in any form, even the kind they can create with their own bodies.