i haven't read it in a long time. but without evidence i can't make much sense of what you are saying he did. since i find people have already damned him--and based on his personal life of all things!--where you assume that he is antifeminist and homophobic because he withdrew from the ranks of the radical left... fercryinoutloud... if the ranks of the radical left with like this when he was "in his youth" i don't blame him. my exposure to rank and file crap makes me ashamed of calling myself a marxist--and i've been calling myself one since i was in high school. i was fortunate to have avoided it for twenty or so years since, fortunately, most activists aren't leninists.
i imagine you are right in many ways. but, his job isn't to denounce the white middle class for being anti-welfare. he supposed to explicate their views, to "understand" them. i'll have to check it out of the library, but isn't he making a particular argument about their ambvialence. in other words, i believe he is saying that people have the ability to understand how they ought to contribute to the greater good, etc., i think you have to read _Whose Keeper_ and his critique of the welfare state to understand what he's saying. He said there that the welfare state encourages people to try to free ride on the system. but i don't know for sure.
but i am not concerned with that so much as i am disgusted by denunciations that went on early on. by crits that didn't understand how ethnography typically works. i mentioned Eli Anderson did the same. but in places he clearly makes a judgment and it isn't one that sits well with your complaints about communitarians who supposed hetmarriage. that is, eli anderson clearly has no problem with it either! worse, he doesn't make any bones about the fact that sometimes women are having babies to get the steady welfare check, altho he presents it in a little more complex way. clearly draws on more radical analyses of urban decline. however, he concludes discussion of sexually predatory games between young men and young women with:
"In fact...a baby can be an asset, which is without doubt an important factor behind exploitative sex and out-of-wedlock babies. Public assistance is one of the few reliables sources of money and, for many, drugs are another. The most desperate people thus feed on one another. The most desperate people feed on one another. Babies and sex may be used for income; women receive money from welfare for having babies, and men sometimes act as prostitutes to pry money from them.
The lack of gainful employment not only keeps the entire community in a pit of poverty, but also deprives young men of the traditional American way of proving their manhood==supporting a family. They must prove themselves in other ways. Casual sex with as many women as possible, impregnating one or more, and getting them to "have your baby" brings a boy the ultimate in esteem from his peers and makes him a man. "Casual" sex is therefore fraught with social significance for the boy who has little or no hope of achieving financial stability.
In this inner city culture, people generally get married for "love" and "to have something". This mind-set presupposes a job, the work ethic, and perhaps most of all, a persistent sense of hope for an economic future. When these social factors are present, the more wretched elements of the portrait presented here begin to lose their force, slowly becoming neutralized. But for many who are caught up in the web of persistent urban poverty there is little hope for a good job and even less for a future of conventional family life."
and, i've seen him go on about the need to strengthen the traditional family in a talk he gave. i was aware of why he said it. but i was more than a little shocked that no one said a thing. had i got up there and said it or a white guy... woo.
eli anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an URban Community"