On the Monday, January 13, All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, host Hayes laughed off the view that encouraging marriage can help some women out of poverty as he spoke to a guest, Shenita Simon-Toussaint, who argued that she has found that being married is more expensive. Hayes posed:
Can I ask you a question, Shenita? There's been this conversation about marriage, and marriage and poverty and the relationship between them. And I met your husband and your kids the last time you were in here, and there is this idea like, you know, single women out there, if you just got married, that's the way out of poverty. What do you want to say to that?
Simon-Toussaint, who works as a shift supervisor at Kentucky Fried Chicken and has difficulty covering her family's living expenses, began:
Getting married, me and my husband jokes about it all the time. Getting married was such a economical downturn, is like, simple filing taxes, you know, is more expensive. You know, eating, clothing, shelter, it's more expensive because that's just another body, you know? That's another add-on, you know?
She continued:
Getting involved with this movement has really changed my life because it gave me the courage to actually file again, because the first time they actually closed my case and say, okay, you get paid too much money. You know, the movement actually said, no, you know, you deserve better.
Hayes added: "And you're talking about the workers that you've been working with in a fight for a higher wage."
Guest co-host Maria Shriver of NBC then chimed in:
Our polling showed, the polling in the Shriver Report said that really the government should support families the way they are now. There's a difference often, you know, I think to shame women who are not in marriages and who have left them because they were abusive or they didn't work isn't really the answer.