Sex Scandals, “Responsible Fatherhood” and the 2008 Election Campaign: When “Sex Talk” Trumps Race and Class

From a social justice perspective, redistribution is a virtue, rather than a social ill. The fact that the most popular welfare program, Social Security for the aged, is deliberately designed to lift low-income retired people above the poverty line underlines the fact that redistribution could be easily reconciled with mainstream American values.¹ The federal government could reduce poverty among poor single mothers at a reasonable cost, while respecting the rights and dignity of the families involved, by providing much more generous cash benefits, increasing the minimum wage, attacking gender and race discrimination, creating decent jobs, establishing adequate public education programs, adopting labor legislation favoring unionization among low-wage workers, and creating adequate child-care entitlements.

In his Father’s Day speech, however, Obama strongly hinted that the roots of poverty in the black community are not to be found in deindustrialization, civil service cuts, failing schools, unemployment, discrimination, wildly inappropriate incarceration trends, and grossly inadequate work supports for low-income working mothers. Poverty, school leaving, and crime are constructed in the speech as the products of missing fathers and the absence of heterosexual marriage in the black community. This moralization of poverty’s causation could contribute further to the neoliberal erasure of social justice arguments from the public sphere, such that the role of wealthy corporate CEOs, Reaganite politics, and capitalist trends in creating, sustaining, and exacerbating American inequality are forgotten.

Obama’s responsible fatherhood discourse could therefore work hand-in-hand with the sensationalistic corporate media by pushing tough talk about corporate and political responsibility off the public agenda and substituting “blame the victim” attacks on the moral character of black men and women. In addition, Obama’s fatherhood campaign contains concrete proposals for strengthening moralistic governmental policies in the context of our poverty assistance programs. Under the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act that reauthorized the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF), the federal Health and Human Services Department (HHS) is permitted to award up to $150 million each year from 2006 to 2010, for a total of $750 million in grants to support projects that promote “healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood.” Critics of the Bush administration argue that this spending is little more than pork for the religious right; they point to the fact that Bush and HHS Secretaries Tommy Thompson and Michael Leavitt could not provide a single scientific study that confirmed that a marriage promotion program would reduce poverty.²

Before his presidential campaign began, when President Obama was representing the state of Illinois in the Senate, he co-sponsored a comprehensive “Responsible Fatherhood” bill. The bill would have increased the Bush administration’s existing allocation of federal poverty assistance funds for marriage promotion and fatherhood program spending.³ Like many other fatherhood bills at the federal and state levels, Obama’s Responsible Fatherhood Act would have given support to non-profit community organizations and religious groups who operated marriage and fatherhood promotion programs in their local communities. Under the existing programs, much of the funds are spent in ways that have no direct impact on the poor at all. For example, some grant recipients offer anger management and conflict resolution workshops to middle-class couples, host massive abstinence education rallies at high schools, bring religious organizations together statewide to coordinate their socio-political agendas, and mount public advertising campaigns extolling the virtues of heterosexual marriage and child-rearing within a family headed by a married heterosexual couple. All of the programs are relentlessly heterosexist; not a single one is designed to assist lesbian and gays to form and sustain caring relationships or to enhance their parenting skills. Although women are technically allowed to participate in the fatherhood programs,⁴ they are heavily discouraged from doing so by the very program’s name and design.

A small amount of the grant funds actually provide quite reasonable forms of assistance to low-income people. For example, the fatherhood programs sometimes offer job location assistance to their participants. In this instance, it is the program’s targeting of this service that is objectionable. Why should the federal government offer job location assistance only to the low-income men who can present themselves to the government as good candidates for responsible fatherhood training and marriage preparation? Why should needy single mothers have to depend on “patriarchal trickle down”—why should they have to marry the men who are admitted into the fatherhood programs to reap their benefits? And what about poor single men who are not parents, single mothers who do not want to get married, and needy lesbian and gay male parents? They also deserve aid, but the marriage and fatherhood promotion model excludes them just the same.

It may be understandable, given our American racial legacy, our sensationalist and corporate media, and our apocalyptic sexual culture, that Obama has championed a moral issue to insulate himself from the right-wing’s moral attacks. Not all moral strategies are cost-free, however. If Obama uses the bully-pulpit to blame black folk for causing inequality and injustice through their morally substandard behavior, and if he actually follows through with his proposed legislation, he might actually perpetuate the anti-feminist and heterosexist approach of the Bush administration with respect to family values and poverty assistance. Promoting marriage and responsible fatherhood as a solution to poverty is just one of the many important issues involving sexuality and economic justice that we ought to be debating, and we will have to work against the corporate media to do so.

1. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999). [↩]
2. See, for example, Let Them Eat Wedding Rings (Washington, D.C., Alternatives to Marriage Project, June 2007). Available at www.unmarried.org. [↩]
3. Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act of 2007, S. 1626. Introduced in the Senate on 14 June 2007 by Sen. Bayh (D-Ind.) and Sen. Obama. [↩]
4. See Government Accountability Office, Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Initiative: Further Progress is Needed in Developing a Risk-Based Monitoring Approach to Help HHS Improve Program Oversight (Washington, D.C., September 2008). [↩]