After reviewing the 2008 election campaign season, a newcomer to U.S. politics could reasonably conclude that Americans are obsessed with sex. The media kept up a steady stream of sex scandal coverage. And with each breaking story, the press and blogosphere ferreted out the seediest details, the miscreant offered his penitent confessions, and his long-suffering wife stood by her man. Whether it was Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) being arrested in a sting operation after soliciting an undercover police officer in the men's room of the Minneapolis airport, or Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York being caught in a wiretap investigation arranging dates with the sex workers of a high-end escort service, or John Edwards being pressed to confess an extra-marital affair with a campaign worker after exiting the Democratic Party's nomination race, there were entire weeks in which mainstream news outlets talked non-stop about sex.

From a feminist perspective, this coverage falls far short of the mark. In this paper, I want to make two arguments about the 2008 campaign. First, that coverage of the sex scandals is actually symptomatic of neoliberalism, the right-wing ideology dictating that virtually every public matter could be properly resolved if we gave free rein to the capitalist market. In particular, sex scandals in America are a product of a corporate media that puts profits first and social justice last. Second, that there were, in fact, serious sexual politics issues at play in the election. I am especially interested in how the family values agenda of the religious right is being re-packaged as centrist, and the complicated ways in which race is deeply woven through issues as diverse as single mother-headed families and abstinence education. However, these crucially important openings for feminist critique are being all but ignored in the corporate media's sensationalist sound-byte (or nano-byte) coverage. To take but one example, I will touch on President Obama's "Responsible Fatherhood" initiative. The race and class politics deeply embedded in this invocation of "family values" need to be recognized and brought to the fore.

Sex Scandals in the U.S. Media: The Neoliberal-Imperialist Interest in "All Monica, All the Time" Coverage

The use of sexual humiliation techniques at Abu Graib and Guantanamo ought to go down in history as the most significant sexual scandals of our period. However, the corporate press does not prioritize human rights in its coverage of American politics; it is oriented instead toward profit-seeking, audience-capturing, and the perfection of multimedia synergy (the complementary promotion of a single conglomerate's cultural products, whether in publishing, the recording industry, film, television news, consumer goods, weapons systems, and so on.) Thus, we are fed a junk food diet of sex scandal, sensationalism, and celebrity drivel. The lines between "news reporting," commercial advertisement, and mindless entertainment are almost imperceptible.

Why is sexual scandal so well suited to the commercial agenda of the corporate media in the U.S.? After all, we could imagine a completely different culture in which other distractions would fit the bill, and the popular media operates differently in other countries. Here we must remember not only the Puritanical dimension of the dominant paradigm for thinking about sex in the U.S. but also our anti-feminist and apocalyptic context. Sexual scandal gives us an opportunity to indulge in the pleasures of voyeurism, even as we claim to condemn immorality. It provides a compelling stage upon which we can organize women into their proper roles: either as Jezebels (e.g., the sex worker or the adultress) or the handmaidens of God (e.g., the politician's long-suffering wife). Lee Quinby argues that we Americans inhabit a common secularized apocalyptic paradigm: we are all influenced, more or less, by the idea that we are living in the "end times." The clash of mighty civilizations is upon us.[1] Virile masculinity will go forth to triumph, albeit in a manner suited to our post-feminist times. As Iris Marion Young puts it, today's brand of rediscovered masculinity is uplifted through its chivalrous relation with feminine moral virtue.[2]

Within the apocalyptic paradigm, sexual scandals indicate that the final battle and the salvation of true believers are imminent. To the extent that they consume sexual scandals from this perspective, the Americans who are struggling with declining real incomes, job loss, steep increases in fuel costs, and mortgage foreclosures can find some solace in them. These images of moral descent are the harbinger of Armageddon. Traditionally, American culture frowns upon the economic "losers" as work shy and morally suspect. However, the apocalyptic paradigm teaches us that there are morally good persons who are scattered among the economic "losers." Because we have descended into the decadent condition of end times, our judgment is now clouded; the corrupt elite has unleashed evil forces that are unjustly persecuting the good and the bad alike. Signs of the apocalypse, to individuals humiliated by economic failure yet proud of their upstanding moral character, indicate that this confusion is coming to an end. Their status as members of the chosen people will be recognized, and they will finally prevail.[3] Indeed, the apocalypse narrative can be marshaled by skilled populist demagogues on the right, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, to create the impression that they alone have the capacity to unmask the evil-doing elites and ensure that the true sentiments of the people will prevail.

The spectacular collapse of the newspaper industry is only accelerating the corporate media's exploitation of apocalypticism and its failure to call demagoguery to account. Even the "serious" national newspapers are pressed to imitate the bottom-feeding tabloids, the worst gossip bloggers, and the most lurid punditry by their corporate directors. The form of the coverage declines from restrained and cautious disclosure to a "flood the zone" effort designed to give us "all Monica,[4] all the time."

Part of the response to the sex scandals has to revolve around media reform: stopping the mega-mergers between content providers, distributors, advertisers, and corporate giants; breaking up the corporate conglomerates through vigorous anti-trust regulation; dissolving the cozy relationship between corporate lobbyists and the governmental agencies charged with regulating the media; and empowering the non-commercial alternative media.

Every government, to a greater or lesser extent, loathes aggressive journalism and tries to encroach upon a citizen's right to know. Even if governing parties and officials suffer from the immediate impact of a sexual scandal, we should consider the ways in which sexual scandal serves authoritarian interests over the long run, insofar as sensationalism displaces real news and creates the simulacrum of an informed public. Bill Moyers contrasts today's journalism with the muckraking reporting of the progressive era that targeted "the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines."[5] Now the precious little muckraking energies that actually thrive in the corporate media are devoted almost exclusively to sexual scandal. This is the symbiotic relationship between the corporate media and the imperial State to which Moyers refers.

The United States is at war in two different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. The economy is in a crisis, and inequality continues to escalate far beyond the already intolerable levels reached in the 1990s. It is only with a vibrant and fiercely oppositional press that we can hold our elected officials accountable and mobilize against the abuse of governmental and corporate power. We need investigative journalism on social justice issues, high-quality independent commentary, and the use of the latest technology to present economic, political, and military news in a lively manner. (If they can zip up baseball statistics and weather forecasting without sacrificing substance, then surely they could make quality reporting on Wall Street and the Pentagon more accessible.)

This is not to say that the U.S. audience is utterly naïve when it comes to media consumption. On the contrary, the often biting political satire of programs like The Jon Stewart Show, The Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live, and the endless loops of political parody videos posted on YouTube, were a constant feature of the 2008 primaries and election season. The first problem with American satire, however, is that it tends to track the sensationalist agenda of the mainstream corporate media. With few exceptions, such as Michael Moore's films, the satirists do not uncover and critique the ways in which sexual scandals and sensationalism divert our attention from serious economic problems and social injustice.

Second, American satire sometimes ends up contributing to the very representational problems that it targets for critique. Satirizing a complicated figure such as Sarah Palin, the Republican Governor of Alaska who brought her religious right credentials to John McCain's presidential ticket when she was tapped as his vice president nominee, is never a simple matter. While Palin richly deserved to be placed under a harsh spotlight for many of her extreme views, the satirical portrayals of her candidacy borrowed a little too much from the misogynist playbook. It was not always clear whether the critics were making fun of her because her opinions could not be squared with mainstream American principles of corporate responsibility, transparent government, and tolerance for diverse viewpoints. It may be objectively true that she was grossly unqualified for the V.P. office, but the fact that the Republicans were cynical enough to think that her qualifications were unimportant is revealing. When they rail against affirmative action, Republicans conjure up an image of higher education institutions that have been hijacked by liberal administrators who ignore merit and jeopardize standards in their bid to diversify campuses. In this case, it was the Republicans themselves who were guilty of promoting a woman into the top echelons of a man's game who simply could not hold her own ground, let alone win votes for the party's ticket. If Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) scored a first for women in 2008 by narrowly losing the Democratic primaries to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), Palin's V.P. candidacy nevertheless connected women's leadership to farcical and disastrous imagery.

The fact that Palin was dubbed the representative of the Republican Party's future (after the decisive Obama-Biden victory) only added to the female gendering of political failure. This presents a possibility of serious polarization. The political center and the left are becoming more comfortable with women's leadership, and the religious right grassroots men and women certainly turned out in large enthusiastic crowds for Palin. It is not clear, however, that the Republican Party's male elite will easily disregard the memories of feminized incompetence and failure when it comes time to select a new crop of congressional and presidential hopefuls.

Sex and Race in Presidential Election Campaigns

Neoliberalism benefits, then, from a sensationalistic media that reduces historic political campaigns to a "horse race" and displaces in-depth coverage of economic inequality and social injustice in favor of sex scandals. Responding to a truly unique American popular culture that amalgamates evangelical pop culture, rugged individualism, and deference to the capitalist market, the mainstream media offers us an apocalyptic menu of pending moral disaster that is well-suited to an audience of uneasy consumers who are seeking reassurance and escape.

Of course, the sensationalist sex scandal stories themselves are not mere distractions that are empty of all significant content; given their important role in reflecting and shaping popular opinions about gender and sexuality, they themselves deserve to be closely scrutinized from a feminist perspective. Former Senator John Edwards (D-NC) was forced to admit that he had had an extramarital affair with a campaign worker during his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination in August 2008. For days on end, key issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, poverty in the U.S. and global inequality, the redevelopment of New Orleans after the Katrina hurricane, the dramatic rise of housing foreclosures, global warming, and America's dependence upon fossil fuels were set aside to make room for the latest angle on the story.

By August, the Democratic Party had already chosen Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as its candidate for the 2008 presidential election. Even though Edwards somehow escaped the revelation of his affair during the nomination campaign, it is nevertheless the case that he was struck by a different kind of sex scandal. As an anti-poverty populist, Edwards had collected a lot of enemies on the right, and the right made its distaste for his campaign crystal clear. He was ridiculed for hiring a Beverley Hills celebrity stylist and two other exclusive salons to do his hair and television makeup while he was on the campaign trail. In spite of the fact that he is married to a woman and has four children, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter openly tarred him with the homophobic slur that still strikes fear in every American male's heart.

As for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the presidential candidate for the Republican Party, one has to wonder about the free pass that he received on his own extra-marital affairs. Only hours after McCain announced that Governor Palin would be his running mate, news leaked out that she had an unwed teenage daughter who was pregnant. The Palins quickly announced that their daughter would marry the young father and that she intended to carry her pregnancy to term. The McCain-Palin campaign, in one of its most deft moments, turned what might have been a deeply embarrassing moment into an opportunity to trumpet the Republicans' fidelity to patriarchal family values.

It may appear that President Obama escaped the 2008 campaign relatively unharmed. But this is not entirely true: as an African-American male, he was subjected to an extraordinary degree of moral scrutiny. The Obama marriage and Michelle Obama, in particular, were subjected to merciless scrutiny and disparaging attacks.

In response, we could ask, first, the "Gary Hart question."[6] If an emerging leader like Obama must be safely ensconced within a monogamous heterosexual marriage with a properly subordinated loyal spouse in order to be taken seriously on the public stage, then how many highly talented and worthy individuals will be unjustly disqualified from running for office? And how do race and gender intensify this sort of exclusionary moral "vetting"? Why does the Obama marriage have to pass a much more demanding test than the McCain marriage? So what if the Obamas fist bumped[7]; can you imagine if they kissed on stage like the Gores[8] did in 2000? How many mediocre white males are going to pass the political leadership test by default, for the reason that simply having dark skin, or simply bearing a non-Anglo-Saxon name, or simply being female[9] is to be already morally suspect?

Second, we need to remember the subtle ways in which race, gender, and sexuality work together outside the terrain of an explicit scandal itself. As Donna Brazile[10] rightly pointed out, the McCain campaign certainly chose carefully when it launched its ad that attacked Sen. Obama as a mere celebrity. The ad placed the images of this middle-aged black family man next to two white young single women known for their unsavory conduct (Paris Hilton and Britney Spears).[11] If the point was simply to brand Obama as a young upstart lacking intellectual depth and experience, why not compare him to Denzel Washington or Bono?

In fact, President Obama is forced to work in a political environment deeply poisoned by sexualized racist hatred. In 2006, Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN), an African-American Democrat with a centrist voting record and a strong foothold in his state and within the Party elite, campaigned for the Tennessee Senate seat that came open after the Republican Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, announced his retirement. Ford had been re-elected four times and had garnered, on average, 80 percent of the votes cast in his district. During the 2006 Senate campaign, the opinion polls suggested that Ford was doing so well in contesting this Republican seat that the race had become too close to call. However, the Republican National Committee ran an attack ad against Ford. Working on an extremely slender factual basis, the ad features a male character who claims that Ford took funds from the producers of pornography; in reality, Ford, who had cast several votes in opposition to gay rights and abortion, had joined 3,000 other guests at a massive football party in 2005 sponsored by Playboy, the mildly pornographic men's magazine. More important, the ad also features a clip with a heavily made-up young woman with blonde hair and a low-cut dress. She poses in a sexually provocative manner, declares with evident pleasure that she met Ford at a Playboy party, and then beckons directly to Ford, "Harold, call me."[12] Ford's Republican opponent, Bob Corker, described the ad as "distasteful" and claimed that he asked the Republican National Committee to take it off the air. The highly respected civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), denounced the ad. William Cohen, a former Secretary of Defense and Senator (R-MA) from the Republican Party, described the ad as a "very serious appeal to a racist sentiment."[13] The smear tactic of linking an attractive black family man to a young blonde woman remobilizes the old racist beliefs about black men's voracious sexual appetite and their predatory interest in sexually assaulting white women.

Corker edged out Ford by three percent in the November 2006 election. Although many whites did vote for Ford, they did not do so in large enough proportions, and the state of Tennessee has a majority white electorate. It is not clear that it was the attack ad itself that made the difference; the rumors about Ford's financial dealings were also featured in the post-election commentary.[14] However, the notorious campaign ad was widely circulated, not only across Tennessee but also throughout the entire country.

It is not only black candidates who become the targets of racialized sexual smear tactics in presidential campaigns. Any Democrat who is successfully typecast as excessively "liberal" is in danger of being associated with rapacious black masculinity. During the 1988 election season, Governor Michael Dukakis from Massachusetts was the Democrats' Presidential nominee. Dukakis, a white man of Greek-American descent, was subjected to an attack ad in which he was blamed for the conduct of William Horton.[15] (The ad was produced by a political action committee associated with the Republican Party.) Dubbed "Willie" by the ad, Horton had been serving his custodial sentence in the state penitentiary for murder. With Dukakis's permission, Horton was released on furlough—and ended up committing rape and assault during his temporary release. Already tagged as a liberal northeasterner by the Republicans, Dukakis was relentlessly linked to Horton's crimes. The Republican candidate, George H.W. Bush, denounced Dukakis as a "card carrying member of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)," and highlighted Dukakis's opposition to capital punishment. For the many white voters still influenced by the nation's deeply engrained sexual-racial script, the implications were devastating: a Dukakis administration would be much too permissive on crime. It would take its orders from the radical wing of the civil rights movement, and it would usher in the much feared return to the excessive racial egalitarianism of the 1960s. The return of black power would mean the emasculation of the white man and the endangerment of white women. Dukakis lost to Bush in a landslide.

Triangulation, from Clinton to Obama, on Sexual Morality

The Harold Ford / Willie Horton legacy created enormous hurdles that President Obama had to overcome in the 2008 primaries and election. This tradition also creates extraordinarily cramped conditions that give the Obama administration relatively little room for political maneuver. Will we see courageous policy positions being taken by President Obama leadership where AIDS and homosexuality are concerned? Or will Obama feel compelled to play it safe? Will he borrow a page from Bill Clinton by "triangulating": stealing a pet issue from the right-wing, claiming that he could stake out a centrist position on that issue, and masterfully staging a political showdown with his own leftist critics, such that he can burnish his bi-partisan credentials? Will Obama conjure up mythical threats, like teen pregnancy (recall Clinton's baseless remarks in the lead up to welfare reform) or masturbation (recall the senseless firing of Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders), only to set up a moral victory: the courageous turn against the mighty tide of permissiveness, the daring and deeply principled reach across party lines for moral allies, and the building of a national consensus in favor of patriotic family values?

Writing in December 2008, I would have to say that the early indications from the Obama team are not entirely positive. On the one hand, there are some important feminist gains that have been made through Obama's appointments. Sen. Clinton will bring her moderate yet pronounced concerns about women's equality to her State Department agenda. Vice President Joe Biden has a solid leadership record with respect to the campaign against violence against women. Eric Holder seems poised to re-energize the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department, and Hilda Solis will, in all likelihood, draw upon her solid background in the labor movement in her leadership of the Labor Department. At the same time, feminist critics expressed disappointment when it became clear that only five of the twenty Secretary-level posts would go to women.[16]

LGBT advocates were stunned when the Obama transition team announced that Rev. Rick Warren would deliver the invocation at the January 2009 inauguration. Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in California, has opposed reproductive rights and championed the subordination of wives to their husbands. Arguing that the divorce revolution has gone too far, Warren supports divorce reform legislation that would only allow for the dissolution of marriage in cases of abandonment and infidelity; domestic violence and child abuse do not appear on this remarkably short list. When asked about his opinions about same-sex marriage, he quickly reached for analogies with incest, polygamy, and pedophilia.[17]

Since Rev. Warren had openly affirmed these views, the Obama team must have known exactly what it was getting into when they tapped him for the invocation. Is President Obama taking his feminist and LGBT supporters for granted, on the theory that they have nowhere else to go, while he scores points with evangelical centrists by reaching out to Warren? Did he deliberately seek to provoke a bit of criticism from the left, albeit on a carefully chosen symbolic issue with no serious policy consequences, in order to solidify his bipartisan reputation? Will he make moral issues his favorite political site to play the Clintonite triangulation game, and will women and the LGBT community be asked to pay the price, again and again?

There are several sites where feminist and LGBT advocates will be concentrating their lobbying efforts during the Obama administration. The American foreign aid prohibitions for agencies that offer abortion services could be immediately eliminated through an executive order. As Secretary of State, Sen. Hillary Clinton could rally support in the Senate for a U.S. signature to, and ratification of, the international human rights agreement relating to gender justice: the Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Strong legislation is needed to rebuild reproductive rights. The Obama administration, with the assistance of an almost filibuster-proof Congress, should be able to rescind the Hyde Amendment that blocks the federal government from spending Medicaid funds on abortion. Where the Bush administration created a situation in which medical personnel, such as pharmacists, enjoy the authority to stop women from obtaining contraception, President Obama could make it clear that the health care system ought to empower women to control their bodies. As always, every single one of Obama's judicial appointments will be closely scrutinized with respect to his or her positions on reproductive rights and LGBT equality. On gender justice in the workplace, the Obama administration could prioritize the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and legislation establishing comparable worth standards.

On LGBT rights, the Obama administration should compensate for its opposition to same-sex marriage by rallying Congress to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In one sense, DOMA is little more than homophobic symbolism. And repealing DOMA should be palatable to Obama insofar as DOMA merely underlines the states' existing constitutional authority to establish their own family codes. DOMA grants each state the right to disregard the legal status of the marriages for same-sex couples that are conducted in other states. Although this part of DOMA has yet to be put to the test in court, it is arguably redundant since the states already have the constitutional authority to deviate from their standard Full Faith and Credit obligation on public policy grounds. It seems likely that the most important developments on same-sex marriage will take place in the state courts and legislatures.

The repeal of DOMA would nevertheless stir up controversy. Although brute bigotry against homosexual equality is on the decline,[18] even a symbolic gesture by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congressional leadership would be met with stiff opposition from the Republican Party. In addition, DOMA is not entirely symbolic. It also defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman for the purposes of interpreting all federal laws. In other words, lesbian and gay male couples who seek to protect or to enforce the same rights that married heterosexual couples enjoy under various federal laws, such as immigration and naturalization laws, bankruptcy procedures, and income tax rules, lack the power to do so.

Where the House of Representatives under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) failed to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in the fall of 2008, both chambers could make the passage of a new version a top priority. ENDA originally provided protection in the workforce for both homosexuals and transgender persons, yet in a futile attempt to round up votes, leading House Democrats stripped all references to gender identity from the bill. Speaker Pelosi could ensure that the new ENDA provides adequate protection for transgender Americans—and Speaker Pelosi and House Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NE) could also work closely with the Obama administration to repeal the notorious "don't ask, don't tell" prohibition against homosexuals in the military.

Obama's Responsible Fatherhood Campaign

There are less obvious but equally important places where the Obama administration could be pressed to stand up for gender justice, the inclusion of LGBT people, and the rejection of the religious right and its conservative "family values" agenda. As a black leader in U.S. society, President Obama is vulnerable to criticism that he is too "soft" on the African-American community where it appears they only have themselves to blame for their unequal standing. In particular, the idea that poverty is caused by black women and their sexual recklessness and inferior parenting is particularly virulent in the United States.[19] Every black politician must negotiate a treacherous path; even the most controversial white contender will never be exposed to the same type and degree of scrutiny and moralistic criticism. Will the black candidate cater to the special interests of his or her own people, and thereby put the general population at risk? Will he or she fail to ensure that black criminals receive the rough justice of retribution? Will he or she fail to punish the welfare queen for her sins? Will he or she make sure that the governmental rewards that do flow to the black community are channeled exclusively to the hard-working blacks from the middle class who are maintaining impeccable moral standards by getting married and staying married?

The African-American politician's burden is made all the more difficult with the sensationalistic corporate media standing ready to pounce on virtually any scandal. Illegal drug use and sexual immorality have become branded, thanks to America's racial legacy, as stereotypical black behavior. The two failing wars abroad and the collapsing economy at home only intensifies the apocalyptic thirst for more scandal. A social justice-oriented media would begin with a principled assessment of the real reasons for poverty in general and the poverty of the black families headed by single mothers in particular; this would include our substandard public education system, low wages, the business lobby's successful disempowerment of the labor movement, gender and racial discrimination, and inadequate child care—and it would explore the possibilities for building creative political alliances. Instead, neoliberalism wins out again and again, as scandal coverage swallows up almost every bit of mainstream news coverage, and criticism of economic inequality, militarism, and social exclusion are pushed to the margins of public discourse.

It is therefore understandable that an ambitious black politician might want to situate himself or herself favorably within the American political terrain by seizing upon a moral issue and making it his or her own. President Obama, for his part, has made responsible fatherhood a signature plank of his political agenda. From the perspective of feminists and LGBT activists, this choice will, at best, yield ambiguous outcomes. At worst, it could become a vehicle for the pursuit of policy objectives that ultimately contradict social justice principles.

On the campaign trail in 2008, President Obama returned several times to the theme of "responsible fatherhood" as an integral dimension of sound anti-poverty policies. In his Father's Day speech, which he delivered at Apostolic Church of God, Obama praised black men who act as strong father figures. He continued:

If we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled—doubled—since we were children. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.[20]

Feminist social scientists, such as Judith Stacey, have long debunked the right-wing idea that single parenting causes social pathologies; given half a chance, single mothers can do just fine raising children.[21] There is a consensus among social scientists that "child outcomes are affected by a large number of factors other than the number and types of parents present in a child's household. These factors include, inter alia, the overall quality of parenting as reflected in parental love, warmth, involvement, and consistency; pre- and post-natal care; adequate nutrition and health care; whether the child was planned or wanted; the mother's age at conception; parental socioeconomic resources; quality of neighborhood and schools; influences of peers and siblings; and the child's own abilities, temperament, attitudes, and psychological resources. Moreover, research reflects wide variation in child outcomes even for siblings residing in the same family."[22] While single mother-headed families have a higher rate of poverty than the ones headed by a single father or by a married couple, this difference reflects the extreme wage inequality endured by working mothers, rather than problems intrinsic to the single-mother family form. The poverty rate for the families headed by single mothers (for every racial and ethnic group) is double that for families headed by single fathers.[23] One study found that as many as 49% of all low-income children live with married parents.[24] Other research suggests that the vectors of causality move in many directions at once. On the one hand, divorce or separation can lead a non-poor family to fall below the poverty line; on the other, economic instability can contribute to family disruptions.[25]

Obama's child welfare outcomes-based argument against single parenting therefore lacks support in the social science literature. The call for responsible fatherhood is also problematic insofar as it has, embedded within it, a mandate for governmental marriage promotion. Drawing once again from the racial slurs against the welfare queen, the right has attempted to persuade voters and policymakers that poverty is caused by poor single mothers who are irrationally avoiding marriage. If these women would just march down the aisle, the argument goes, we would have less poverty and could reduce our poverty programs.

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.[26] 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.[27]

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.[28] 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,[29] 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.

Endnotes

1. Lee Quinby, "Virile Reality: From Armageddon to Viagra," Signs, 24:4 (1999): 1079-87. [Return to text]

2. Iris Marion Young, "The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State," Signs, 29:1 (2003): 1-25. [Return to text]

3. Quinby, "Virile Reality." [Return to text]

4. I refer to Monica Lewinsky, with whom President Bill Clinton had an affair while he was in office. [Return to text]

5. Bill Moyers, Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform, November 8, 2003, Madison, Wisconsin. Posted on www.commondreams.org. [Return to text]

6. Former Senator Gary Hart (D-CO) was considered a leading contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in the 1988 election season. He left the race, however, after it was revealed that he had been having an extra-marital affair with a younger woman. [Return to text]

7. On June 3, 2008, just before Sen. Obama took the podium to acknowledge Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-NY) withdrawal from the Democratic nomination race and to accept the Democratic presidential nomination on an unofficial basis, his wife Michelle wished him well by awkwardly using this ubiquitous "hip-hop" ritual. In a country still steeped in Islamaphobia, Obama had to endure a whisper campaign about his alleged Muslim faith. His wife, Michelle Obama, was portrayed as an unpatriotic militant, and the couple's stilted handshake was depicted in alarmist tones as a "terrorist fist jab." These caricatures were reproduced in an ostensibly satirical drawing on the cover of The New Yorker (21 July 2008). [Return to text]

8. Al Gore, a former Senator (D-TN) and Vice President in the Bill Clinton Administrations (1994-2000), was the Democratic presidential contender in the 2000 election. Dogged by criticism that he was too intellectual, unfeeling, and insufficiently "manly," Gore embraced his wife Tipper on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention and held her in a full-mouth kiss for three seconds. [Return to text]

9. On the misogynist treatment of Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, see Katha Pollitt, "Iron My Skirt," The Nation, 5 June 2008, posted at www.thenation.com. [Return to text]

10. Brazile, an African-American woman, currently appears regularly in the mainstream media as a commentator. In the 2000 election, she was a senior campaign aide to Sen. Al Gore. [Return to text]

11. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c0vctCfhH8&feature=related. The television ad for the McCain campaign also places the word "foreign" in large font next to Sen. Obama's face in a shot that is ostensibly concerned with America's dependence upon oil imports. [Return to text]

12. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWkrwENN5CQ. [Return to text]

13. Max Blumenthal, "Character Assassin," The Nation, 30 October 2006. [Return to text]

14. Adam Nossiter, "Is the South Truly a Dead Zone for Democrats?", The New York Times, 21 November 2006. [Return to text]

15. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9j6Wfdq3o&feature=related. [Return to text]

16. "Why some Women's Groups are Miffed at Obama," CNN.com 22 December 2008. [Return to text]

17. See Katha Pollitt on The Rachel Maddow Show 24 December 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwk845iMXY or http://kathapollitt.blogspot.com. [Return to text]

18. Alan Yang, Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, From Wrongs to Rights: Public Opinion on Gay and Lesbian Americans Moves Toward Equality, 1973-1999 (Washington, D.C., 1999). [Return to text]

19. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000); Ange-marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York: New York University, 2004). [Return to text]

20. Sen. Barack Obama, "Remarks: Apostolic Church of God," Chicago, Ill., 15 June 2008. [Return to text]

21. Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). [Return to text]

22. Frank Furstenberg et. al., Brief for Andrew E. Cherlin et. al. as amici curiae supporting appellees, Baehr v. Miike (Hawaii Cir. Ct., Dec. 3, 1996). [Return to text]

23. New Strategist Publications, American Incomes (Ithaca: New Strategist Publications, 2001), 343-7. [Return to text]

24. National Center for Children in Poverty, Ayana Douglas-Hall et. al., Basic Facts About Low-Income Children: Birth to Age 18 (Washington, D.C., September 2006). [Return to text]

25. Sara McLanahan, "Parent Absence or Poverty: Which Matters More?," in Consequences of Growing Up Poor, ed. G. Duncan and J. Brooks-Gun (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), 38-45. [Return to text]

26. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999). [Return to text]

27. See, for example, Let Them Eat Wedding Rings (Washington, D.C., Alternatives to Marriage Project, June 2007). Available at www.unmarried.org. [Return to text]

28. 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. [Return to text]

29. 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). [Return to text]