Anna Marie Smith,
"Sex Scandals, 'Responsible Fatherhood' and the 2008 Election Campaign:
When 'Sex Talk' Trumps Race and Class"
(page 7 of 7)
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]
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
|