Fatherhood.gov

Another Father's Day, another lament that single mothers raise children... The president once again pledged to use government to put fathers in families. This is more bad wine in fancy bottles. Fatherhood.gov coming to your browser soon.

It's time to put a stop to patriarchal public policies. It's time to support caregiving parents, not to divert precious funds and programs to meddle with family forms ...Notice that the President's fatherhood proclamation leaves out single mothers as legitimate or desirable parents. Two fathers are better than one mother, it seems: "Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian." (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-proclamation-fathers-day)

Obama Administration Plan to Establish a Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund: Old Wine in New Bottles

The Obama administration has proposed to extend Temporary Assistance for Needy Families for one year (rather than reauthorize it for five years) and to establish a Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund to replace the current Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood funds. The Innovation Fund would total $500 million (2.5% of the TANF budget) a net increase of $350 million on top of the $150 million that is currently allocated to Healthy Marriage &Responsible Fatherhood annually. 

The Alternatives to Marriage Project reports:

"In April, the National Fatherhood Leadership Group offered a one-hour conference call in which two Special Assistants to the President described the proposal and answered pre-selected audience questions.  The entire transcript is online. AtMP was among nearly 1,500 participants, listening specifically for clues to whether this administration is wedded to marriage promotion. 

The highlight was Question 3 by Phil: Will the current administration be supportive of programs that include couple relationship strengthening, regardless of the marital status of the parents?  

[Answer by] Martha Coven: Sure, and Joshua may want to add something here. I think we're open to anything. Whatever the most effective ways are to reach people is what we want, and I think we all know that, and Joshua will probably say this more eloquently than I can. We take parents as prospective parents or folks who shouldn't be parents right away as they are in the various points in their relationships and relationship with each other and with their children. And, I don't think we want to take any point where anyone is currently and take that off the table.

[Answer by] Joshua Dubois: I think that's exactly right. It's very well said, Martha." [it is??]

Another highlight was their explanation that the grant application will not list eligible activities, only broad objectives and strategies. There will not be set-asides for specific strategies (e.g., marriage promotion vs. fatherhood supports).  Dubois, who is also Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships referred to the influence of his Task Force on Fatherhood and Healthy Families.  Among that task force's recommendations was to  "Ensure that programming for couples' employment training, job placement, and financial literacy are allowable activities under federally funded fatherhood, healthy relationship, and healthy marriage grants."  (Task Force members vehemently disagreed about whether unmarried couples should be allowed to receive services.)"

In my view, this repackaging of intimate interventions does not end what's wrong with substituting family engineering for economic resources for low-income families.  

We have struggled for decades to get government out of our bedrooms and to stop governmental interference in reproductive decisions.  Do we really want to invite government into our intimate relationships?

As with pregnancy termination, services should be available and accessible to those who seek them. Counseling for partners should be available through health programs. Preparation for parenting should be available as part of elementary-secondary schooling. Parenting classes should be available for adults who are parents. Supports should be offered to partners who have to flee relationships due to intimate violence. 

Educational and support services for parents and prospective parents should not target poor people, should not pathologize poverty.  They should reach everyone in recognition that anyone might benefit from parenting support.

But the availability of such educational and support services should not authorize the government to act as a missionary for two-parent families, for marriage, or for fathers.

Some proponents of these sorts of programs argue that bringing fathers into families helps reduce poverty.   Other proponents argue that the presence of married fathers in families is a good in itself, regardless of economic consequences.  Either way, proponents want to uplift fathers even if at the expense of mothers.

Why should employment training, job placement, and financial literacy -- all mentioned by DuBois, above -- be linked to fathers or to couples?  Shouldn't these efforts to improve economic circumstances be directed at individuals, especially individuals who are custodial parents?  Why does the economic security of a mother have to be tied to her relationship to her child's father? 

The big losers here are single mothers.  Every increment of spending directed away from income support for single mother families and toward family formation programs to enhance fatherhood hurts the economic wellbeing of single mothers and their children.

We should embark on a more promising and more just course toward ending poverty.  Some first steps down such a path include:  wage reform to assure comparable worth; minimum wage reform to assure a living wage; unemployment insurance reform to take women's work patterns into account; education and training supports for low-wage workers and  low-income family members; paid family leave; universal child care; income support to caregivers in economic recognition for the work of raising children and caring for family members.

For more on this, see my article "Women's Work, Mother's Poverty: Are Men's Wages the Best Cure for Women's Economic Insecurity," http://www.newpol.org/fromthearchives?nid=164

 

Marriage Promotion Hasn't Promoted Marriage. And It Certainly Hasn't Met It's Putative Goal of Ending Poverty.

See Shawn Fremstad's excellent review of a recent evaluation of the Marriage Promotion program:
The Failure of Conservative Welfare Reform: Marriage Promotion Edition

The White House is pushing for agency budget cuts. It should start by ending all federal spending on managing the intimate lives of low income people.

Mink Foundation and Awardee Brittney Ferara featured in Women's Enews

Scholarships Help Work Around Welfare Limits | Womens eNews

http://www.womensenews.org/story/education/100607/scholarships-help-work-around-welfare-limits

Obama's Racial Politics Examined in New Book

For a provocative, textured analysis of Obama's racial politics, take a look at Thomas Sugrue's new book, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race. 

The stuff on Hawaii is caricature and confection; it would seriously detract from the whole were it more than a few sentences here and there. At the same time, Sugrue's analysis of Obama's ethnographic odyssey would benefit significantly from a more informed, critical understanding of racial politics in Hawaii during the 1960s and 1970s. For example, a more knowledgeable writer would notice that the intermarriage Sugrue assumes is the norm in Hawaii ca 1961 (when Obama was born) was actually more problematic; he would also notice that the intermarriers, in Obama's case, were not from Hawaii, moved within the cocoon of a university, and included a member of the socially and economically dominant and elitist race.

Similarly, some of Sugrue's efforts to think beyond the black-white binary in expositing shifting boundaries of racial politics could be based on more rigorous invocation of social science data on the relative position of different non-white groups in contemporary America.  For example, Sugrue offers outmarriage rates as one piece of evidence of Asian Americans' allegedly better integration into mainstream (white) America.  He points to high outmarriage rates among Japanese Americans -- a) without distinguishing between Japanese American populations that enjoy a critical mass (ie, in Hawaii) and those that are tiny and often dispersed minorities (ie, on the US mainland); b) without differentiating outmarriage to whites (arguably a form of integration) from outmarriage to members of other Asian American groups; and c) without acknowledging the uniqueness of Japanese American US demographics given a long history of immigration exclusion and low contemporary rates of in-migration.  Sugrue also uses evidence from housing patterns -- stronger evidence, for sure, but still untested by variables such as population density, economic investment, duration of residence, or disaggregation of the census classification of Hispanic racial identities. I read this part too quickly, perhaps, so my reactions might not be fair:  but from reading Sugrue's discussion of comparative inequality, one would not know that Latinas earn the lowest, most unequal wages of all women in the US and that Latina single mothers have the highest recorded US poverty rates.

Despite my reservations regarding aspects of Sugrue's analysis, his main project does successfully show how Obama explored and engaged the intellectual, political, social, and strategic dimensions of U.S. race politics from the 1970s to 2008. Sugrue distills the legacies of Martin, Malcolm, and the rights revolution -- both for us, generally, and for Obama, in particular.  He shows how Obama the participant-observer experimented with different modes of thinking about race, and he illuminates the seminal influence of certain academic interventions -- ie, William Julius Wilson's various works, especially The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged -- in providing grist for both liberal and conservative versions of "getting beyond race."  By his silence about gender, especially the intersectional gender inequality of the whipping girls of "postracial" politics, Sugrue leads us to question the place of poor, Black women in Obama's philosophical and strategic calculus. Ultimately, Sugrue gives readers tools to consider how Obama the ambitious political actor came to deploy, simultaneously, race-consciousness (among Blacks), color-blindness (among Whites), and middle class gender values (for all) in a Clintonian strategic synthesis.  As Sugrue explains:

"By 2008, Obama had developed a patchwork quilt of social politics, one that combined left-leaning calls for cross-class alliance building, Clintonite advocacy for the end of welfare as we knew it, and a Christian moralism that allowed him to build an unlikely bridge between black churchgoers and culturally conservative whites. It was -- as with so many of Obama's key positions -- a synthesis of deep currents in American political and intellectual life in the last third of the twentieth century.... [T]hat synthesis...allowed him to fashion an appeal, at once, to left, center, and right; to blacks who called for a combination of social justice and personal responsibility, to whites who believed that the roots of black poverty lay in individual behavioral and moral failings, to Democrats who had worked to create a new liberalism that combined a jobs-oriented economic populism with cultural conservatism, to those right and center who supported bipartisan efforts to reform welfare, and to those on the left who were uncomfortable with it."

Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Privatization Supporters and Benefit Cutters

Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Privatization Supporters and Benefit Cutters

Elena Kagan's Troubling Record on Diversity -- In Her Own Bailiwick

The White House's Kagan talking points are wrong - Elena Kagan, Solicitor General | Obama Supreme Court - Salon.com

The case against Elena Kagan

As Glenn Greenwald asks in his piece for Salon.com, "If progressives aren't willing to fight Obama for the Supreme Court, what are they willing to fight him for?"

The most generous critique of the Kagan nomination is that Obama has squandered an opportunity to strengthen progressive jurisprudence on the Court. A more realistic critique is that Kagan's nomination directly assails progressive jurisprudential and political principles across a range of policy and constitutional arenas. Greenwald and others have explained Kagan's problematic record of support for expansive executive power, a derangement of the constitutional order. They have also sounded necessary alarms about her willingness to subordinate civil liberties to the "war on terror."

Kagan's willingness to make problematic adjustments to civil rights and liberties are not limited to the national security arena. As a domestic policy advisor in the Clinton White House, she collaborated in the most heinous social policy decision of the 20th Century: punitive welfare reform. Welfare reform embraced Blue Dog and Rehnquist-style fiscal retrenchment and federalist devolution. But it was worse even that that: 1990s welfare reform culminated a race-coded war against poor women with children by imposing inequality on them. At bottom, welfare reform demanded that low-income mothers trade constitutional liberty and equal citizenship for economic security; and it so disdained low-income mothers as mothers that it set in motion a series of policy conditions that undermine low-income single mothers to remain single or to be mothers if they do.

I hope progressives will finally resist the triangulating, difference-splitting, and play-faking we have suffered, mostly in silence, in the name of Change.

See The case against Elena Kagan - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

The Progressive Movement is Officially Dead | FDL Action

The Progressive Movement is Officially Dead | FDL Action

Diana M. Pearce: Changing the Federal Poverty Measure...or Not

Diana M. Pearce: Changing the Federal Poverty Measure...or Not