Rhetoric matters...and this is what's wrong with Obama's

I'm sure I am supposed to be happy that President Obama, in his Chicago speech last week, included us within the definition of "loving, supportive parents."   According to Obama, that category includes "all kinds of parents -- that includes foster parents, and that includes grandparents, and extended families; it includes gay or straight parents."

But I can't be.

And that's because the thrust of his attention to families was to emphasize fathers and marriage.  And that, even though he referred to being raised by his mother and grandparents and noted that he turned out okay (an understatement by any definition), he said he wishes he had had a present and involved father.  As a statement of his personal feelings I cannot and will not fault him.  But I am not letting him off the hook for his conclusions and his policy prescriptions.  Here is what he said:

There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families -- which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood....
 

So we should encourage marriage by removing the financial disincentives for couples who love one another but may find it financially disadvantageous if they get married. We should reform our child support laws to get more men working and engaged with their children. And my administration will continue to work with the faith community and the private sector this year on a campaign to encourage strong parenting and fatherhood. Because what makes you a man is not the ability to make a child, it’s the courage to raise one.

(These latter remarks were underreported when he included them in the State of the Union address).

Marriage and fatherhood as the best way to reduce violence is way off base.  It was off base when Dan Quayle tried it in his 1992 "Murphy Brown" speech.  It was off base when Romney tried it in 2012 in one of the presidential debates.  For real information, read sociologist Philip Cohen, who responded directly to Romney and more recently expounded on the myth that violence can be laid at the feet of single mothers.  His research is drawing the ire of the "marriage promotion" movement, but that just makes him more precise with his rebuttal.  President Obama needs to read his blog posts and needs to stop blaming violence on single mothers and offering marriage as the solution...even as a throwaway line. (If it was that.  I think there is a good argument that no line by a sitting president is ever a throwaway line.)

As for the policy positions in this speech, tax reform that benefits couples who earn roughly equal amounts of income are a good idea, but what about eliminating the huge tax bonus that goes to families with a high earning spouse and a low or non-earning spouse?  The rest of us should not have to subsidize that family form, which is what we do now.  I don't know what child support reform he is talking about.  If it allows poor non-custodial parents to keep more income, when that income doesn't go to their children anyway (because it goes to the government if the child is on public assistance), I am for it.  And as for the private sector, strong parenting depends on employment policies that flexibly account for parental responsibilities.  I don't see Obama specifically refering to those policies (like paid parental leave and paid sick leave), which he should.  Those policies would help fathers and mothers raise children.  As for faith organizations, if their mission is promoting marriage, I say keep them out of it.

I hope other supporters of LGBT families are not lured by the inclusion in Obama's rhetoric to ignore so much that is wrong about it.

Does Obama mean all families?

I saw very little press attention to Obama's mention of families in the State of the Union address.  This is what he said:

We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low- income couples and do more to encourage fatherhood, because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child, it’s having the courage to raise one. And we want to encourage that. We want to help that. (APPLAUSE) Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger America.
 

At first glance it sounds pretty general and benign.  Who could disagree with that?  Well... maybe I do.

Take the first phrase of the first sentence.  As for, "we'll work to strengthen families," I'm all for that.  But the way he wants to strengthen families is "by removing financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples."  Not by better reentry and job creation programs for those coming out of prison, not by increasing affordable housing, not by mandating paid parenting leave or more broadly defining who can take family leave.  Just by making marriage more finacially attractive to those with low incomes. It's certainly a kinder, gentler way of saying that marriage strengthens families, but it is, nonetheless, saying just that.  For those of you wondering why the Washington Post had so much trouble recognizing Gail Messier's family in her obituary, this speech is a clue. 

Of course I want to strengthen families, the families in which people actually live.  Here is an example.  An employed woman has a child.  Her mom comes to live with her to help care for the child.  Those two people, who have pooled their emotional and economic resources to raise that child, cannot file a joint tax return, even though, with one stay-at-home adult caring for the child they would save money doing so.  Now if they were a married couple with one wage earner, then they could file their taxes jointly.  What we need to do is stop making marriage the dividing line in our laws and policies and start dealing with how people actually arrange their intimate and financial lives.

The other part of Obama's proposal is encouraging fathers to raise their children.  Many children will be better off with their fathers in their lives.  Others won't.  Ask a mother who has been beaten by her child's father and who is trying to fight back against his efforts to have more time with that child because she knows it's about power and control, not love and nurturance.  All the talk about encouraging fathers to raise their children can create another obstacle to a mother's efforts to protect her child.

The worst part of the father-encouragement rhetoric, however, is that it is invariably connected to mother-blaming rhetoric, as in "those single mothers -- they are the problem."  Kudos to Legal Momentum, the organization whose research and policy papers continually prove that there is no inherent connection between births to single mothers and poverty (as they do in this chart).  Higher wages, ending discrimination, more public support for children...these are the policies that work and Legal Momentum fights for them.  Those who push fathers and marriage as the solution tend to oppose all such efforts.  When "fatherhood initiatives" resulted in education and job training programs for fathers only, Legal Momentum's advocacy against sex-discrimination opened those programs to mothers as well.

Back to Obama's speech.  It could have been a lot worse.  The marriage and fatherhood rhetoric was worse under the Bush administration.  But why include it at all?  It is not synonymous with "stronger families," and suggesting that it is sends the wrong message even when it's done gently.

Start solving real problems; don't blame everything on the decline of heterosexual marriage

Marriage is not the right public policy answer to our social and economic problems.  But that doesn't stop the right-wing "marriage movement" from asserting that it is, something I decree often in this blog.  Here's a good rebuttal, by Jodie Levin-Epstein of the Center for Law and Social Policy, to one of the latest incarnations of the "promote marriage" argument.