Suchergebnisse

More than a year ago, the front page of the New York Times featured a story on a new workplace trend. Besides laying off thousands of workers, employers have also been resorting to pay cuts, downgrades, and shortened work weeks more often than at any time since the Great Depression. The article went on to tell what happened to Bryan Lawlor, a thirty-fouryear-old airline pilot who lives in Virginia with his schoolteacher wife and their four children. He had been a captain earning $68,000 a year, in line for a promotion raise. But suddenly, he and other captains were demoted to the rank of first officer, automatically cutting their salaries in half. Lawlor's frank description of his emotional reactions to his new financial situation illustrates, in mild form, symptoms of what researchers have called the "normal pathology" of unemployment or other economic falls from grace. Not allowed to wear his captain's uniform or command an airliner, and no longer the major breadwinner in the family, Lawlor feels "diminished." He worries that the mortgage payments may now be unaffordable, and that the children, who have not been told of the change in family finances, will finally notice when Christmas brings many fewer clothes and toys than usual. And it bothers him that he can no longer pick up the check when the family goes out to dinner with his parents. With a solid marriage, supportive relatives, a roof over their heads, and a still decent twoearner income, the Lawlors are not the hardest hit victims of the current recession. But they could be poster children for the economic forces that have made even solid middle class lives far more uncertain and stressful. And the trouble started long before the financial meltdown of 2008. Indeed, the great untold story of the past four decades is the steady erosion of the economic underpinnings of American families, even while the national economy seemed to be thriving.

I will begin with a general comment, then discuss the specific points raised by Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern. There is a great deal of public anxiety about the dramatic family changes of the past several decades, and news about the disappearing or declining family has become a media staple. Conservatives have honed this pervasive "decline" theme into a potent political weapon. The "D" word supplies the symbolism and emotional force for right-wing social policies—abolish welfare, promote marriage, ban gay unions. And the word evokes the a simple before-and-after narrative that explains it all: before the sixties, all was well with the American family; then came the counterculture and feminism, the moral collapse of the family, and the host of social pathologies we have today.

Kay Trimberger and I are not far apart politically. We share a feminist perspective. We agree that "irreversible changes" have occurred to marriage and family life, and we agree that family change does not equate to moral decay. We agree about the kind of policies progressives should support—health care, child care, and so on that have been on the liberal agenda for decades.

Marriage entered presidential politics for the first time as farce: Dan Quayle's June 1992 attack on the television character "Murphy Brown" for having a child while unmarried. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, the then-vice president addressed the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. "The lawless social anarchy which we saw," he argued, "is directly related to the breakdown of family structure." The poverty at the root of the disorders was a "poverty of morals." At the very end of speech, he denounced "Murphy Brown" and her Hollywood creators for "mocking fatherhood," glamorizing single motherhood, and thereby encouraging family disintegration among the poor. The attack on a popular television show launched a media frenzy and a torrent of late night talk-show jokes.

Offers a basis on which the left might build a counterargument to the conservative narrative of moral decline to which is hitched the marriage movement. It is argued that the left needs a better grasp of the complexities of demographic trends and forces behind family change; a historical perspective on current marriage and family life dilemmas; and an alternative to the moral decline narrative that addresses family, gender, sexuality, and personal life changes that shifts the terms of the debate from individual moral failings to wider social structural changes. Contradictions in the conservative ideology on family and marriage include conservative support of economic forces that disrupt families and the Republican Party abandonment of its commitment to women's equality in favor of religious fundamentalism even while its economic policies undermine the idea of the traditional male breadwinner that fundamentalists support. The centrality of economic factors to US family problems is demonstrated, arguing that this opens an opportunity for Democrats and progressives to bond with the middle class and lower with a political program based on fairness, opportunity, and individual and family empowerment. Problematic is the effort to sustain families amid a major 21st-century shift in gender relations. The marriage movement argument about the implications of rising divorce rates and the counterculture's role in those rates is challenged, and it is asserted that, in fact, the push for gay marriage is a ringing endorsement of the institution. In closing, it is maintained that the symbiotic relationship between the "right-wing message machine" and the media's taste for conflict overshadows mainstream US attitudes, which remain large and diverse. On occasion, however, the voice of the tolerant and pluralist, if often silent, majority can be heard, eg, in the form of new editions of etiquette books; attention is given to Emily Post's 17th edition, where a strong moral defense of family diversity is mustered. D. Edelman

It's not yet clear how big a role the "moral values" issue played in the outcome of the election; it seems to have been less decisive than first reports indicated. And war and terror may have come to G.W. Bush' s political rescue, as September 11 did before. Nevertheless, it does seem clear that liberals and progressives have not done a good job in presenting our own ideas in a framework of values or challenging the right's narrow version of morality, which seems to stop at the bedroom door. Nor have we exploited the right's own vulnerability: the contradiction between its family values rhetoric and its economic and social policies.

Recently, a PBS Frontline documentary called "The New Asylum" showed how our jails and prisons have become, by default, the nation's mental hospitals. This wasn't an exposé. The prison under examination didn't seem particularly bad. The staff seemed to be trying their best to deal with an impossible situation. But what, you might ask, has the topic of prisons to do with the culture war and family values, the subject of this series? First, it shows how the culture war, with its focus on hot-button issues like gay marriage, end-of-life decisions, and obscenity on television, to name the most recent examples, crowds out discussion of serious social problems. More than that, however, the documentary illustrates the reductio ad absurdum of America's current political culture: its rhetoric of faith and family values combined with its tax-and-services-slashing policies, its deference to corporate power and accompanying sink-or-swim economy, its tolerance of growing inequality, its bread and circuses media, and the unprecedented reliance of the current administration on a strategy of lies and denial. As a result of all this, prisons have become the social policy of last resort. No longer just the place to incarcerate violent offenders, the prison has become the final common repository of the social problems we are unwilling to prevent or remedy before they grow into crises. Only when these problems deteriorate into matters of crime and punishment can "government spending" be justified.

The post-election stress disorder afflicting Blue Americans (wherever we live) continues four months after the election. We still obsess about what went wrong. Was gay marriage the determining factor? Moral values in general? Was it the threat of terrorism? Did we suffer from a flawed candidate and a poorly managed campaign? How can we be more successful in 2006 and 2008, or are we doomed to remain a minority party overwhelmed at the polls by a rising tide of religious fervor and social conservatism?

Introduces the second installment of articles in a series on family politics in the US. Contributions address issues emerging from the sexual, gender, & cultural revolutions of the late 20th century. These essays are briefly summarized. It is argued that the public debate must be reframed to reflect their values of equity, equal opportunity, inclusion, & tolerance, noting that sociodemographic trends, eg, cultural liberalism of the younger generation, appear to be working in that direction. J. Zendejas