Who is really supporting the American family?

I was thinking about how republicans like to claim that progressives want to control every aspect of their lives with everything from health care reform to laws that make it harder for us to kill our children.

"Leave us alone", they scream. "This is a nanny state". "Keep your hands off of my money and my guns". 

Then I read a wonderful article by a colleague of mine who happens to be a fine family lawyer who has tried cases before me in the past. She wrote it over a year ago for the Huffington Post, but I think that given the social climate in our country it is worth revisiting.

"Rick Santorum and his tea-partying cohorts have their knickers all in a knot about the government telling people what to do with their money. As in the government making them pay for health insurance. Or making them pay more income tax. Or using their tax dollars to educate other people's children.

At the same time, they're all pumped up about the sanctity of marriage and family. Marriage and family meaning mom, dad and kids, everyone neatly organized in a hierarchy, with dad at the helm, providing for the flock. And sanctity meaning no outside intrusion, no government telling them that their children have to learn about sex or birth control or gay people or evolution.

So how would Rick and the tea-partiers feel if the government told them exactly how much money they had to spend on their children every month? And wage-attached their pay checks and deposited those funds in their ex-wives' bank accounts? What if the government took a 401(k) titled in a tea-partier's name and gave part of it to his ex-wife without his consent? Or worse yet, took his real estate and made him pay his wife half the value of it? Talk about the heavy hand of the state invading the innermost sanctum of the family -- it's a tea-partier's worst nightmare.

But these are, in fact, our society's actual family values. We collectively agreed, sometime in the latter part of the twentieth century, to empower the government to re-distribute wealth within the family. We routinely force one parent to pay the other parent. It's called child support. In those fabled "one in two marriages," we frequently take property paid for by one spouse and give it to the other spouse. It's called divorce. And we're very comfortable with this re-distribution. We think it protects the young, the weak and the vulnerable. We believe it creates, to quote my state's divorce code, economic justice.
 
Wouldn't Newt Gingrich cry socialism? And wouldn't he be right? Let's be honest -- this is the best of Karl Marx, pure and unadulterated. "From each {parent} according to his ability, to each {child} according to his need" is a pitch-perfect summary of the policy underlying child support laws. 
 
Just imagine if these laws came up for vote in today's legislatures. Picture the outrage, the denouncements, the fiery speeches about keeping the government out of our living rooms and our bank accounts. But if we count on parents to provide for their children, and spouses to share nicely after they split, what are we supposed to do when they don't? Doesn't it become all of our problem? And isn't that the point? Just like the homeless, the sick and the poor -- the extended family that is our community.

Let's be thankful that Rick, Newt and their brethren haven't started deconstructing family law yet, because if they do, it could be just like contraception: we could be about to witness the implosion of a social policy that we haven't given even a second thought to for decades. And we'll be caught unawares -- us women, that is -- hurtling back through time, casting off divorce laws along with birth control pills, in our race to a darker, earlier era where we will eventually land, barefoot, pregnant, and without access to the bank account." [Source]

In the world of Rick, Newt, and all of his quixotic dreamers, there will be no need for things like child support. This social contract that we have all collectively signed on to is no longer needed. Because, in their world, all marriages will be perfect. Inconveniences like divorce and single parenthood is not even considered. We have churches for that. Can we try universal and affordable health care? Nope.Who needs it? All we have to do is pray. 




  

"Back To The Future"?

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I have been doing a lot of reading lately. Primarily because I find the political and racial atmosphere in A-merry-ca to be so fascinating.

Anyway, my man Matef from Socal shot me an e-mail today, which led me to the following article from Naomi Klein. It's a long article and it's creating a lot of buzz in certain circles. If you are a thinking person, or in anyway intellectually curious, you should read it. Here is a sampling:

"Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a "post-racial" era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court, was "racist" against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped "the Gates controversy", the furore over the president's response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama's remark that the police had acted "stupidly" was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president "has a deep-seated hatred for white people".

Obama's supposed racism gave a jolt of energy to the fringe movement that claims he has been carrying out a lifelong conspiracy to cover up his (fictional) African birth. Then Fox News gleefully discovered Van Jones, White House special adviser on green jobs. After weeks of being denounced as "a black nationalist who is also an avowed communist", Jones resigned last Sunday.

The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to "take our country back". Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of "massive resistance" launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today's "new era of 'massive resistance'," writes Rose, "is also a white racial project."

There is at least one significant difference, however. In the late 50s and early 60s, angry white mobs were reacting to life-changing victories won by the civil rights movement. Today's mobs, on the other hand, are reacting to the symbolic victory of an African American winning the presidency. Yet they are rising up at a time when non-elite blacks and Latinos are losing significant ground, with their homes and jobs slipping away from them at a much higher rate than from whites. So far, Obama has been unwilling to adopt policies specifically geared towards closing this ever-widening divide. The result may well leave minorities with the worst of all worlds: the pain of a full-scale racist backlash without the benefits of policies that alleviate daily hardships. Meanwhile, with Obama constantly painted by the radical right as a cross between Malcolm X and Karl Marx, most progressives feel it is their job to defend him – not to point out that, when it comes to tackling the economic crisis ravaging minority communities, the president is not doing nearly enough.

For many antiracist campaigners, the realisation that Obama might not be the leader they had hoped for came when he announced his administration would be boycotting the UN Durban Review Conference on racism, widely known as "Durban II". Almost all of the public debate about the conference focused on its supposed anti-Israel bias. When it actually took place in April in Geneva, virtually all we heard about was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inflammatory speech, which was met with rowdy disruptions, from the EU delegates who walked out, to the French Jewish students who put on clown wigs and red noses, and tried to shout him down.

Lost in the circus atmosphere was the enormous importance of the conference to people of African descent, and nowhere more so than among Obama's most loyal base. The US civil rights movement had embraced the first Durban conference, held in summer 2001, with great enthusiasm, viewing it as the start of the final stage of Martin Luther King's dream for full equality. Though most black leaders offered only timid public criticism of the president's Durban II boycott, the decision was discussed privately as his most explicit betrayal of the civil rights struggle since taking office.

The original 2001 gathering was not all about Israelis v Palestinians, or antisemitism, as so many have claimed (though all certainly played a role). The conference was overwhelmingly about Africa, the ongoing legacy of slavery and the huge unpaid debts that the rich owe the poor.

Holding the 2001 World Conference against Racism in what was still being called "the New South Africa" had seemed a terrific idea. World leaders would gather to congratulate themselves on having slain the scourge of apartheid, then pledge to defeat the world's few remaining vestiges of discrimination – things such as police violence, unequal access to certain jobs, lack of adequate healthcare for minorities and intolerance towards immigrants. Appropriate disapproval would be expressed for such failures of equality, and a well-meaning document pledging change would be signed to much fanfare. That, at least, is what western governments expected to happen.

They were mistaken. When the conference arrived in Durban, many delegates were shocked by the angry mood in the streets: tens of thousands of South Africans joined protests outside the conference centre, holding signs that said "Landlessness = racism" and "New apartheid: rich and poor". Many denounced the conference as a sham, and demanded concrete reparations for the crimes of apartheid. South Africa's disillusionment, though particularly striking given its recent democratic victory, was part of a much broader global trend, one that would define the conference, in both the streets and the assembly halls. Around the world, developing countries were increasingly identifying the so-called Washington Consensus economic policies as little more than a clever rebranding effort, a way for former northern colonial powers to continue to drain the southern countries of their wealth without being inconvenienced by the heavy lifting of colonialism. Roughly two years before Durban, a coalition of developing countries had refused further to liberalise their economies, leading to the collapse of World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle. A few months later, a newly militant movement calling for a debt jubilee disrupted the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Durban was a continuation of this mounting southern rebellion, but it added something else to the mix: an invoice for past thefts.

Although it was true that southern countries owed debts to foreign banks and lending institutions, it was also true that in the colonial period – the first wave of globalisation – the wealth of the north was built, in large part, on stolen indigenous land and free labour provided by the slave trade. Many in Durban argued that when these two debts were included in the calculus, it was actually the poorest regions of the world – especially Africa and the Caribbean – that turned out to be the creditors and the rich world that owed a debt. All big UN conferences tend to coalesce around a theme, and in Durban 2001 the clear theme was the call for reparations. The overriding message was that even though the most visible signs of racism had largely disappeared – colonial rule, apartheid, Jim Crow-style segregation – profound racial divides will persist and even widen until the states and corporations that profited from centuries of state-sanctioned racism pay back some of what they owe..."

Sometimes we just "can't see the forest for the trees". Especially when we live in the forest.

More here, and in September's Harper's Magazine.

*Pic courtesy of Michael Reynolds and the Guardian.