Unknown Speaker 00:00 I look at the family values issue and I'm going to talk about it in terms of actually existing politics. What are family values? Anyway? This is the $64,000 political question, it would be hard to find a person well, a person outside this room who's against family values. And it would be equally hard to find a person outside the ideologues of the Christian right, and the communitarians, and the Democratic Leadership Council, who could give you off the bat a concrete and detailed list of what those values specifically are. In the political arena, family values is a terrain in which many things are simultaneously and often quite confusedly contested. The roles of women and men, which includes just about everything having to do with sexuality, from gay rights to birth control, and abortion, the relations of parents and children, and appearance visa vie schools and clinics and other institutions that care for their children. But family values also take takes in concerns that at first glance don't seem to have much to do with families, the amount of secular power religion ought to have in civic life and in politics, what kind of art if any, ought to receive government funding and how high your taxes ought to be? When educated, urban nation reading people, which I know you all are, think about family values, they tend to see it through the lens of the religious right and the Republican Party, and they tend to get very scared without Pooh poohing either the harmful nature of right wing family values or its potential to make life worse. In this talk, I'm going to suggest that the real threat proposed by family values is much more diffuse. And that obsessing about fundamentalists and militia men, as we like to do over the nation is to focus too narrowly and in the wrong direction. And after I've persuaded you all about that, I'm going to try to answer a question that doesn't get asked nearly enough. What is the political purpose served by family values campaigns, and why are we having them now? When Christian coalition leader Ralph Reed talks about family values, what exactly does he mean? Well, he wants vouchers that allow parents to send their children to private and religious schools. He wants prayers, the teaching of creationism and abstinence only sex education in public schools. He wants abortion to be banned, preferably through the passage of a constitutional amendment, although he's given signs that he knows that achieving that goal is unlikely. And he'll settle for something more moderate, though also bad. And he wants teenage girls to give birth who gives birth to choose adoption, he may well believe that wives should be subjected to and dependent on their husbands because the Bible tells him so. But he doesn't come out and say that I think that's interesting. What he says is that he wants to see taxes lowered, so that families can survive on one income and mothers can stay home if they want to. He wants to keep gays and lesbians marginal by denying them the right to serve in the army marry or be protected by civil rights laws. And he wants to reform divorce laws to make divorce more difficult, not to mention getting tougher on crime and drugs, abolishing welfare and other social programs for poor families and so on. Well, it's quite a list. And when Newt Gingrich and his fellow right wing Republicans took both houses of Congress in 1994, a lot of people guilt hard and thought, Oh, this is it head for the hills. And it's true that the Gingrich Republicans did a lot of damage, sometimes over President Clinton's veto. But often as with the welfare bill, with his cooperation, the job was poor, the environment, the schools and the consumer are all worse off. The military, health maintenance organizations and corporate interests of all sorts are going fabulously well. The family values agenda, however, did not get anywhere near as far as it seemed it might in those creepy early days of the 100 and fourth Congress. One reason for this is that the Christian Coalition and the radical right generally have a limited if considerable political constituency. If you're not in the Christian coalition, you probably really hate the Christian coalition. And the more the religious right tries to inject itself into the mainstream, the more people get to see them close up for the religious fanatics they are. Most Americans, including most politically conservative Americans, do not think school breakfast programs undermine the family. They do not want their children to be taught creationist science. They do not want to de bloom banned from school libraries as pornography, and they certainly don't think Halloween is a Satanist holiday. Unknown Speaker 04:41 Moreover, they and this is very important. They don't want their school board spending meeting after meeting wrangling over these issues. That the religious right advises its devotees to run for school boards and other offices as stealth candidates who packaged themselves as normal conservative Those shows that even they understand how out of step they are. Their tragedy, if you can call it that is that in order to make real political gains, they have to make themselves acceptable to the mainstream. But since they are, as I've said, religious fanatics, they can't actually do that. Something always gets in the way. The head of the Southern Baptists calls for the conversion of the Jews, or they decide they have to boycott Disney because Disney decides to offer spousal benefits for gay couples. And can you imagine? You know, can you imagine the war between parents and children in the houses? You know, and between parents and pastors, you know, I mean, my God, without Disney, how can you raise a child in contemporary America, you can't do it. Or someone says something too silly, even for American politics, like Idaho's anti environmental, Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, who believes in black helicopters and all the rest, and when confronted with the fact that a species was becoming extinct every five minutes or so, opined that, if that was indeed So surely, God was creating a new species every five minutes also. So now, what about the rest of the radical right family values agenda? It runs into similar trouble with basic political realities. As Senator Dole has discovered, the hardline anti choice position is an electoral loser. Even such anti abortion stalwarts as Bill Bennett and Bill Kristol have the Weekly Standard. My favorite magazine, my pornography I love that magazine. They now talk about abandoning the crusade for a human life amendment in favor of working to limit access to abortion and changing the moral and social climate so that it becomes a less popular and less necessary choice. This is the Clintonian position there just like him. Making divorce more difficult runs into the obvious problem that everyone's divorced. In particular, politicians have astronomical divorce rates, and seem particularly prone to the least justifiable kind of divorce in the popular mind. The man who leaves his loyal helpmate, the mother of his children for a younger, flashier woman. And here, I think those of us who understand how absolutely essential liberal divorce laws are to women's self determination should all pause for a moment, and thank our lucky stars that Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole behaved as badly as they did. Because that has made it impossible to mount for them to mount this particular barricade. Whereas Clinton as he often likes to point out, he's still married, you know, the bad husband, he's still there. Unknown Speaker 07:54 Now political realities aren't the only obstacles. There are economic realities too. Much of the right not just the religious right would like to see mothers out of the workplace. David Gelernter of Yale made the case in a recent issue of commentary magazine. In the Weekly Standard. William Tucker called for the restoration of the family wage, which paid men enough to support a stay at home wife and several children in his heyday. Now, it's interesting to note that even in the leading reactionary journals of the moment, writers have to hedge and qualify their case. Good learner allows that women have brought a wealth of talent to the workplace, he claims that he prefers them to male colleagues. He admits that staying home will be an act of self sacrifice for many women. tocker proposes a family wage uncoupled from sexism, this is amazing, but he does, each family, according to him, could choose one spouse to be the primary earner, kind of like a designated driver. And this person of either sex could be the would be the beneficiary of favorable discrimination in pay and promotions. The other officially registered as the secondary earner would be discriminated against and that would be okay or mildly discriminated against, as he puts it. Now, how gender neutral this would be in practice can be judged from the fact that Phyllis Schlafly wrote into the weekly standards letters page to say that she had had the same idea in 1977. But, but he had to say it you know, I think that's interesting. You can't really do get very far if you say, you know, women are constitutionally unable to have to hold down jobs in a serious way women should be officially the subject member of the relationship although the Promise Keepers and the Million Man March so pretty much tried to do that. But there that I think has a limited constituency. If you want to go mainstream, you have to adopt the official ideology which is have some kind of gender official Lee labeled gender equality. The main point about these and other schemes though, is that they bear absolutely no relation to economic reality in which, far from a halved workforce making doubled salaries, a doubled workforce is making less and less. There are doubtless many women and many men too, who would love to stay home or work only part time while their children are young or who knows, even when they kids are middle aged. Men work much overrated we should talk about this. The notion that employers will accommodate this desire by raising pay for those people spouse's out of sheer civic mindedness is fairly fantastic. It's akin to the widespread belief that we can bring back the 1950s by sheer force of moral will, when by having the right pop music, for example, when in fact no amount of moral real can restore that particular economic and historical set of circumstances. Now, I'm not urging complacency about the radical right here. And I'm not denying that their version of family values can cause actual harm for real people. The attempt to defund legal services for the poor, for instance, and to bar legal services lawyers from taking divorce cases, is a good example of the way in which the radical right is able to smuggle bits of its larger agenda into reality by wrapping them in cost cutting measures and aiming them at the weakest members of society. And of course, welfare reform is a very big example of that. What I'm trying to underline here is that family values represents a much larger bipartisan political phenomenon. It took a hip modern saxophone playing baby boomer president to end the federal entitlement to welfare for poor children. You know, Reagan didn't do that. I mean, he told a lot of jokes about welfare queens, but in fact, the the entire the safety net expanded while Reagan was in office, that's why we have all these big debts, I mean, well, that of giving all that money to rich people. Unknown Speaker 12:03 But anyway, if family values is really to shape public policy, it will be in the bland and centrist formulations of the communitarians. And the progressive policy institute. It will be Clintonism In fact, it is clear to me, like the religious right, the communitarians and conservative Democrats of the DLC think what's wrong with America today is the people have the wrong ideas. They are too selfish, individualistic and hedonistic and isolated. They don't respect authority, they are unwilling to submerge their own interests in those of a larger identity, the family, the neighborhood, the church congregation and the nation. They bowl alone. They watch too much TV when they should be out there volunteering. Now, I happen to think this criticism is not a fair assessment of the facts. Americans are let's not forget the most religious people. In fact, the only religious people in the industrialized West, nobody goes to church in Europe. More than half at least say they volunteer in a typical year. And if Americans watch too much TV, maybe the reason is that they're too tired from working two jobs and taking care of their children, and maybe too depressed to do anything else. The US is surely the only country in which the ideologues who are calling for more patriotism, more national pride are the same people who have little good to say about the actually existing citizens of the supposedly wonderful nation. Or I might add about its distinctive traditions of civil liberties, separation of church and state, freedom of speech protections for privacy, etc. Like the religious right, the communitarian or Clintonian family values, ideology, conflicts in various places with civil liberties with women's liberation and with contemporary modes of sexuality. In her book, it takes a village, Hillary Clinton herself says she thinks people should be virgins until they're 21. And that divorce should be made more difficult to obtain. Of course, this is easy for her because it's very hard to imagine the set of divorce reforms that would force her to remain married to her husband. She's covered under the most rigid fault divorce system. But unlike the religious rights version, it acknowledges the basic outlines of modern life at the end of the 20th century, that women are not going to stay home they need to work that strictly defined gender roles are giving way to more flexible ones, that America is not a Christian nation. It's a pluralistic and multi ethnic nation and so on. While the family values agenda of the radical right is both sweeping and out of touch with possibility that of the Clintonian communitarians is when you get down to brass tacks, so modest, as to be practically invisible, except of course, where it affects the poor. Volunteer at your child's school seek marital counseling before breaking up your marriage. To know your neighbors disapprove of violent misogynistic rap lyrics. It's hard to disagree with bromides like that. And although I would hate to see them enacted into law, the truth is mostly they wouldn't make a whole lot of practical difference. Let's say for instance, the couples did have to seek marital counseling or wait six months before divorcing. These requirements might be a pain in the neck for some couples who knew what they wanted. And Assaf to some spouses who feel they are being hustled to quickly out the door by their mates, but they would not alter the ultimate outcome very often, and I have the divorce decree to prove it. Unknown Speaker 15:38 Similarly, the violence and raw sexuality expressed expressed in one area of cultural production rap or primetime TV will soon show up in another. Here again, as with the radical, right, I'm not denying that family values can and probably will make difficulties for many people. But when you consider the scale of what family values advocate advocates themselves identify as vast social problems, the breakdown of marriage, the decline of neighborhood vitality, single parent families, teen pregnancy, rundown and chaotic schools full of underperforming students, you have to be struck by the lack of a commensurate response. If the schools for example, are indeed full of idle, disrespective, disrespectful, thuggish, semi literate, putting them all in uniforms isn't going to make much difference. And neither will adding a few more school volunteers. So that what what is it every every third grader knows how to read? I mean, when what happened to when we used to read in the first grade, you know, this is Clinton's big idea. And you can see from these suggestions how much ground has been conceded already, the reforms that would matter classes with no more than 15 students, the restoration of art, music, gym guidance counselors, and all the counselors and all those other frills, remember them, they're not even on the table, they cost too much money. Now, if I can see this, and you can see this, you can be sure Bill Clinton can see it too. So the interesting question is, if right wing family values proposals are too extreme to find mass acceptance, and Clintonian family values, proposals are too minimal to have much effect even if everyone thought they were a fine idea. What is family values really all about? In my view, family values is the ideological cover for our current economic situation, the slashing of the safety net and a public services of all kinds, global competition and downsizing family value says there are no classes, there are only families, and everyone is in a family. So we are all equal. It says that what determines a person's fate in life are individual qualities like responsibility and hardworking this and faith in God. And the commitment to deferred gratification. And this is This is Louis Farrakhan, this idea, this is his vision. That's what black people need to have more of the wonderful quote, you know, don't send, don't send the jobs off to the Third World. Send them to the ghetto will work in such as sub minimum wage labor. And there is nothing about the economic circumstances that have created the current plight of black America. Unknown Speaker 18:27 It says that the public service money has run out and you are on your own. And since wages are stagnant, you had better attach yourself to another wage earner, especially if you are female and therefore underpaid. It says that the nanny state in the wonderful conservative phrase is finished. So the real mommies must take up the slack. Whether or not they also hold down a job someone after all must take care of babies have children, and after Social Security and Medicaid have been cut the elderly family values in a funny way, you could almost say is it isn't really about families, which will continue to form and fragment and metamorphose as they have been doing for quite some time. Under the pressures of modernity, which is not about to be repealed. Family Values is really about rallying people to accept the ongoing decline in their standard of living, and to accept a diminished public sphere school uniforms instead of smaller classes, the V chip for the home alone child instead of after school programs and a shortened workweek so that parents could actually spend time with their children, volunteers instead of professionals, an unhappy relationship instead of even a brief time on shameful, stigmatizing welfare. And it's about drawing people together to celebrate their straightened circumstances as proof of their moral superiority. It works at the national level, we ought to be top country Yeah, we feel we're not perhaps we should be more orderly and authoritarian like Japan or Singapore. And it works at the cloud. This level even while denying class exists, like predestination for Calvin and genetics for Charles Murray, family values explains why the successful deserve what they have, and why the poor deserve what they don't have. Thus, it justifies transferring wealth upward by increasing middle class tax deductions and credits for children adoption, college tuition, summerhouses, whatever, well cutting welfare and scholarship aid and other benefits for the poor. It works at the individual level too, as a kind of warning, a false step and out of wedlock baby and impulsive divorce. And you could fall very, very far down the social scale with no one, but your family to pick you up. Call me a vulgar Marxist. Well, I call myself a volver. I am a vulgar Marxist. But when I asked myself what family values are, I answer in the immortal words of James Carville. It's the economy stupid. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 21:12 Thank you to all our panelists. To my far left, so to speak, and to my far right, are two microphones for you to come to and ask a question of any or all of our speakers. I'll start in the absence of anybody standing at the microphone. So is there any reason to vote for Bill Clinton? Given all that you've all just said? Somebody? Unknown Speaker 21:47 Well, I'll answer that. I'm on record. I think that for people who live in New York State, which Clinton will carry by a very, very large margin, there is no reason to vote for Bill Clinton. Because even if everybody who is influenced by the kinds of arguments that they I've been making, did what I want them to do, there are too few. So you might as well use your vote, instead of adding your little might your little widow's mite to the huge electoral horror that Clinton possesses. You might as well use it to make another kind of point like, I don't like what this guy is doing to the poor. And you could vote for Nader. I mean, I don't know I might not be able to bring myself I'm so mad at the way he's run his campaign, you know that I might not be able to do that. Or you could not vote most people don't vote, you know, they're saying something to the idea that your vote is wasted. If you don't go to the polls, I think that's a mistake. The political people who are in charge of the political system are very upset that people don't vote because they know it means they have less legitimacy. So you might want to think about how much legitimacy you want to give them. Unknown Speaker 23:04 Anybody want to tackle this? No, Unknown Speaker 23:07 I often am persuaded by the people who argue that we should have another category like it's none of the above. Available for election. So we could do exactly that. And maybe not vote for NATO, but vote for you know, vote against Clinton. And I agree, I told Kat that she persuaded me not to vote for Clinton in her nation editorial. But I don't know if I feel the same way. If I lived in Florida, for example, where my where the vote might not or more, right. Unknown Speaker 23:36 So the hedge is you want Clinton to be president, but you just don't want to vote for him? Well, I Unknown Speaker 23:41 you doing? I have a severe appreciate appreciation on the Supreme Court and what that means in the American society, which is why I think marginally it makes a difference. Fun? Well, Unknown Speaker 23:57 I guess the only thing I want to add to this, because certainly, ideologically, I share kaphas sentiment, but I think when Election Day comes I will go into the voting booth and I will vote for Bill Clinton. Because I do have some concerns about what it would mean to have a Republican Congress and a Republican president. And although I think he I mean clearly. Absolutely. I don't think I have to say this I he did the wrong thing on welfare. And I'm not convinced that some people are that he'll make it right later. I'm not convinced to that. I I still think that at least on some things. The whole the whole kit and caboodle has not totally eroded. And it's only because in a few instances, he vetoed things and I think the other the other part of that message is that we have to continue to be actively engaged emerged in the political process, not just in the voting process, but really in commute. I mean, if Bill Clinton is nothing else he is a, he responds to public perception of him. And that may be the only thing we have going Unknown Speaker 25:20 on. Again, sharing a lot of the ideological seventh and so like the first time I've been stumped, because in my job, I have to, like go around, like getting people out there to vote, you know, so, but but my concern about saying don't vote for Bill Clinton, is that the message that gets sent to a lot of people, what they end up doing is not going to the polls at all. And that's my biggest concern. Every one of the 211 members of the New York State Legislature are up for reelection again, in two weeks, we have major congressional battles going on around the state. And it is very important, it is the state that will determine at this point where those welfare dollars and how those welfare dollars, the few that there are are going to be dispersed and how the structure is going to be put in place that will deal with this new reality. It is the state that that is going to deal with the issue of marriage and the issue of family relationships as they usually do. It's been a total, you know, perversion of that process for the Congress to step in on that but but that is where it happens. So whether one goes in wants to take the the conscientious objector approach to the presidential campaign is a personal choice. But don't let that mean you don't go to the polls. Unknown Speaker 26:42 Okay, let me go over here. Unknown Speaker 26:44 Thank you. Um, Utah, I believe is one of the states that has already moved to prohibit recognition of same sex marriages that have been consummated in other states. Ironically, I think it is also a state that is home to some portion of its citizenry that has sought to challenge bigamy laws, seeking a family life based on polygamy. Polygamy can, I think, propose some unique questions to feminist way of thinking, how do we as we seek a multicultural and embracing definition of family address this challenge as feminists, assuming that we stopped short of the radical proposition that we abolish marriage as a legal institution? Do you want to start on that follow? Or Unknown Speaker 27:31 give it a try? It's your last part that hooked me. And that's like, oh, no, well, you know, the the thing about things like bigamy and polygamy and I can't say to be much of an expert on it, but what I do understand or think I understand about it, at least as it's been practiced, is that it's been primarily the practice of men with many wives. Now, that should tell us something about what that is. And so to all of a sudden go down this kind of road that says, we want to engage in a process by which marriage can be allowed to more than two people might have some validity to it. I mean, it would certainly in some ways, begin to reflect some of the families that actually exist. But I think we have to look at how that has practiced. So far. What the law requires is that purely and simply is that when a state does anything in this area, whatever, that they show some reason for doing it. And that's part of what we have the courts to protect against the so called tyranny of the majority, that people can't just go around passing laws, right and left and and with no meaning or no purpose to them. And I think that certainly, you know, engaging in the question of whether multiple marital partnership should be recognized, is one that I think is worth engaging. And I think it's a little bit off the point, though, because I think it still puts marriage at the centerpiece, it still doesn't recognize that family relationships share a lot of different kinds of, of relationships. I mean, again, those students I was talking to earlier this week at the new school, one young woman, you know, talked about how her older brother is her brother, who then became her father figure at a certain point, you know, and so, you know, she has a very, you know, a multipole relationship with Him in some ways. I would rather that we see and seek a world in which we begin to recognize, as I said, the relationships that exists to de stigmatize in the way that I think marriage does, those that fall outside of whatever its purview is, and to just get away from marriage altogether. And I know you said, you know, but short of banning marriage, I think, as Martha said, is a legal institution. I think it's majorly flawed for women. Unknown Speaker 30:00 My own feeling about polygamy was actually changed somewhat by meeting a Senegalese judge who was a judge who just become the third wife of Senegalese businessman. And, of course, being a curious American, and having no restraints whatsoever. I asked her about that. And her response was kind of interesting, because she told me how she, she's in a society where it's unusual for women to have that kind of career. And the career had a lot of demand made a lot of demands on her. And she thought being the third, a third, having a third of a husband was just about right for her. That I mean, I'm, I'm actually, you know, translating a bit here. But, um, but I, but I didn't think about that, because she wanted to reproduce, she wanted to have children, she wanted to have a, quote, normal life, which means that she wanted to have a marriage of some sort. And this was a way that she could accommodate both what you wanted to do on her professional level and her desire for a family. So I just want to say that about polygamy, I think that there's a way in which we view polygamy as inherently exploitive. And what she taught me is that it need not be that way. And but even beyond that, I think we think about marriage or inherent in the notion of exploitation in the context of polygamy is the way it is it is a certain set of assumptions about the way we view sexuality and male and female sexuality and the, you know, the notion of male sexuality as in need of constrained by marriage or other institutions. And now you've kind of removed for me my radical solution of abolishing marriage is legal institution. But let me just say, I really believe that, that that is what we have to do to allow our Senegalese judge to reproduce, even outside of the context of our family of marriage, in that kind of traditional family. I think the advantages of doing that is once we no longer have a legal institution of marriage, which means that marriage is not an economic ordering, doesn't privilege, certain kinds of transfers, and it's not the basis for certain kinds of social subsidies, then the state has no interest in our sexuality. If the state is not using marriage to perform state functions, like caring for dependents, then it seems to me that all sexual affiliations are on equal ground, none are privileged, and none would be prohibited. And that would include polygamy, same sex relationships, and everything else, that marriage No longer would stand as the state defined appropriate sexuality. Unknown Speaker 32:37 Over here, Professor Sherry grillak of Rutgers University can you hear? Unknown Speaker 32:46 I want to pick up on some of that. Crisis being the conjunction of danger and opportunity, I wonder whether we might see this crisis of families as an opportunity in a way Edelbrock mentioned the fact that when gays and lesbians pushed for domestic partnership, it in it enlarged the range of possibility for straight people as well as for lesbians and gays, it seems to me that tech, we could take that further and say that health benefits have to be taken out of any kinds of ties to the family or employment by having a national health system. And that thanks. The anxiety that comes from having to be related to an employed person, or to worry about whether you'll lose your own employment or even gain and employment would be taken away by having that established by the state. The other thing is that I think that some of this tremendous anxiety that is fed by the family values, ideology, is the fact as you several of you pointed out that families are dissolving. And besides all those other reasons, like domestic abuse, etc. It also has to do with the economy in that people lose jobs, they have to find jobs by moving to a completely different regions of the country. So they're not near their elders, they're not near their extended family, they it breaks up families, etc. And I think this is something that we really have to address that is what are some of the economic forces that are breaking this down? Because I think that one of the sources of this anxiety is that people do feel that without a family member, they are lost in a bureaucracy and any I'll just say one more thing. Anybody who has had the experience of having to take care of somebody within the hospital system or an age parent knows that the fact that you are there for them makes the world totally different. So that's one of the things that we have to address as well, not just caretaking in the abstract, but caretaking in a way that people can develop trust. Unknown Speaker 35:24 Well, I'll just say briefly, you you highlighted for you know, what is I think the fundamental difference between equality and social change. The domestic partner benefits issue is one in which within the workplace context, employees seeking to be treated equally, ie equal pay for equal work, you're going to give health care benefits to married employees, you should give them to unmarried employees who have partners. But you're absolutely right, a true social change visions. So what are we doing giving healthcare benefits based on whether somebody is attached to somebody else to begin with? Everyone should have a fundamental right to health care. It's my same view of marriage, I can hardly refute those. And you know, of my colleagues who say, well, straight people are allowed to marry so we should be allowed to marry to well, yes, legally speaking, that's a very, you know, important and viable argument. But that doesn't satisfy the question of why should marriage be the the play the role it does in determining who gets these basic and important fundamental, I mean, economic benefits. So that's and that, you know, in a feminist context, that's the, you know, sameness difference issue to some extent of equality. Unknown Speaker 36:37 Go to Marcia Hurst. Unknown Speaker 36:40 I thought Leslie was going to start off her introductory remarks when she said she was the focus of political attention by saying she was a soccer mom. But that's the question that I'd like to ask. And I guess it's a follow up on the electoral question earlier on this, presumably a block or a non block of female voters who the major parties are vying for, and this is the soccer mom phenomena, which is interesting, and that I believe it was Time Magazine recently featured a soccer mom who was unmarried may or may not vote, depending on whether she has time, if I remember correctly, because she's very busy earning a living in bringing up a child. And I'd like the panel to comment on whether this is a block, if so, what is it a bloc of should it be mobilized? Can it be mobilized? And what does it mean in terms of family values? Unknown Speaker 37:31 Yeah, I think that that was a very interesting article in Time Magazine, because not only was this woman not married, and she had a small child, and she was living with her, the father of the child that they weren't married, and he was quite a bit younger than she was. It also says she didn't believe in God. But she did believe in the 10 commandments. And she, it was one of these, it's like, I don't know if some of you might have read that book about a renaissance mind called the worms and the cheese or something like that. It was just about all this sort of crazy stuff, contradictory stuff that you would never find together in a book, but that, in fact, are together in people's minds, people put the world together in all kinds of strange ways. And she was doing that. And so of course, both parties hope that they can reach this prototypical person. But the really interesting thing about this woman was that she wasn't paying attention to politics at all, and she knew nothing. That was why she didn't know who she was going to vote for. She didn't read the newspaper, maybe she looks a little bit at TV, the whole thing she said, the government has has no relation to my life, you know? And then she said, Well, maybe, you know, pressed to think of a way in which the government affected her life. She said, Well, maybe I can get a small business loan. Because she and her boyfriend had had started many sort of failed little businesses out of their home and you know, like selling Amway products or something like that, selling Herbal Shampoo, I think that was, you know, going to make their fortune. And so it really did give you the what it really showed is not that here are is a very politicized constituency that everybody wants. But here's a very deep politicized, fragmented constituency that I think the people who run political campaigns are hoping to find the magic words that will appeal to them, and they don't know what those magic words are. Maybe it would be single payer health insurance, who knows, but nobody's gonna say that because that would cost a lot of money and all the rest of it. So I always say, you know, I'm a gender gap. Skeptic, I have to say, not that there isn't a gender gap, but I don't see it as you know, wonderful women, voting for women, more wonderful women, and then everything gets to be more wonderful because actually, if you look, women voted, white women voted voted Republican. In 1992, they voted Republican and independent They were not big, you know, Democrats, they stayed home in 94. I don't know why because they weren't happy. Because they're a political to. And when they do get a chance to vote for someone who was supposed to be good for them, that person turns out not to be so good for them. For example, Dianne Feinstein, for example, Barbara Mikulski, all these Democratic women who have been voting for cutbacks in the safety net, and have been doing all the bad things we associate many of the bad things we associate with Republicans. So I would say that, you know, we, it would be so lovely to think yes, women will sort of pull the chestnuts out of the American fire, but I don't think that that is going to happen. So that's the gloomy view. Maybe someone else is more optimistic, Unknown Speaker 40:51 will be powered by Rumi. Unknown Speaker 40:54 Today, as well. My name is Adriana chef, and I'm a Sarah Lawrence College student. And I wanted to ask him a question. And I'd like Mrs. Edelbrock, especially to answer what did children require in order to discover gender or sexuality or identity in terms of association or disassociation? And to what extent do we need members of both sexes present to become fully realized people? Unknown Speaker 41:23 Well, there's a dissertation question. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by your first question, but I assume that part of it is when do people determine what their sexual identity is? Is that part of what your question is? Okay. I don't know. The simple answer is, I don't know the simple answer is there are many, many factors that researchers have found that that helped formulate sexual identity, what we do know is that sexual identity in terms of sexual orientation is formulated a very, very young age, that it is not as mutable as people may think that it is. In other words, the whole recruiting aspect of around sexual orientation is absolutely ridiculous, in that you cannot recruit somebody necessarily to change their fundamental sexual orientation. The role that parents play in a child's developing sexual orientation is somewhat limited, in that many of us who are lesbian or gay have straight parents. So it certainly can't necessarily be be tied to that. But environmental factors, perhaps some biological factors, we don't know there are very early very, very non conclusive studies on all of that. What we do know is that if children are raised in homes that are accepting and they're open, and that are caring about them, they may in fact come out if they are gay at an earlier stage. And perhaps that some of the fear that the right wing has so well then when they say that gay parenting will mean more gay children. It doesn't mean that quantitatively, it means that qualitatively it means that perhaps kids will not have to go through what I went through in the late 60s and early 70s, of the tortured suburban, you know, like, There's nobody like me, kind of life until you could come to terms with that, in terms of parenting, and and you know, what's necessary for children. I mean, there are many, many theories and probably more people expert in this in this room, than I with regard to gender. But for the most part, I just have to believe that children who are raised with, you know, parents who care for them, sort of have a pretty good shot at life. With regard to gender roles. I mean, my partner is now pregnant, we will be having a baby in March. And there are lots of wonderful, decent men in our lives. We don't need to have one living with us. In fact, it would be a problem in other ways, if it was but you know, there are there are ways in which I think and somebody said this earlier that a lot of the gender roles, ways in which parenting is looked at stigmatizes a lot of women, including lesbians, you never have somebody question gay men raising children about where the female role model is. You never have that question. There are other things that gay men face around their sexuality, but is never whether there's a female role model for those children. So, you know, the jury's out on many of these things around child rearing. And I was actually talking to a colleague recently about how I'm very anxious for the time in which a lot of the children of lesbian and gay couples who are raising children's out lesbian and gay couples come of age many of them are, but there's a whole group sort of coming up or just now entering college and what have you. It can begin to tell us more information about what it means in a free or society to be raised by a lesbian or gay parent. I don't know if that begins to answer your question, Unknown Speaker 45:04 congratulations to good luck on that Unknown Speaker 45:08 term. It's a boy. Unknown Speaker 45:17 He'll be a great soccer player. We go over here. Unknown Speaker 45:22 It's always powerful to have alternatives in front of us. And I was thinking if they watched a little bit of the debate, the presidential debate on Wednesday, how neither candidate ever shows there's nothing in the national debate that shows what's being done in other countries. And I think each of the panelists was talking about a little gave a little bit of a hint of what's going on other industrialized countries that are dealing with some of the industrial post industrial effects on the family, and how many of the countries in Europe, for example, have national health care, they have systems in place to support families and don't expect families to take the full brunt? Or try to isolate families in the way that we see in this country? So my question is, my observation in question is how can we bring those alternatives into the discussion? In other words, to stop sort of just looking at the American scene, but really to try and bring you know, what's going on in Denmark? What are these other countries that are facing some of the same problems doing and it's they're really providing some alternative models, some problems, too, but we should be discussing them, I think, and I'd like to see what the panelists think about that. Is that something that we can bring into the American debate? Unknown Speaker 46:33 Let me first just plug panel number three this afternoon, which will be addressing those questions. But Unknown Speaker 46:40 I think that one of the things that we're most successful at is exporting our ideology, ideology of self sufficiency, independence, autonomy, and the ideology of the family as the location for, for dependency. And what you see, I think, in a lot of the other industrialized countries is an attempt to cut back using American models. So far from them, influencing us what is happening here is influencing them. And you see this in a variety of ways, not only in terms of undermining the welfare states that exist in other countries, but also in the context of divorce to the development of anti divorce rhetoric and father's rights movements in the bill. The need to assert men within the context and confines of families as heads as economically responsible human beings is very much alive and well in other countries, as well as this one. So I think that the, you know, the influence is running the other way, unfortunately. Over here, Unknown Speaker 47:42 I just graduated from law school, and in our family law class, we read the case that was the first the first lesbian mom who was able to adopt her parent her partner's child, I just wanted to point out as a Barnard grad. We also learned in constitutional law class about what Paula was saying that each state must give full faith and credit to the other states law. So I have two questions. One, I have a quick question for you, Paul. What it seems that when Congress passed this law, saying that they're not going to recognize same sex marriages from another state that that was a blatant violation of the Constitution. So one question is, when is that going to? When is somebody going to have standing in order to be able to bring that present that to the Supreme Court? And what do you think is going to happen? That's one thing. The other thing is that I haven't really heard from you, you all, and I'm interested to hear, what do you think is going to happen? Now with the new welfare bill, there was an article in the paper this week, this, two parents of nine children were arrested for leaving their kids alone. The father was at work, the mother had gone to housing court to fight an eviction notice. And it just seems like that kind of thing is going to happen more and more. I'm interested in the child welfare system, foster care. And I just wonder, like, it just seems like things are gonna go from extremely bad to worse now that legal services are especially now that legal services are phenomenally cut. So if anybody could answer that question, and Unknown Speaker 49:13 we got to two for both faith, well, Unknown Speaker 49:15 the first one is is relatively quick to answer. I mean, the challenge to the federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act will only be ripe when some state allows same sex couples to marry. And then that couple tries to exercise the rights of a married couple, either, you know, they are seeking immigration status. They are seeking, you know, to file a joint tax return. They're seeking social security benefits, something like that, and that will allow that law to be challenged other wise, it's basically a you know, it's sort of foolish, because it doesn't affect anything right now. There's no one that can marry if you're in a same sex couple Unknown Speaker 49:55 on the welfare bill, Oh, Unknown Speaker 49:58 can you hear me? Yeah. Oh, And interestingly, in the Washington Post this past week, there were a series of articles about the the rural communities, encouraging women who lived in those communities to migrate to urban areas for job opportunities, and that that was one of the things that was projected to occur with welfare reform. I have been looking specifically at single mothers in rural communities in the south. And clearly one of the issues there has to do with not only low welfare payments that already existed, but also the prospect of economic development and employment opportunities in many of these areas where employment opportunities have already been very slim. So I think this issue about or this potential for migration, again, is an interesting one, and is one I mean, in this in these particular articles, the welfare caseworkers were encouraging people to move. I mean, it wasn't just kind of they were saying you will be better off if you go to these the cities. And of course, what we know about a lot of the cities is already jobs there either. So I think, in one place or another, if this kind of trend does occur, we're going to see more of these kinds of problems, but perhaps even more concentrated in urban areas than they are now. Unknown Speaker 51:38 I'd like to add to that, that Unknown Speaker 51:41 the an interesting feature of the welfare bill, and one which Bill Clinton cannot fix is the way in which it throws everything back to the state. So what we're going to see is many, many different kinds of attempted solutions to the enormous amount of problems that the welfare bill is creating. Now, at first, there's going to be a little more money. For a lot of states, because of the way that the formula is going. It's all sort of cleverly rigged, the bad things will happen after the next presidential election, you know, after that five years when everybody who's currently now on welfare, can't be on it anymore, even if they go on it today. But it see it's interesting now, who is to the left of Clinton on welfare, Mayor Giuliani, you know, Christy Whitman, these are the people who have to deal with the enormous numbers of legal and illegal immigrants who get thrown off the fact that you know that there are no jobs, the fact that people have nine children, and all the rest of it, and that huge foster care loads already, they know that this isn't going to work out. And because these are urban places with a lot of media people, they're not going to let people starve in the streets. Maybe people will starve in Mississippi where you know, they don't care who it is that some rural place, you can get away with it. These are very feudalistic kinds of, you know, Arkansas and other very feudal kind of a state. But in the big industrial states, you I think you're going to see that the some of the governors are going to find that, that this thing they said they wanted, they is just a tremendous can of worms. We have time for one last question, especially if it's brief. Unknown Speaker 53:28 Okay, for katha, Paulette, I'm interested in what reallocations you have in mind, when I mean, it's clear that it's the economy, stupid. That's why we don't have better schools, let's just focus on the schools. We don't need uniforms, what we need is money to reduce classroom size. Where does that come from? We you the politicians are no politician going to get up and say we have to raise taxes and have taxes like they have in Denmark so that we can have that, you know, whatever. What do you see? What is your vulgar Marxist dream for where that real allocation comes from? Unknown Speaker 53:58 Well, I'm glad you asked that question. Ah, I guess, you know, it seems to me that, as Betty for Dan said, at the Labor teaching that some of you might have attended. And I don't usually agree with her about very much, that I think that the different separate movements that we have in this country have cannot make more advances against a rising tide of inequality. I think that's another thing that family values is about. So I would say that all these different sorts of oppressed people have to get together they have to have tremendous amounts of ad political agitation and direct action and 100,000 people sitting in and, you know, on the Washington Mall, I mean, there has to be an enormous amount of social ferment and then and that that's going to make maybe a difference because you're absolutely right. If a politician says Well, I want to raise your taxes to Denmark level so that we can have smaller class size forget It, you know, people don't even they don't even know what that would mean. Unknown Speaker 55:04 What do you see it? Where do you see it coming when when or when all these oppressed groups get together and they say we want to walk lower the military budget. Where's it going to come from? And what is what is your Well, yeah, Unknown Speaker 55:13 yeah, exactly, exactly. And but I think that it's, it's not something that like people will just sit down at a table and say, here's what we want, it will come out of out of struggle. And I have to say, I think, you know, we're seeing maybe only the teeniest tiniest beginnings of that. I think this is, you know, we're really in for a number of very difficult years. Unknown Speaker 55:37 I agree with that. Before I give you your lunch instructions, please join me in thanking Paula it'll brick Barney deal Martha fine, and Catholic. Unknown Speaker 56:02 We had hoped to lunch out on the Barnard lawn and enjoy the brisk autumn air and the autumnal leaves. We won't we do have for you box lunches that are available up these stairs. Now here's the tricky part where you're going to take the box lunch directly across the plaza from us which does require about a 15 feet walk from one building to another there is a lovely atrium area very pretty with nice couches and tables that you can sit at. There are also some tables upstairs, that you can sit at you if you really hate rain, you could come back down here although that's not quite as elegant. There are restrooms in the other building directly across the way as well and the Barnard students with The Goddess T shirts will be helping to direct you at 130 Hang on one second at 130 Please go to your first panel of the afternoon follow your program it'll tell you where to go there are tunnels that connect every building at Barnard and there really only two buildings in question Milbank, which is that away and Barnard Hall which is this way and you can do it underground on this floor so that you need not go outside at 430 Please be sure to return here for the very exciting jewel Jackson McCabe and four Women's Center sponsored cookies and tea. We are a women's center we always have cookies and tea. Enjoy the rest of the day.