Pushed to the Altar

The remaining six statements address child support, single-mother families, teen pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock births. None of these statements addresses: poor housing; substandard education; lack of health care; institutional racism and sexism; lack of employment opportunities; or language barriers. The 1996 Republican Congress placed marriage at the center of its framing of the poverty the law is intended to address.³

In June 1995, President Clinton had launched a government-wide initiative to strengthen the role of fathers in families, which expanded HHS’ efforts to assist men in their roles as fathers. But it was not until the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that this initiative was advanced, publicized, and given a large amount of funding, and the federal bureaucracy began to fully implement the marriage and family formation aspects of welfare reform. The Administration teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to develop programs now being implemented across the country with federal and state funding, including: advertising campaigns on the value of marriage and the skills needed to increase marital stability and health; education in high schools on the value of marriage, relationship skills, and budgeting; and marriage education, marriage skills, and relationship skills programs that may include parenting skills, financial management, conflict resolution, and job and career advancement for nonmarried pregnant women and nonmarried expectant fathers.⁴

As a result of the Administration’s commitment to funding faith-based organizations, much of the federal money for these programs has gone to religious organizations or to groups heavily influenced by conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity.⁵ Although the federal government has long funded religious charities, it previously stipulated that they receive the money through a secular arm and adhere to strict rules for separation of church and state. That meant no prayer or other form of worship in the program, and no religiously-based discrimination in hiring. The Bush Administration has resisted these restrictions and implemented the $2 billion “Charitable Choice” program by administrative fiat since Congress has never passed Charitable Choice legislation.⁶

The 1996 “Welfare Reform” law had opened the door to the use of TANF money to promote “healthy marriage” through religious charities by allowing states to administer and provide welfare funds through nongovernmental entities. Arizona and Oklahoma were the first states to use TANF money to fund marriage initiatives, followed by Utah and West Virginia. Beginning in 1996, West Virginia notoriously provided a $100 monthly welfare bonus to recipients who marry, though the program has since been suspended.

By the Bush years, the funds were flowing. In Dallas, the Friendship West Baptist Church won $546,025 per year from 2006 to 2011 in African American-targeted funds for a media campaign, marriage education and a teen program. Another $550,000 a year distributed through a ministers’ network is supporting the pastoral teaching of a Keys to a Healthy Marriage curriculum to black youth in 25 cities over the same time period.

It is difficult to know exactly how much state and federal money goes to support marriage promotion programs. The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act has authorized $100 million per year for five years for a total of $500 million. But, according to Timothy Casey of Legal Momentum, it is not possible to name the exact figure. One complicating factor in researching the amount of money awarded to programs and states for marriage promotion is that some marriage promotion grants are made not only through separate funding streams within HHS, such as the $30 million Compassion Capital Fund, but also through Executive Branch departments other than HHS, such as the Department of Justice.

Together, federal and state faith-based funding, as journalist Jason DeParle said, “seeks a third way between cold government and cool indifference [to those in need]. Yet with much of the money flowing to conservative supporters of President Bush, the [Compassion Capital] fund is also a tool of realpolitik.”⁷ The funds advance a systematic Republican courtship of conservative African-American and Latino voters by providing government funding to explicitly African-American and Latino organizations, showcasing support for a segment of those communities.

The Christian Right’s marriage and fatherhood activism of the 1990s provided a solid base for the Bush Administration’s redirection of poverty programming in the first decade of the 21st Century.

Pro-Marriage Activism: From Grassroots to Government

Although ideas have consequences, they do not become policy unless there is pressure brought to bear by institutions, organizers, activists, and voters. This network of national and local institutions, informal groups, and fellow-travelers constitutes a movement “infrastructure.” Attention to nurturing and strengthening this network is usually called “movement building.”

During the 1990s, the Right presented its family values theme as an antidote to the social changes that had occurred during the preceding thirty years, especially the rise of feminism. In 1995, the rate of divorce stood at approximately 50 percent, presenting a challenge to the traditional inviolability of marriage vows. Families had become increasingly “melded” — made up of two divorced parents and their respective children. Single motherhood had increased dramatically, growing across social classes, and had lost much of its social stigma. At the same time, the number of gay and lesbian families was beginning to grow, presenting perhaps the most serious challenge of all to the traditional heterosexual nuclear family model. The Right’s leadership blasted all these social changes and blamed them on liberalism, especially the women’s movement and the gay rights movement.

One movement response from the Right was massive Promise Keeper rallies. These evangelical Christian revivals, for men only, were launched in 1990 by University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney to teach men the importance of their role as husbands and fathers. They were also intended to recruit men to the ranks of the Christian Right and lure them back to conservative Christian churches, which for decades have been attended and maintained predominantly by women worshipers. Specifically addressing the role of a woman within a marriage, Rev. Tony Evans of the Promise Keepers states in Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper:

The stadium rallies held by Promise Keepers across the country were a media sensation for at least two years. They were huge, professional productions, with a soundstage and production values to rival a large industrial convention. The Promise Keepers’ budget midstream in its organizing in 1995 was estimated to be $22 million. The budget peaked at an estimated $117 million in 1997, then declined following the successful Million Man March on the National Mall in October 1997, which seemed to sap its coffers. Still, the Promise Keepers continues to host regional events—19 in 2006 alone—as it continues to promote an anti-abortion, antigay, conservative fatherhood agenda.

While media coverage of Promise Keepers’ activities in the 1990s was intense, the press paid little attention to various conferences and meetings that were simultaneously organizing a rightist “fatherhood movement,” largely made up of white leaders and members. The movement is focused on issues such as divorce, custody of children, child support payments, “false” accusations of abuse, and control of access to children (for instance, by blocking the mother and child/children from moving out of state).

The fatherhood movement represents a serious attack on divorced women, women who are single parents, and same-sex families.

The titular head of the movement was Wade Horn, leader of the largest and most powerful of the fatherhood organizations, the National Fatherhood Initiative. Other prominent leaders included David Blankenhorn, David Popenoe, and Don Eberly.⁹

As Wade Horn acknowledges, these sectors were not all on the same ideological page:

This diversity of ideology and agenda within the fatherhood movement allows the movement to present many faces to the world. Its most militant wing calls itself the “fathers’ rights” movement and is led by fathers on a crusade to put right the injustices done to them by: 1) the divorce court “system;” 2) their “vengeful and spiteful” ex-wives (who were inevitably abetted by “the system”); or 3) “man-hating feminists” and welfare workers who have stolen their children after their wives brought false accusations of battering or incest against them.

The debut of the slightly more moderate center/right fatherhood movement occurred at a “National Summit on Fatherhood,” held in Dallas, Texas, in October 1994. It was sponsored by The National Fatherhood Initiative, the largest and most respectable of the fatherhood groups. This meeting was followed by a 1996 conference convened in Minneapolis by the movement’s leadership. The Minneapolis conference resulted in the definitive statement of the ideology and agenda of the fatherhood movement, titled “A Call to Fatherhood,” published in a collection of essays titled The Fatherhood Movement: A Call to Action.¹¹ Marvin Olasky, a principal architect of the Bush Administration’s faith-based initiatives, was an original signer of this Call.

While A Call to Action is a comprehensive introduction to the movement and required reading for anyone interested in the Bush Administration’s family policy, it tends to present the movement as self-invented by its leadership. The movement actually owes a great deal to several intellectual and activist predecessors, especially: Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the well-known and controversial “Moynihan Report” (1965); George Gilder and the “family values” agenda developed by the New Right during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations; the mythopoetic men’s movement headed by Robert Bly and captured in his book, Iron John: A Book About Men; and the national activism of Promise Keepers.¹²

The 1999 book, The Fatherhood Movement, edited by Wade F. Horn, David Blankenhorn, and Mitchell B. Pearlstein, pulls together the movement’s major articles and serves as its guidebook. When Horn was appointed Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at HHS and put in charge of the Bush Administration’s programs for welfare recipients, the centerpiece of his policy implementation was to fund marriage promotion and fatherhood programs, putting the federal seal of approval on the importance of a father in low-income families.

Despite its ideological diversity, a few basic tenets run throughout the predominantly white fatherhood movement. Underlying every rightist sector of the movement is a conservative Christian reading of the nature and role of the family. Christian Right theological principles are central, and adherents often refer to Christianity as the basis for the movement’s legitimacy. The movement explicitly supports patriarchy, asserting that it is damaging to children for them to grow up without a father present in the home.

Importantly, there is a liberal sector of the fatherhood movement that is often called “profeminist fatherhood.” These groups, such as Dads and Daughters, the National Center for Fathering, A Call to Men, and the Fathering Program of the Men’s Resource Center for Change, organize men to be better fathers while taking on problems of male dominance. Rightist fatherhood groups have stereotyped these groups as not representing “real men.”¹³

Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama, who himself grew up with little contact with his father, has urged fathers in the Black community to be more responsible and has linked their absence to family poverty.¹⁴ Because he is considered a liberal on social and economic issues, his voice is one strain of the liberal pro-fatherhood position, one often expressed by Democrats in the House and Senate.

Ideological common ground between liberal and conservative fatherhood groups is elusive at best. The best recent effort to achieve some degree of unity was a moderate statement, signed by fifty participants at a multiracial 1999 conference held at Morehouse College and cosponsored by the Morehouse Research Institute and the conservative Institute for American Values.¹⁵ The statement, whose signatories ranged from conservative to liberal, cites declining economic opportunity for inner-city Black men, racial discrimination, and a culture that increasingly has become uninterested in marriage. But clearly that unity has not held.

The most important institutionalization of the conservative fatherhood ethos prior to the George W. Bush Administration was the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention’s resolution on marriage. It maintains that wives should voluntarily yield to their husbands, following Saint Paul’s words to husbands and wives. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Baptist group in the world and the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. It is second only to the Roman Catholic Church in U.S. membership. Its marriage resolution drew substantial media attention because its adoption followed a hard-fought battle in backrooms and on the convention floor.¹⁶

Despite the Right’s support for the principles of the fatherhood movement, neither the Christian Right nor The Heritage Foundation envisioned using federal funds to promote its principles. It took the election of George W. Bush in 2000 for this to happen.

Fatherhood and Marriage Promotion in Black Communities

White marriage and fatherhood promoters see low-income communities of color as their most challenging project. Because many families in these communities do not conform to the model heterosexual, nuclear family configuration, they are identified by rightists and also many liberals as “problem” or “unhealthy” communities.

However, to effect change in low-income communities of color, the primarily white fatherhood movement must gain access to them. Under Horn, HHS’ primary strategies involved awarding grants to both faith-based and select secular organizations, publishing a newsletter, and sponsoring convenings that target specific communities of color.¹⁷ By gaining access and building trust with federal grants, the Ideological common ground between liberal and conservative fatherhood groups is elusive at best. white fatherhood movement (through its allies in the federal bureaucracy) has an opportunity to recruit men and women in low-income communities of color to collaborate in the Right’s “cure” for their poverty.

HHS itself often points out that it is particularly concerned with promoting marriage within the African-American community. The justification for this racial “marriage promotion affirmative action” is that, according to the 2000 U.S. Census and 2003 National Center for Health Statistics Report¹⁸, African-Americans have the lowest marriage rates and the highest divorce rates of any group in the United States, the highest rate of households headed by single mothers, and the highest rate of childbirth to single mothers. These statistics have given rise to events such as “Black Marriage Day,” put on in 70 cities by the Wedding Bliss Foundation, with direct assistance from HHS.

By targeting African-Americans for marriage promotion, HHS is responding to the statistics cited above, claiming that marriage promotion must, logically, be most active in the communities with the poorest record on marriage. In this stealth logic, marriage is elevated to the status of a community asset, while the lack of robust marriage statistics is seen as a community deficit (the word “pathology” is no longer popular); therefore the African-American community receives a disproportionate share of marriage promotion efforts. The entire argument rests on the association of a low marriage rate with a lack of community health—such that the government can justify intervening.

Conservative activists in communities of color, often adhering to the rightist notion that issues of race and racism should be “colorblind,” tend to focus on the community itself as the cause of fatherlessness. They argue that blaming poverty, white racism, or joblessness allows the fathers in the community to shirk their responsibility to provide for their children. Traditionalist African-American organizations, such as the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Responsible Fatherhood and Family Revitalization, and new publications, such as Proud Poppa, promote the nuclear family model that emphasizes the father as the principal determinant of the success of children and the family. They encourage fathers to be heavily involved in the rearing of children. Many of these more conservative African-American organizations talk very little about the challenges of poverty or the crucial role of the mother in childrearing. Their message is that “fathers make the family.”

It is these few organizations, and a number of conservative pastors and ministers, that tend to work most closely with the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the George W. Bush Administration. For example, as part of its outreach to African-Americans, HHS’s Administration for Children and Families hosted a 2004 conference in Chicago to spread the word in the African- American community about the government’s efforts to promote marriage. The Forum’s title was, “Why Marriage Matters: The Role of Faith-Based and Community Organizations.”¹⁹ Approximately one third of the attendees identified themselves as pastors from around the country.

At the conference, one workshop leader, Rev. Darrell L. Armstrong of Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, N.J., illustrated the gap between the more conservative marriage analysis promoted by rightists at HHS and a more liberal analysis of marriage when he warned participants to be wary of two groups that would oppose their efforts: advocates against domestic violence, who are concerned that marriage initiatives will encourage people to stay in abusive relationships; and gay and lesbian groups that are fighting for access to marriage.

Although liberal fatherhood and marriage organizations of color are equally dedicated to strong families and involved fatherhood, they are less attached to the traditional nuclear family model than are conservative fatherhood organizations. In the words of Ronald Mincy, a scholar who studies African-American fathers, these organizations “encourage fathers, whether married or not, to become more involved in their children’s lives, both emotionally and financially, and to develop a better relationship with the child’s mother.”²⁰ They explicitly promote marriage and fatherhood within the reality of a world where low-income men of color face barriers in employment, housing, and access to health care.

Senator Barack Obama, for instance, in his comments chastising “absentee Black fathers,” also notes that the federal government has “gone AWOL” as low-income families deal with unemployment and lack of health care.²¹ These organizations, activists, academics, and politicians appropriately emphasize poverty as the cause of family distress, and then help fathers develop a healthy relationship with their families. More researchers are pointing out that the statistics showing most low-income black families are headed by single-mothers don’t reveal the larger truth that some young men of color are involved with the mothers of their children, sometimes live with them, and even are active in their children’s care.²² Yet the couple may decide not to marry.

Another ideological sector of the fatherhood movement within the African-American community is nationalistic fatherhood, almost single-handedly represented by the National of Islam, which has long emphasized the importance of the family. Its call for a million African-American men to come to Washington, D.C. on October 16, 1995 to stand up for “unity, atonement, and brotherhood” resulted in one of the largest marches ever seen on the Mall, drawing many who were not affiliated with the Nation of Islam, but wanted to make a statement in support of African- American empowerment. Speakers from the podium called on African-American men to “clean up their lives and rebuild their neighborhoods.”

Conclusion

Whatever critique liberals and progressives justifiably make of the Right’s ideas and methods, nearly all students of the Right will agree that its leadership had a remarkable understanding of the importance of movement building. In The studying the specific area of marriage and fatherhood promotion, it is clear how strategically the movement’s organizations molded and mobilized public opinion against single mothers and, most especially, against single mothers who are welfare recipients. Simultaneously, they elevated the role of “father” to make the presence of a father necessary for the formation of a healthy family.

The Right points to the success of its policies in shrinking welfare rolls and the numbers of welfare recipients who have gone to work. Then shouldn’t the poverty rate in the United States be at an all-time low? But the U.S. Census Bureau’s report for 2005, released in August 2006, details a grim picture of poverty in the U.S. The report finds that the percentage of people living in poverty in 2005 (12.6 percent) contains the highest percentage of people living in “deep poverty” since the government began keeping poverty statistics in 1975. That’s because nearly half (5.4 percent) of those living in poverty are living below half the poverty line of $17,170 for a family of three, according to 2007 Health and Human Services Guidelines.²³

Much of the public does not know the extent of deep poverty in the United States or the expenditure of federal money to promote marriage among low-income women and to promote fatherhood in family formation. Even if they did know, they might assume that the program was driven by solid evidence from the social sciences that marriage does indeed result in a higher income for poor women. But there is no such evidence (as I will document in a forthcoming article). This is a program driven by right-wing ideology, a backlash against the social reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, and a commitment by the Republican Party to “restore” the idealized “father knows best” family model of the 1950s. If this were a harmless pursuit of a fantasy ideal, that would explain why it fairly often garners bipartisan support. But on close examination, it is more accurately a cynical social experiment, using as its subjects the low-income women of the early 21st century.