Father’s Rights Groups Threaten Women’s Gains—And Their Safety

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Pam Chamberlain

Fathers 4 Justice, a fathers’ rights group whose members often dress as superheroes, demonstrate on a rooftop in 2005. Photo by Cate Gillon/Getty Images

In June 2010, Ned Holstein, the president of the national group Fathers and Families, appeared on a Boston call-in radio show to promote a child-custody bill before the Massachusetts legislature. “The message is so simple, he said.

We’re fit parents, most of us. We just want to be involved in helping to raise our children…. [Divorced] children have a hole in their heart. The average child would crawl over broken glass to see their absent parent.…. [This bill] is a very mild nudge in the direction of getting both parents to be involved.[i]

This mild-mannered approach to child custody, a major issue in contested divorces, hides the real agenda of Fathers and Families. What appears at first glance to be an honest plea for fairness is in fact a backlash movement against changing gender-role norms and family structures—cultural shifts that have been influenced by feminist thought and action.

Although Holstein sounds as though he is promoting a new initiative, some form of joint custody bill has been filed in the Massachusetts legislature every year since 1983. Since the 1970s, certain conservative men’s organizations, commonly called fathers’ rights groups, have been seeking to increase their visibility and influence over divorce-court proceedings. While their tactics have changed, they remain a threat to women’s hard-won gains.

Fathers and Families, one of the hundreds of fathers’ rights groups that has sprung up in the past 35 years, uses language that is far removed from the angry pitch of early movement spokespeople. For example, in 1986, the journalist Greg Weston paraphrased the feelings of such fathers: Read More →

The Long Hurricane
The New Orleans Catastrophe Predates Katrina

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Darwin BondGraham

Members of Survivors Village, an organization of displaced New Orleans public-housing tenants, and their supporters occupy the Columbia Parc rental office in June 2010.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina and the “federal flood,” as locals call the disaster, the new New Orleans is as much the product of decades of antiwelfare ideology in local and national governments as it is of the unique circumstances of the disaster. Since the storm, a resurgent racist business elite has gained power in the city and region, and instituted a new era of urban renewal—or, as community activists termed it the first time around, in the 1960s, “Negro removal.” Privatization of New Orleans’ public sector has proceeded to a degree that real estate, banking, and industry leaders in other regions only dream of. Federal disaster subsidies have enabled reinvestment in the state’s major economic sectors—oil and gas, shipping, military, and tourism. Characterized by low wages and ecocidal byproducts, these industries dominate state and city politics. Yet New Orleans is held up as a model of redevelopment, its innovations made possible by an unfortunate storm called Katrina.

Concurrent with this neoliberal economic project is a neoconservative cultural project, the goal of which is to remold impoverished Blacks and other underclass people—who are portrayed by the redevelopers as living in a pathological state of dependency, turned into irresponsible burdens on society by decades of failed big government—into “productive citizens.” Foundations both liberal and conservative have converged on New Orleans to experiment with housing, schools, parks, and economic development.

Beyond Green Jobs

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Julie Quiroz-Martinez

A volunteer from Youthbuild/Service Nation at the September 27, 2008, Green Jobs Now National Day of Action, sponsored by Green for All.

Everyone wants to be green. Fossil fuel companies tout their commitments to the environment, with BP sporting its green and yellow flower logo and Chevron scooping up a Green Apple award for promoting public-school energy efficiency [1]. In 2009 Exxon-Mobil got itself named Forbes magazine’s Green Company of the Year for stepping up its natural gas production [2].

Mix “green” with “jobs,” and everyone ought to love you. In fact, a 2010 Harris Interactive survey found that 72 percent of respondents believed that expansion of green jobs would help preserve a higher quality environment, and 61 percent agreed that expansion of green jobs would have a positive outcome for the U.S. economy. [3] As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to create five million green jobs, arguing that “green jobs are the jobs of the future,” and that they would “help reduce our dependence on foreign oil and save this planet for our children.” As president, Obama has directed $500 million toward green jobs training as part of the federal stimulus funding authorized in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. (ARRA)

But organized opposition to green jobs does exist; in fact it thrives among conservative thought leaders and business groups, who view any push for an environmentally sustainable economy as simply an excuse to further regulate business. The influential Heritage Foundation, for one, claims that a green economy is a contradiction in terms, an approach that will eliminate more jobs than it would create. [4] Heritage also argues that green jobs are anti-free enterprise, propped up by government subsidies. It even pokes fun at green jobs, asking, as Peter Brookes and J. D. Foster do on the Heritage website, “What could be greener than a rickshaw?” [5]

Tax Revolt as a Family Value
How the Christian Right is Becoming a Free Market Champion

Posted on December 10, 2006 by Richard J. Meagher

“Death Should Not Be a Taxable Event.” In August of 2005, this headline appeared on the website of the conservative evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family. The accompanying article asked Focus members to persuade their Senators to repeal a federal tax on inherited estates.¹
Focus on the Family is not the only Christian Right organization to add this tax to its hit list. The Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council (FRC), and other conservative Christian groups condemn the estate tax in radio broadcasts and in newsletter updates; they include it on voter scorecards; and they ask members to encourage their federal representatives, as FRC head Tony Perkins puts it, to “give this onerous tax a proper burial.”² Read More →