Fundamental Differences: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatives (review)

Fundamental Differences contains new and previously published essays on "family values," a discourse formulated by conservative organizations in the 1970s and codified in public policies from 1980 forward. Academic readers who are familiar with the conservative agenda will not be surprised that the family-values crowd has linked its physico-moral typologies of race, gender, and sexuality to the economic imperatives of reducing social services and maximizing citizen labor. The ideal conservative family consists of hard-working and devout (preferably Christian) heterosexual parents who train their children in these doctrines. Whoever deviates—lesbigay partners, single mothers, poor families—must be normalized, through coercion if needed, by the state.

Bridging the disciplinary divides, the essays use a variety of methods to expose the inegalitarian assumption and faulty logic of family-values ideology and to capture the flow of political action—framing issues, sparking public debate, and crafting policies on marriage/domestic partnership, adoption, child well-being, welfare assistance, and identity-targeting violence. The best essays, in my judgment, also disabuse scholars of the notion that academic research helps political actors make rational decisions by showing, to the contrary, that these actors manipulate the research and weld it to power in order to achieve their own partisan objectives.

Originally published in the American Sociological Review, Judith Stacey and Timothy H. Biblarz's "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" is a comprehensive analysis of psychological research on lesbigay parenting that does double duty. To assist social scientists, the authors discuss the difficulties of surveying vulnerable and often closeted lesbigay parents, controlling for numerous psycho-social variables affecting families, and applying fixed definitions to sexual orientations that often modulate over the life course. They also address activists, judges, lawmakers, and journalists who oppose lesbigay parental rights, cautioning them that "every relevant study to date shows that parental sexual orientation per se has no measurable effect on the quality of parent-child relationships and child development" (50). "Social science research," they conclude, "provides no grounds for taking sexual orientation into account in the political distribution of family rights and responsibilities" (54).

Their allusion to distributive injustice goes to the heart of the problem. Although the U.S. Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law to all citizens, government policies do violate the equal-protections status of lesbigays, single mothers, and poor families. Two brilliant essays dissect a glaring example to such encroachment—the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA).

Jenrose Fitzgerald's "A Liberal Dose of Conservatism: The 'New Consensus' on Welfare and Other Strange Synergies" traces a critical shift in how welfare discourse construed the causes of, and the remedies, for poverty. Where traditional liberals had attributed poverty to structural inequalities that burdened people of color and white women, the "new consensus" forged by moderates and conservatives pathologized families—Moynihan's matriarchal black family, the Reagan-Bush out-of-wedlock family, and the Gingrich Congress's dysfunctional welfare-dependent family. Gwendolyn Mink's "From Welfare to Wedlock: Marriage Promotion and Poor Mothers' Inequality" details the corresponding shift in policy. Where early legislation had provided recipients with education, job training, and childcare to help them transition into living-wage jobs, PRWORA required them (90 percent are single mothers, disproportionately women of color, with little education, few job skills, and high disability rates) to work at jobs that usually pay minimum wage, provide no health care benefits, and evaporate within a year. PRWORA also instituted coercive measures that dovetail with the conservative agenda on gender and sexuality: mothers are required to disclose the identity of their children's biological fathers, fathers (no matter how poor) are jailed if they fall behind in child support, and states receive huge sums to promulgate sexual abstinence, sponsor marriage classes, reduce both nonmarital births and abortions, and award bonuses to married recipients.

These essays were written before Congress reauthorized PRWORA and made welfare more...