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Domestic Warfare

It wasn’t much more than a week ago that the Tories announced an end to their war against single parents. This was tactical rather than practical, I believe, since it is customary for the end of a war to be announced by its winner. The Tories must have hoped thereby to persuade us that they had won. Whereas in fact, by any measurable scale, single parents must have won, since it’s statistically impossible in this country to be less popular than the Conservative party.

Principle carers (as lone parents are so non-judgmentally known by the child support agency) must have thought they would be given a short while to regroup and maybe hand out a few medals, but no, a new war has been launched almost immediately, this time by the government itself. Poor carers, they must feel like Poland.

In an effort to make things “fairer and faster”, the CSA has announced a new scale to calculate the financial input of the non-resident parent. The formula, which was meant to be introduced in April but will not take effect until some time next year, requires the absent parent to pay 15% of his or her income for one child, 20% for two and 25% for three. This amounts to a cut in payments to single parents of up to 19%, but does not affect the ones who live on benefits. Therefore, it is effectively a penalty on being a single parent with a job, which is a little bit rich coming from a government that spent so much of its first term trying to get single parents back to work.

The CSA’s position is that the system needs to be changed, because it is unworkable at the moment. It has some good evidence to support this claim – in August, it transpired that the agency had written off £2bn worth of debt, and considered a further £150m “uncollectable”.

Sir John Bourne, the auditor general, estimated in July that 81% of the CSA’s maintenance assessments were wrong. In other words, this is the most comprehensively rubbish finance collection agency this country has ever seen. If a lone parent failed at its quotidian duties this woefully, it would have its children taken away.

So, the quest for simplification and greater efficiency is understandable, but when the end result is to round down the amount owed to the main carer, you can’t help thinking that behind this fiasco there’s prejudice at work.

Try to imagine what would happen if the Inland Revenue got most people’s tax assessments wrong, wrote off vast quantities of its debts because it couldn’t be bothered to chase them and then said “sod it, let’s charge them all a bit less, and see if that works”. Well, it would make the whole business of being taxed a lot more fun, and we wouldn’t be able to afford a war against Iraq, but on the downside, society would disintegrate and we would all get cholera.

The decision is absolutely obscure; it doesn’t benefit the working single parent, and ultimately it cannot benefit the government. If the employed are to be penalised, those on very low incomes will necessarily be forced out of work and back on the dole. The only people gaining from this are the absent parents, who are in effect being rewarded for the merry £2bn dance they’ve led the CSA on since its inception nine years ago.

Of course, this is infinitely worse than the now-defunct Tory war – it doesn’t make any difference to anyone whether or not the opposition party thinks they got pregnant just to get a council flat. If anything, the act of annoying Norman Tebbit might add to your overall quality of life.

The government scheme, on the other hand, has important and damaging financial ramifications. But the thinking behind New Labour and Old Tory is the same – single parents are quite simply worth less than other groups. They are worth less than dual parents, they are worth less than the childless and – most ridiculously – they are worth less than absent parents. Their payments are chased less tenaciously than bloody parking fines, they were harried back to work with the most patronising of poster campaigns and now they are penalised for being in work.

The very people who demonstrate their sense of social responsibility most assiduously are the ones who are treated with least respect by their society. Conceivably, this all stems from a moral agenda that still puts some crazy value on marital respectability, even though the only people who really stay married for life these days are politicians themselves, and that’s just because they have such, ahem, fun-packed professional lives.

Possibly, there is a misogynist undertone here since, though we all strive with modern even-handedness not to group resident and absent parents by gender, the former are still mainly women. I wonder, though, whether it isn’t all a bit more pragmatic than that – lone parents are notoriously time-poor individuals, being so busy with kids and whatnot. If you’re going to victimise anyone, you may as well victimise the ones who don’t have time to fight back.

Tags: Domestic, Warfare

Sex Warfare Breaks Out in Us Election

Standing beneath the dome of San Francisco’s City Hall last week, amid floral bouquets and wide-eyed onlookers, Josephine and Gieseppina made their vows and were married; they have been together for eight years. Josephine works for the electricity company and Gieseppina works in a store. But their union is more than just an act of love. It is also a political statement.

‘How come I live in the land of the free, yet am not free to spend the rest of my life in my own country with the woman I love?’ said Josephine. ‘If Gieseppina were a man, we wouldn’t have this difficulty.’

For the past two weeks, 3,500 gay and lesbian couples have travelled to San Francisco, among them the talkshow host and actress Rosie O’Donnell and her partner, Kelli Carpenter, as well as others from Australia, Germany and Britain, taking advantage of Mayor Gavin Newsome’s decision to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples. It is a simple ceremony, presided over by a voluntary army of marriage commissioners, and takes less than five minutes. The move has outraged many in conservative America, not least President George W. Bush, who has vowed to seek a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages.

On Friday, 24 ceremonies were performed for gay men and lesbians as a little-known mayor of a small upstate village thrust New York squarely into a dispute that has divided the country in recent weeks. Almost immediately the office of Governor George E. Pataki in New Paltz, 80 miles north of Manhattan, asked Eliot Spitzer, the state attorney-general, to seek a court order to halt the proceedings, state officials said. Spitzer, a Democrat considered a likely candidate for governor in 2006, rejected the efforts of the Republican governor.

‘We will not seek an injunction against either the mayor of New Paltz or any other mayor solemnising marriages in the state,’ Spitzer said. Whether the weddings would be considered legal under state law is likely to be decided by the courts.

The ceremonies in the picturesque university town of New Paltz came as a surprise to many officials, who have been conspicuously silent on the issue, even as it has erupted nationally. The last census counted nearly 50,000 same-sex partner households in New York, and, by some estimates, 500,000 gay residents.

Coming with little warning, the ceremonies left many lawyers and politicians struggling to respond, while independent observers and advocates for gay rights said that the move may signal a shift in the scope of the cultural struggles – from big cities to small towns.

But it is not just the row over gay marriage that has rocked America. There is a wider culture war, a political war that is pitting traditionalists against liberals. And it is a geographic war that sees the East and West Coasts divided from the vast – and more conservative – heartland.

In an election year America’s morals and sexual behaviour are at the centre of the political stage. From gay marriage to abortion, from Bush’s promotion of sexual abstinence to cracking down on sex on TV, America is fighting a battle over values that is now at the centre of the fight for the White House.

It is also a bitter battle. On the streets outside San Francisco City Hall, a rag-tag band of Christian demonstrators, many flown in from other parts of the country, waved banners declaring ‘I hate faggots but I love Aids’ and hurled abuse at the happy gay couples as they left the building. ‘You’re hurting the children,’ they screamed.

Behind the yells and the insults lies a political plan. Though Bush is undoubtedly sincerely conservative in his personal beliefs, putting sexual morals into an election campaign has the effect of energising his conservative base.

This is vital for Republican strategists. Conservatives have been rocked by recent moves allowing illegal immigrants to work in the US and the spiralling budget deficit. Moreover, in 2000 strategists estimate at least four million conservative evangelicals failed to vote for Bush. In an election both sides expect to be tight, mobilising that voting bloc could make the difference between winning and losing.

So far it looks as if Bush’s strategy has scored a bull’s-eye. ‘I was very proud of the President. This engages the Democrats on their moral values,’ said Tim Wildmon, president of the American Families Association. The AFA, one of America’s biggest conservative lobbying groups, is planning a voting drive to get conservatives to register. Wildmon is under no doubt about what he believes is at stake: ‘When you talk about abortion, people like me believe you are talking about a human life created in the image of God.’

There is a cultural backlash across the US. Last week two of America’s most infamous ‘shock jocks’, Howard Stern and Todd Clem, were hauled off the airwaves as the broadcasting industry braces itself for an increase of the obscenity fines.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, shock jocks came to symbolise a new form of American entertainment, brash and controversial and often breaching the boundaries of good taste. However, as the number of shock jocks soared, the stunts they had to pull to attract listeners became increasingly offensive. Stern once made one of his guests – a porn star – clean out a toilet bowl with her hair. Clem has got in trouble for castrating and slaughtering a pig during his show.

Following a furore last month when singer Janet Jackson flashed a breast during the half-time show at the Superbowl, broadcasters have cracked down on anything deemed remotely offensive. Some TV shows have axed sex scenes and MTV has removed risqué music videos from its daytime schedules.

The values issue is a huge problem for Democrats. John Kerry, widely tipped to be anointed the Democratic candidate after this week’s bout of primaries on ‘Super Tuesday’, has refused to support legalising gay marriage. Democratic strategists know that being a liberal on values is unlikely to win many votes in the key states of middle America, far from the coastal strongholds of California and New York.

But for Bush, this is friendly territory. He makes no secret of his close links with Christian conservatives and sexual abstinence campaigners. Last week Rebecca St James, a leading abstinence lobbyist and singer, led a Bible study class at the White House itself. Bush is also drawing up a project that will pump millions of dollars into promoting sexual abstinence as a form of sex education. He has also announced a drive to promote marriages (between men and women) that has been allotted more than $1 billion of funding.

This is music to the conservatives’ ears. ‘I think those sort of things will be under threat from a Democrat President. This is just a sex-saturated culture,’ said Mike Long, an abstinence campaigner who tours schools encouraging teenagers not to have sex before marriage.

But campaigners such as Long and Wildmon face an array of challenges, especially over issues such as gay marriage. Powerful judges have set the pace in states such as Vermont and Massachusetts, declaring gay couples should have the same rights as straight ones. It is an issue reaching other courts, too, as activists pick off states one by one. In New Jersey, seven gay couples have their case before a state court.

‘We can’t fully protect our family if we can’t get married. We don’t want to cross state or national borders to get married, which is why we’re working this out here in our own state,’ said Marcye Nicholson-McFadden, who has been with her partner, Karen, for 14 years. They are raising two children.

Where the courts are not available mayors such as Newsome can step in, defying state law and issuing marriage licences. In New Paltz Mayor Jason West married four gay couples on Friday.

That has provoked backlash in the heartland. Ohio has passed legislation specifically banning same-sex marriages, aiming to strike the first blow before a court does. Other states are set to follow suit, further polarising the nation on the issues of sex and values.

It is impossible to predict how the battle will end. Though Bush’s amendment is almost certain to fail to get the required two-thirds backing of Congress, it has succeeded in placing conservative morals at the foreground of the election. Democrats are on the defensive and Bush’s key voting base has become energised like never before.

But in San Francisco, no one should forget the real human stories being played out in front of the cameras. ‘It’s so wonderful to a part of such a loving, joyful moment,’ said retired schoolteacher Donald Bird, who married his partner of 37 years on Valentine’s Day and has presided over 50 weddings since, including that of Josephine and Gieseppina.

Sarah Wilson, a San Francisco lawyer who happened to be passing through city hall, acted as Josephine and Gieseppina’s witness. ‘It makes me proud to be a Californian; to live in a state where we recognise a person’s right to express their love through the institution of marriage,’ she said.

Tags: Breaks, Election, Warfare