I just heard a Professor Rev. Dr. Gloria Albrecht crush Bob Duco on his rightwing Christian callin radio show "Fearlessly defending the faith". She talked over him with statistics. Said job security, layoffs, etc. must be discussed first because of their major impact on family values. She had an answer for every right wing angle Duco came with. When he tried to say that some people are basically freeloaders, she came back with the main free loaders are the top 20% in income. Duco had this ridiculous refrain that if an employer doesn't pay enough or whatever, one should just quit. This was his major offered program for workers to defend their family $$$$$ values. She calmly said that is not an option and described why not in many ways, backed with facts.
When he said government shouldn't regulate economics, she replied that corporations have overarching power over politics and politicians, vs workers' power.
Class struggle in the temple.
CB
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http://www.religiousconsultation.org/hitting_home.htm
Hitting Home: Feminist Ethics, Women's Work, and the Betrayal of Family Values by Gloria H. Albrecht
Editorial Reviews
Daniel C. Maguire, President, Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics "Gloria Albrecht has written a masterpiece...and she has done so with clarity, passion, and wit."
Beverley Wildung Harrison, Union Theological Seminary "must read for those...who believe that ethics must have a place in politics. Religious Social Ethics at its best!"
John Raines, Center for Comparative Religious Studies "For anyone concerned with the well being of women and children this book is a must."
Book Description
At the very time when most women's lives are defined by a lack of income, time, and energy, and when being stressed-out is for them more common than the common cold, politicians and other professed guardians of public virtue are stridently lamenting the loss of what they define as "family values." Even as women enter the workforce to provide essential income for their families while attending to children, spouse, and the endless round of domestic chores, every sort of social ill from drug addiction to unwed mothering is laid at their door. As Gloria H. Albrecht shows, this dismal situation is not merely a cultural irony; it is a potential social tragedy.
In a book that combines learning, eloquence, and wit, she explains how this paradox symbolizes the new face of family life in America's post-industrial economy.
"Hitting Home" carefully documents the growing abandonment by business and government of their social responsibility to sustain the well-being of families. She exposes "family-friendly" policies as being in fact policies that are friendly primarily to the profit-oriented goals of the corporate world. Business strategies, touted as the new methods of efficiency, reveal the fundamentally anti-family nature of an economy designed from its origins to exclude those authentic values that arise from caring relationships.
Albrecht amasses compelling data which are illuminated by portraits and stories of the real people whose daily lives are the grist of economics. She emphasizes how sermonizing family values advocates ignore the connection between their ideal family and its exploitation of underpaid "help," whether actual servants, or cooks, or nursery attendants, or child-care provides, etc.--none of whom can themselves afford to support staff necessary to attain the status of being an acknowledged nurturer of those mythic family values.
Throughout her book, Albrecht maintains that authentic family values require an equal social commitment to two connected goals: women's equality and the well-being of families.
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The Rev. Dr. Gloria H. Albrecht served as a consultant in the preparation of the "Changing Family" report. She is Professor of Religious Studies and Women's Studies at University of Detroit Mercy, and earned a PhD in Christian Ethics from Temple University. Her latest book is entitled Hitting Home: Feminist Ethics, Women's Work, and the Betrayal of 'Family Values' (Continuum, 2002).