WASHINGTON — In 2002, over a third of all births in the United
States were to unwed mothers. About 40 percent of recent first
marriages end in divorce and the prospects for second marriages are
even dimmer. In several American subcultures such as inner city
D.C., wedlock is the rare exception. So we now have a perfectly
good (i.e., wretched) laboratory from which social scientists can
discover how much marriage once did for us.
The results fairly overwhelmingly favor getting hitched.
Marriage helps fathers love their children. Even the
best-intentioned unmarried fathers have a much harder time caring
for their kids. They move in and out of the children’s lives rather
than providing stable, reliable support; they have children by
other women who make conflicting claims on their time, resources,
and loyalty.
Marriage helps women regulate their relationships with men. In
low marriage communities, women haven’t been liberated from
patriarchal shackles. Instead, they often hold men to very low
standards, requiring little in the way of commitment before they
have sex or after they get pregnant, since holding out for anything
more is viewed as wildly unrealistic. The father is the first man
most women come to know; he provides the first model for what she
can ask of a man, what she can expect. If he is absent or only
intermittently present, her expectations shrivel.
And let’s not forget marriage significantly reduces crime and
dependence on government. Boys want to become men, and when they
don’t know how to achieve manhood as responsible fathers, they will
seek it through promiscuity, violence, and the sense of “tribe”
provided by gangs. When mothers cannot rely on fathers to take care
of their children, government must replace daddy.
ALL OF WHICH is a long way of establishing what should be obvious:
Marriage is a public issue. And now, a major marriage proposal has
reached the Senate: the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a portion of
the Temporary Aid for Needy Families reauthorization bill which
would provide $1.5 billion — $200 million a year for five years
from the federal government, the rest from state matching funds —
for programs to promote marriage. The funds will be split between
state agencies and private nonprofits, and can be used to develop
programs for just about any group that might desire marriage
education: engaged couples, unwed parents, high school students,
people in troubled marriages.
This is not a radical step. Both state and federal governments
have been funding marriage education for high school students and
adult couples considering marriage for years.
But is it the government’s job? The initiative has come under
heavy fire as an intrusive, big-government ploy to propagandize
reluctant couples into tying the knot. The initial press was
overwhelmingly negative, with editorial headlines like “Heartless
Marriage Plans” and “A Dubious Marriage Initiative.” Robert Reich
argued in the New York Times that marriage rates were
driven by economic conditions, thus changing people’s beliefs about
marriage was a waste of time and money.
This perspective — that women don’t marry because their
children’s fathers don’t have jobs — neglects both the economic
benefits of marriage (sharing a household, providing greater
stability and support) and the fact that many of the fathers
do have jobs. It also fails to acknowledge that having sex
but not getting married because you believe you can’t afford it is
the perfect recipe for staying poor.
Criticism from the right characterizes the marriage initiative
as just one among many “compassionate conservative” expansions of
government spending and influence under President George W. Bush.
Yet strong marriages reduce government dependence and help to
reduce crime and other social costs as well. Strengthening marriage
will make limited government both more appealing and more
likely.
Critics of a more civil libertarian bent focus on the mistaken
belief that couples will be “coerced” into marrying, but
participation in any of the programs (with the exception, I assume,
of any high school classes) is entirely voluntary. No one would
have to participate in a marriage-education class to get a welfare
check, for example.
THERE ARE STILL pitfalls ahead before the Healthy Marriage
Initiative can become more than just another symbolic gesture. The
proposal right now is necessarily vague; the details will be hashed
out at the state and local levels. And it’s those details, decided
in hundreds of scattered conference rooms out of the public view,
that will determine whether the initiative is enough of a success
to justify the time and energy the marriage movement has spent
promoting it.
It’s understandable that the initiative’s supporters wanted to
operate on the federal level: As with Willie Sutton’s famous
explanation of why he robbed banks, that’s where the money is. But
fellow marriage activists didn’t seem prepared for the media
firestorm that greeted the initiative. Intensely political,
partisan media coverage is a fact of life for any program of the
federal government.
It’s no coincidence that the news stories that have treated the
initiative more sympathetically have generally focused on
small-scale, local programs. On the national level,
anything, especially a “values” issue, becomes chum in
media-infested waters. Supporters of the initiative could reply
that it’s harder to coordinate efforts and receive funding at the
state and local levels, or via charity rather than government
monies; but in the end, which would really have proven harder:
passing a more-than-symbolic Healthy Marriage Initiative, or
promoting and supporting lots of local initiatives?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that the
marriage initiative could justly be supported by anyone who favors
limited government, stronger families, and reducing poverty.
Strengthening marriage in poor communities, in fact, would be far
more empowering than a welfare check.
