Tucson, Arizona Friday, 12 April 2002
Bush marriage initiative sparks heated debate
PRO: Kids benefit
By Louis P. Sheldon
President Bush's efforts to encourage marriage as a remedy to poverty and suffering have been criticized by liberals who fear the imposition of morality on the American people and by libertarians who value government neutrality more than they favor good or detest evil.
When it comes to fighting poverty, reducing child abuse and a long list of other problems, one simple fact needs to be recognized - marriage works.
Now I believe there are important reasons for encouraging marriage.
They are rooted in traditional moral values. But the pragmatic and efficient role of marriage in our society is
undeniable.
Steven Nock, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, says the economic impact of marriage has made it a top legislative priority of the Bush administration and many state legislatures.
In West Virginia, welfare parents already receive a $100 marriage "bonus" in their monthly assistance check once they marry.
Other states are trying "covenant marriages," which roll back some of the streamlined "no-fault" divorce provisions of the past and require counseling and other procedures as a prerequisite to divorce.
Libertarians should take heart in the fact that dependence on government - particularly welfare - is less among those parents and children in married households.
The Heritage Foundation found that 74 percent of $199.6 billion spent on child welfare by federal and state governments in 2000 went to single-parent families.
Other reputable studies have discovered numerous other societal impacts. Among them:
* Children raised by married couples are less likely to suffer from behavior problems and emotional disturbances.
* Boys raised in single-parent homes are almost twice as likely to have committed a crime and spent time in jail by the time they reach their early 30s.
* Children raised by both parents are less likely to become victims of physical and sexual abuse than children raised outside traditional marriages.
* Children whose parents are divorced or living out of wedlock are less likely to graduate from high school and as adults are more likely to be unemployed.
But children aren't the only ones to benefit from intact marriages. Married mothers are less likely to experience domestic violence than their never married counterparts.
The Justice Department's 1999 National Crime Victimization Survey found that more than three out of four mothers who have experienced domestic violence were never married.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that men and women who are married are physically and mentally healthier than their unmarried counterparts.
Bush wants to shift federal dollars away from treating the symptoms of our society's ills and toward prescribing long-term cures for the welfare dependency disease.
He has proposed devoting as much as $300 million in federal and state dollars to encouraging healthy marriage across our nation.
A chorus of critics has assembled, and the hand wringing has begun. Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., calls Bush's proposal "wasted money."
Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., warned the pro-marriage proposal would place some in "perilous danger," which, I imagine, is somehow worse than mere danger.
My own belief is that Bush's proposal is a break from the tried-and-failed policy of having government replace the family.
Instead of attempting to draw children away from families by providing meals, extensive child-care services, family life classes, birth control and condoms, he wants to strengthen families by making them more closely knit.
Bush has it right. There simply is no government substitute for a traditional one-man, one-woman marriage.
Anyone who supports less government intrusion in our lives should support Bush's marriage initiative.
* The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon is chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition. This piece was distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.
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CON: More intrusive
By David Boaz
Sit up straight, stop smoking, lose weight, spend more time with your kids - and get
married. The federal government
has a long list of ways you need to shape up.
The Bush administration wants to spend $300 million to promote marriage, mostly among welfare recipients.
There's no question that fatherlessness is a real problem in modern America.
Children in single-parent families are more likely than children in married families to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teen-agers, to abuse drugs and to run into trouble with the law.
Although not all children in single-parent families encounter such problems, there are obviously real benefits to growing up with two parents.
But that doesn't mean that there ought to be a federal program to push people into marriage.
The proposal's supporters insist that they want to spend only a small percentage of the welfare budget on marriage-promotion programs. But they have the cart before the horse.
If we're worried about children growing up without fathers, we need to discourage out-of-wedlock childbearing.
Why did the unwed-pregnancy rate rise from about 5 percent in 1960 to 33 percent today?
One big answer is the welfare system. Starting with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s, the federal government told young women that if they got pregnant without a
husband, a job or a high-school education, they would get a monthly check - not a big check, but enough to live on.
And people responded to the changed incentive system: The rate of out-of-wedlock births started soaring. How do we know that welfare benefits actually have these effects?
Well, a study for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that a 50 percent increase in the value of welfare and food stamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.
Similarly, research by Shelley Lundberg and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington showed that an increase in welfare benefits of $200 a month per family increased the rate of out-of-wedlock births among teen-agers by 150 percent.
As long as we offer teen-age girls and young women this sort of incentive, we can expect a high rate of unwed motherhood - currently, about 1 million babies a year.
Until we change the welfare system, programs to encourage marriage would intrude into our most private decisions without having any real effect.
In a free society, not everything is the responsibility of government. Indeed, our Constitution sets up a government with limited powers - mostly relating to national defense, the courts and the basic rules that guarantee a free economy.
Other important matters are left to the states, or to people to decide for themselves.
And despite the growth of government in our time, that's still the way most people want it.
That's why they responded positively in 2000 to a presidential candidate who kept saying, "My opponent trusts government; I trust you."
That candidate was George W. Bush, who has now proposed that government meddle in the most intimate decisions that people make. But the voters haven't moved with him.
A recent poll found that 79 percent of Americans want the government to "stay out" of promoting marriage.
Even 60 percent of "highly committed" white evangelical Christians oppose a government role in promoting marriage.
Bush should trust the people and drop this idea.
* David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute. This piece was distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. |
