THAT'S LIFE
Marriage of Convenience
Michelle Cottle is a senior editor at TNR.
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 01.16.04
Ah, reelection time. That magical, golden season when a compassionate conservative's fancy turns to thoughts of love. Or, more specifically, to thoughts of marriage. As The New York Times reported Wednesday, the Bush administration is gearing up to sell itself as marriage counselor to the masses--in particular the low-income masses on welfare. If you're poor and unwed, the Bushies want to help you understand all the good things, financial and otherwise, that holy matrimony can bring to your family. If you're already hitched, they want to show you the perks of staying that way. To this end, the White House even plans to put (a little bit of) its money where its mouth is, setting aside $1.5 billion or so for programs aimed at teaching poor couples the interpersonal skills necessary to sustain "healthy marriages."
Many women's advocates are suspicious of this whole notion, fearing that in its haste to promote marriage, the government will pressure already struggling single moms into relationships that are abusive or that tether them to deadbeat losers who'll lounge around all day watching Jerry Springer and shooting smack bought with the little woman's paycheck. Maybe. But it seems to me the more likely problem is that the initiative won't do much to promote marriage in the first place.
In fact, there's basically zero evidence to suggest that Bush's proposal would be even remotely effective. For starters, most such programs currently in existence are targeted at middle-class couples. (And even there, hard data about success rates, rather than feel-good anecdotes, are strangely elusive.) Men and women trapped in America's underclass, by contrast, face a whole host of additional stressors, from the lack of jobs for daddies to chronic drug use to the number of young black men behind bars. As Michael McManus, a co-founder of the popular "Marriage Savers" program recently noted to the National Catholic Reporter, there's been "almost no experimentation with the poor so far." Moreover, the biggest, most comprehensive effort to target welfare recipients, the state of Oklahoma's four-year-old marriage initiative, has thus far had no effect on the state's astronomical divorce rates. Oklahoma's program "has not worked out so well," McManus conceded, largely because it has failed to get men involved.
Now, maybe Oklahomans simply need more time to get with the program. Alternatively, the program may prove to be a blazing waste of resources in a state without all that many resources--as could a handful of smaller-scale initiatives underway in places like Florida and West Virginia. But until we have even the vaguest indication that these programs can work--especially among the lower-income population being targeted--why is Bush so fired up to take this little experiment national? I mean, aren't Republicans the ones always babbling about the need to demand accountability and tangible results from a program before throwing more money at it?
Besides, if Bush really wanted to do something about poverty and child welfare, he'd focus less on upping marriage rates and more on reducing out-of-wedlock births. Members of the administration, including the president himself, have noted that their desire to promote marriage is really all about the kids--a sentiment with which I totally sympathize. (As an adult, you should be able to ruin your own life in any number of ways without a second thought. But when kids enter the picture...) But is the best way to improve child welfare to encourage a bunch of poor 16-year-olds (or, for that matter, a bunch of poor, unemployed 20-year-olds) to tie the knot for the sake of their unborn child? Of course not. The better strategy is to aggressively discourage these 16-year-olds (and 20-year-olds) from getting themselves knocked up in the first place. (This, in turn, could reduce the number of youthful marriages--ultimately a boon to the marriage movement since studies show that the younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to wind up in Splitsville.) Sadly, this line of thinking marches us directly toward the administration's horribly misguided affection for (again, unproven) abstinence-only sex education programs. But that's a discussion for another day.
Luckily for Team Bush, none of this talk about results or shaky pilot projects really matters. This latest push for marriage-promotion isn't so much about helping folks live happily ever after as it is about getting Bush elected to a second term. With this proposal, the president aims to do two things. One, remind fickle swing voters of the "compassionate conservatism" he promised them back in 2000. To this end, having Bush visit poor neighborhoods where some of these programs are being tried will make for some fabulously compassionate photo ops. As a White House aide told The New York Times, "The president loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city with black churches, and he's very good at it."
Perhaps more important, as the Times (among others) noted, Bush is desperately hoping his efforts to play couples-counselor-in-chief will distract social conservatives fuming over recent assaults on the institution of marriage--such as the Massachusetts court ruling allowing gay marriage and the Supreme Court ruling that gay sex is legally protected behavior. To turn back this attack, conservatives want Bush to come out strongly in favor of an amendment codifying marriage as a one man/one woman arrangement. So far, the president has dragged his feet, and the base is beginning to grumble. "We have a hard time understanding why the reserve," Glenn Stanton, a policy analyst for the conservative group Focus on the Family told the Times.
Mr. Stanton may well be the only person puzzled by the president's "reserve." Issues like gay marriage and shifting sexual mores are tricky terrain for a self-described uniter like Bush. By contrast, cheap-ass, feel-good initiatives aimed at promoting strong marriages--all in the name of happier, healthier children, of course--are something only the most amoral neo-Marxist feminazi could object to. Who cares if the programs actually work? Nearly all of us can agree that they should work--that it would, on the whole, be a positive thing if somehow they could work. And, in an election year, that kind of broad consensus is as good as gold.
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