The wedge issue” is a time-tested election-year strategy, and the Bush administration is unusually fond of – and unusually good at – the practice. Oppose the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance? You must be an atheist. Oppose the Patriot Act? You must hate America, or have something to hide, or both.

The controversy surrounding “Healthy Marriages” – President Bush’s plan to use welfare money to spread marital bliss – isn’t a spectacular battle like gay marriage or the “under God” business, but it’s as much about creating divisions and gaining leverage. It’s just less “shock and awe” and more stealth bomber, engineered to both look impressive and go unnoticed.

Bush first introduced Healthy Marriages in early 2002, with little accompanying fanfare. But with the flap over gay unions bringing the definition of family to the top of the national agenda, the media are taking a second look.  

Ostensibly, the program is about improving the lives of poor children, by fostering “stable families.” And it sounds good. It appeals to core constituents and seems innocuous – if not downright reasonable – to most everyone else. The few opponents are so ideologically diverse that their varied objections dissolve in a sea of “ifs,” “ands,” and “buts.” Best of all, it won’t cost taxpayers a thing – at least, not so much that they’ll notice.

In light of the war in Iraq and the stumbling economy, Healthy Marriages may be considered a “soft” issue, but poverty in America is a pervasive and immediate problem. Approximately 35 million Americans – one out of every 10 people and one out of every six children – live below the poverty line. The Bush administration says encouraging marriage will reduce those numbers.

There is some evidence suggesting they may be right. Social scientists have found that children in married families are less likely to be poor, addicted to drugs, and involved in crime, and more likely to finish high school and have healthy families of their own. Under the new plan, the Bush administration would put more money toward eliminating the disincentives to marriage that now exist in the welfare system, support existing marriages by teaching relationship skills, and educate the country on the value of the institution.

But the administration is touting one fact – children in married families are generally better off than those in single-parent families – while conveniently ignoring another: We have no idea how to promote marriage among the poor. In his “Fatherly Advice” column for the National Fatherhood Initiative website, child psychologist Wade Horn even admitted as much. “There is no evidence that any of this will work,” he wrote in 2000. That was before he was appointed as Bush’s healthy marriage pitchman.

Critics argue that it’s premature to put so much money into what amounts to a vast social experiment. The enthusiasm for the plan, they say, isn’t as much about reducing child poverty as it is about defending traditional marriage as a panacea for all of America’s social ills. Critics allege that for healthy marriage defenders – a diverse group of concerned citizens, beltway policy analysts, and “faith-based” organizers – Bush’s program is meant to initiate a widespread culture change that extends beyond the poor.

And there is evidence to support critics’ claims. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, a bipartisan bill signed by President Clinton, already provides for all the “marriage promotion activities” included in the Bush plan. Under the 1996 law, states have recently begun experimenting with policies and initiatives to promote marriage. But as expert Theodora Ooms points out, “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.” In fact, the potential implications of current state initiatives are so unknown, the administration won’t endorse any particular method of promoting marriage.

Bush is betting that the perceived softness of Healthy Marriages will carry it through Congress. The welfare reauthorization bill has been hung up in the Senate for months, but lately the sticking point has been minimum wage, not marriage promotion. If the bill passes while Bush is still in office – there’s a chance that the Senate might not consider it again until 2005 – Healthy Marriages will likely pass with it. So far, the administration has succeeded in presenting it as a common-sense plan. But hard questions remain unanswered.

Clinton’s compromising legacy

The idea of the federal government promoting marriage predates the Bush administration. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, was pitching similar ideas to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank, have been building the case for marriage promotion almost as long.

By 1992, when welfare dependence was at its peak, there was a widespread, bipartisan feeling that reform – including work requirements and family formation goals – was a legislative, if not moral, imperative. As a candidate for president, Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it” by imposing work requirements and time limits on benefits, and funding programs that would reduce out-of-wedlock births.

At the end of his first term, during his bid for re-election, Clinton signed the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. “A long time ago I concluded that the current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility and family,” Clinton said. “Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.” The new law effectively ended the New Deal guarantee of welfare for poor Americans.

Conservatives complained that their agenda had been coopted. Liberals cried treason. Two high-ranking Health and Human Services administrators, including long-time Clinton family friend Peter Edelman, resigned in disgust. Moynihan called the new law “the most brutal act of social policy since reconstruction,” predicting that the law’s backers would “take this disgrace to their graves.” But the plan was roundly regarded as a bipartisan success – it still is – and Clinton’s propensity for compromise helped deliver a landslide victory.

At the time, most critics were overwhelmed by the abandonment of the old welfare system and the sweeping changes of the new one. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cornerstone of welfare for six decades, was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which gave states more discretion over the use of funds, limited the duration of assistance to five years, and established strict work requirements.

The new law was focused on encouraging recipients to get to work, but it was also explicitly aimed at influencing family formation. New Deal welfare programs contained implicit financial disincentives to marriage for single parents; often, a mother’s benefits would drop significantly or end altogether if she got married. Under TANF, states could eliminate those disincentives, but they were also directed to actively encourage marriage as a method for ending welfare dependence.

While there were deep concerns on the left about welfare reform generally, the family –based objectives weren’t that controversial. Little was made of the fact that states could theoretically use 100 percent of their welfare grants to promote marriage – and not just among the poor. Programs aimed at reducing out-of-wedlock births and encouraging two-parent families could be directed to the general population (see Box 2).  

Since it was unclear how, exactly, the goals were to be met, few states implemented explicit family formation policies. That is, until Bush became president.

How marriage will cure poverty and other tall tales

Shortly after taking office in 2001, Bush appointed one of the marriage movement’s most vocal leaders, former President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, Wade Horn, as Assistant Secretary in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. With one of their own heading ACF, the movement has more clout than ever. But critics worry that the administration is publicly “soft-pedaling” a vague and potentially dangerous – and extraordinarily well-funded –experiment. Since 2001, 35 states have adopted some form of marriage promotion. And many states are already using TANF money for “marriage promotion activities” aimed at whole populations.

Horn is careful to say in public that the government won’t be “playing cupid,” and that the emphasis is on healthy marriages, not marriage for its own sake, or marriage as the solution to poverty. “We’re focused on helping low-income couples build strong marriages and get equal access to marriage education services on a voluntary basis,” he told the Boston Globe last month. (Horn denied repeated phone and email requests to be interviewed for this article.)

When speaking for the president, Horn anticipates and neutralizes objections to the plan, but it is not clear that he takes them seriously. “Someday someone has to explain to me what the controversy is,” he said to The Weekly Standard in March 2002, “why it’s a terrible idea to help couples who’ve chosen marriage for themselves to develop a skill set which will allow them to have a healthy marriage.”

But Horn’s posturing obscures the real issue. Few object to the expressed goals of teaching relationship skills or fostering loving families. Rather, critics fear that the administration is putting a pretty face on a dubious ideology that holds up marriage as the answer to poverty and the welfare state. They point out that there are very few restriction on how the TANF money can be used. The language is vague enough that faith- and community-based organizations can easily go from endorsing healthy relationships to promoting marriage as the only possible healthy relationship (see Box 1).

“In the abstract, this is a great thing,” said Stephanie Coontz, co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She acknowledges, as most critics of the plan do, that a healthy marriage benefits both parents and children.

But she is uneasy about dispatching non-profits and religious groups – some with no training at all – to implement unproven programs. One marriage promotion method touted by the Bush administration, “Marriage Education,” can be taught by “para-professionals, lay leaders, teachers, clergy, or mental health professionals,” according to ACF literature. “Some courses require no training and are ready to teach out-of-the-box.”

Coontz is also suspicious of the intentions of the White House and its ideological backers. “The administration isn”t putting it forward as an anti-poverty measure “they’re soft-pedaling it as much as possible,” Coontz said. “Their biggest supporters are people who really do see this as an alternative to the welfare system.”

“The people at the Heritage Foundation clearly argue that getting people married is the way to stop poverty, and that that’s where the bulk of our efforts should go,” Coontz said.

She’s right. Heritage – the policy pipeline for the White House – is saying what the administration won’t. In a March 26 report, Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue wrote, “the collapse of Marriage is the principle cause of child poverty in the United States.” It’s a convenient theory, but not one that is widely accepted outside Bush’s tight ideological circle.

Most experts on welfare, marriage, and social policy share a lot of common ground and mutual respect. If it weren’t for sectarian ideologies, they say, they might be able to hammer out a workable healthy marriage program that could satisfy everyone.

“People on both sides who are debating this issue believe that families need help and support and need to escape poverty,” said Dorian Solot, co-author of Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple. Solot is also Executive Director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which she founded in 1998 to advocate for marriage-neutral social policy. “I do think, interestingly, that these groups share very similar values,” she said.

But Wade Horn doesn’t see it that way – at least he didn’t use to. Before joining the Bush administration, when he was still president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, he characterized his opponents as “the we-hate-marriage left.” The Heritage Foundation voices this adversarial divide: “We have two very different worldviews and two very different strategic goals, and they’re totally irreconcilable,” Heritage policy analyst Patrick Fagan said in a phone interview. Like Horn before he was initiated into Bush’s circle of trust, Fagan is quick to dismiss his opponents’ arguments. He sees his side of the debate as “the traditional, Judeo-Christian, orthodox, ortho-praxis community,” and critics as “the newer, sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” community.

But the majority of concerned researchers and scholars locate themselves somewhere between the ideological poles. To them, the debate isn’t as contentious as the media or the Heritage Foundation are making it appear. “I’m not sure where these people are who he’s making out to be his opponents,” Solot said of Fagan, “but I’ve never met them.”

Fuzzy numbers, clear disclaimers

Both camps in the marriage debate have research to supports their views. But analysts at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), widely acknowledged as a responsible, non-partisan think-tank, argue that we don’t yet have answers to a couple of important questions. States are expected to develop innovative programs to promote marriage, but whether they have the know-how remains to be seen.

Much of the research on the relationship between marriage and poverty is imperfect, inconclusive, or worse, purposely partisan. Politicians and advocates on all sides manipulate the numbers to suit their needs; sometimes they even cite the same numbers to make different points. If the trend supports one’s argument, the unwritten rule goes, cite the trend; if the trend casts doubt on one’s argument, cite an individual case. It’s this rhetorical calculus that gave us the “welfare queen” in the 1980’s, and gives us the average “healthy” family today.

In a recent report that synthesizes marriage and poverty research, Mary Parke, a CLASP policy analyst, concludes that there are no simple answers. “Findings from the research are often oversimplified, leading to exaggeration by proponents of marriage initiatives and to skepticism from critics,” she writes. “While it’s difficult to disentangle the effects of income and family structure, clearly the relationship operates in both directions: poverty is both cause and effect of single parenthood.” It’s a conclusion that undermines the Heritage Foundation’s premise that marriage is the main cause of child poverty. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Heritage Foundation continues to insist that the merits of the initiatives are beyond doubt. “This is an equation made in Hell,” Fagan said of the historical resistance to federal marriage promotion. “We know that marriage reduces poverty,” he said. “It’s been a known, open secret for a long time.”

In any case, states have begun experimenting with a variety of initiatives aimed at reducing divorce rates, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock births. Arizona has dispatched a 48-foot semi-trailer that carries marriage counselors to low-income areas. West Virginia is giving a $100 monthly bonus to poor couples that marry. Despite the flurry of new initiatives, the Administration of Children and Families acknowledges that most programs haven’t been properly evaluated, if they’ve been evaluated at all.

Theodora Ooms, a senior policy analyst at CLASP, regularly consults with federal, state, and local public officials on marriage promotion policies and strategies. She thinks federal marriage promotion is a good idea. But she has reservations about the plan as it stands. Since states have just begun implementing the programs, Ooms said in a phone interview, “it’s much too early” to know if they’ve been successful. “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.”

At a Healthy Marriage conference sponsored by the ACF last year, the Director of the Division of Child and Family Development, Naomi Goldstein, acknowledged that states’ evaluation methods have been flawed. “They are too often based on small, non-representative samples and lack adequate experimental design or long-term follow-up,” she said. “They have not generally focused on low-income populations and/or unmarried parents, or included child-level outcome measurement.”

The ACF’s published list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages includes such initiatives as modification of no-fault divorce laws and television advertising campaigns extolling the virtues of marriage, none of which are directed exclusively at the poor. Four states have passed reductions in the cost of a marriage license for couples, poor or not, who take a marriage course. Florida, for example, has dropped its fee from $88 to $55.50 for such couples. But these programs’ inclusion, the document warns, “does not constitute or imply favoring or endorsement by ACF.”

Although they’re clear in disclaiming responsibility, Bush and Horn have still not answered the central question: If we don’t have any confidence in the current programs and we haven’t evaluated them, why are we expanding them?

Deploying the culture warriors

We may not know Bush’s true intent for “Healthy Marriages,” but it’s somewhere in between a sop for “family values” conservatives and a nefarious Orwellian plot. What’s clear is, there’s a vast middle ground, and he’s not reaching out for it. He’s not even looking out for it.

By design and by some chance, the plan has eluded widespread scrutiny. Bush has managed to sell it as a soft-and-fuzzy, “it’s all about the kids” plan. But he has had to be deceptive to pull it off. The administration maintains publicly that the interest is in promoting healthy marriages, but without enough information to endorse any marriage programs, they can have no real idea what the results of state-sponsored initiatives might be.

Even the staunchest critics of the Bush plan acknowledge that the government would be wise to promote healthy relationships among the poor. But instead of trying to pacify his critics, Bush and his strategists prefer to deploy the culture warriors. Oppose Healthy Marriages? You must be one of those “sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” types.

Scales photograph from istockphoto.com

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Heritage Foundation
URL: http://www.heritage.org

The National Fatherhood Initiative
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org

Center for Law and Public Policy (CLASP)
URL: http://www.clasp.org

Administration of Children and Families
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov

Council on Contemporary Families
URL: http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org

Alternatives to Marriage Project
URL: http://www.unmarried.org

TOPICS>

Understanding the President?s Healthy Marriage Initiative
Report by Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue
March 26, 2004
URL: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/bg1741.cfm

ACF list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/region5/htm_pages/compendium.htm

Doing Something to Boost Marriage
Essay by Wade Horn
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org/articles/wh102500.htm

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
URL: http://crcw.princeton.edu/fragilefamilies/index.asp

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