You May Kiss the Bride: Government Is Still Pushing Marriage

By Amy DePaul, AlterNet. Posted June 1, 2009.

"Our organization is all about helping teens learn how to navigate their romantic lives in a healthy way," said institute Director Kay Reed.

As part of its public-education campaign, the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center has created the Web site TwoOfUs.org, which offers tips on dealing with money, conflict and romance in long-term relationships. The tasteful page design and content of the site seem deliberately feminine -- a recent lead article was on the impact of mothers and the challenges of being a supermom (though the discussion boards are, weirdly, dominated by men voicing disdain for marriage and women).

Beyond the Feds: State Marriage Policies

Even if the marriage program were to be eliminated by Congress, activists have made initial strides in securing continued government support at the state level.

The "1 percent solution" is a campaign organized by Chris Gersten, a former official at the federal agency that administers the marriage grants and currently the chairman of the Fatherhood and Marriage Leadership Institute. Under the FAMLI "1 percent" campaign, some states have pledged to dedicate funds to marriage-education programs, usually setting aside a small percentage of their federal block grants for public assistance. Nine states have dedicated the funds, with mostly Republican states participating, although New Mexico recently joined up.

Another policy initiative to preserve marriage is to make divorce harder, which is an effort under way already in Texas. There, under a new law, marriage licenses are cheaper to couples who take marriage-education courses before the wedding. The sponsor of that legislation also has proposed a bill that would require one person in a couple seeking a no-fault divorce to attend 10 hours of marriage-crisis education.

Further, leaders of the marriage-education movement are seeking to broaden their coalition, a significant portion of which is devoutly Christian and traditionalist, by reaching out to minorities, who have been targeted in the federal grant programs. (Hispanic and black rates of childbirth outside marriage are higher than whites’.)

"My effort has been to focus on members of the Congressional Black Caucus. A lot of the grantees are African American," said Gersten. In fact, FAMLI’s home page announces, "URGENT… We need to build ties with members of the Congressional Black Caucus in order to save the federal TANF Healthy Marriage and Fatherhood Funding."

Persuading Obama

Soon after the change of presidency, conservative activists began making the case to save the federal marriage initiatives. In a public letter to Obama, then still president-elect, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation cited a paragraph from The Audacity of Hope that seems to endorse government-sponsored marriage promotion.

"Policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue," Obama wrote in 2006. Three years later, Rector applauded the president. "You were exactly right," he said in his letter.

Other activists, meanwhile, have been demanding modifications to the marriage policy, if not outright termination.

"We call upon the Obama administration to make ending poverty, using proven methods, a top priority. … We call for an end to federal spending on unproven initiatives such as marriage promotion," wrote a coalition of academics and activists representing the interests of gays and lesbians, welfare recipients and unmarried couples.

Other experts criticize the marriage programs for failing to address the needs of low-income parents who either divorced or moved on to new relationships, and are thus not going to marry each other. A pivotal study of low-income families found that 59 percent of unmarried parents have children by more than one partner.

This kind of relationship turnover is a serious problem, according to Andrew Cherlin, author of The Marriage-Go-Round, who said that Americans divorce and remarry at higher rates than in other industrial countries. Repartnering and remarrying are often a source of instability in American children’s lives.

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Amy DePaul is a writer and college instructor who lives in Irvine, Calif. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post and many other newspapers.

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