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Government vs. Marriage



 
 
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Old January 28th 05, 01:11 AM
Dusty
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Default Government vs. Marriage

http://www.crisismagazine.com/november2003/letters.htm

CRISIS MAGAZINE
Government vs. Marriage: Dr. Stephen Baskerville Responds to "Wade Horn"
(Scroll
down page)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Government vs. Marriage

No reasonable person denies the value of marriage to adults, to children,
and to
society. But Wade Horn never answers the question promised in "Closing the
Marriage Gap" (June 2003): How specifically can the government save
marriage?

Even granting the efficacy he claims for various marriage-saving schemes (a
large concession), what precisely can government add that couples and
counselors
cannot do on their own? More importantly, what dangers accompany government
involvement in the most private sphere of life? Government's role is to
coerce,
on pain of incarceration or death. Not surprisingly, this seems to be
precisely
what it is doing.

Helping troubled marriages is a valuable activity of churches. But federal
funding is a formula for turning pastors into police-and at precisely the
time
when many churches have abdicated their role as the guarantors of the
marriage
contract. Initial measures indicate this is already happening.

In January, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced $2.2
million in grants to faith-based groups to "promote fatherhood and healthy
marriage." Horn said the grants "reach out to those who need help in
acquiring
the skills necessary to build relationships." Yet only 25 percent of the
funds
are earmarked for marriage; the rest will deputize private groups to collect
child support, though the therapy and the policing are not strongly
distinguished. The Marriage Coalition, a "faith-based organization" in
Cleveland, is to receive $200,000 to assist child-support enforcement.

In May, HHS was again conflating therapy and law enforcement, announcing
more
grants "to support healthy marriage and parental relationships with the
goals of
improving the well-being of children." Here again marriage promotion is a
smokescreen to collect child support. Almost a million dollars is going to
Michigan's child-support enforcement agency.

"The policy is designed to mobilize the entire community-including clerical,
political, medical, business, and judicial leaders-to support children by
strengthening marriage," according to the Michigan agency. These measures
follow
more forthright expansions of police power, wherein HHS revealed that its
principal method for rebuilding marriages and "parental relationships" is by
arresting spouses and parents. Under a Clinton administration initiative
called
"Project Save Our Children," HHS last year announced mass arrests
"reminiscent
of the old West," as the Christian Science Monitor described it. "Most
Wanted
lists go up, and posses of federal agents fan out across the nation in hot
pursuit." Among "the worst of the worst" was James Circle, earning all of
$39,000 a year and ordered to pay $350 a week for one child, about
two-thirds of
his likely take-home pay.

Dr. Horn has revealed that promoting marriage effectively means collecting
child
support: "These projects are a sensible government approach to testing and
evaluating creative approaches that enhance the overall goals and
effectiveness
of the child-support enforcement program by integrating the promotion of
healthy
marriage into existing child support services."

How? How precisely can law enforcement agents improve anyone's marriage? It
is
likely to have the opposite effect, since any bureaucracy develops a stake
in
perpetuating the problems it ostensibly exists to solve.

Child-support enforcement is actually a mechanism for destroying marriages
by
subsidizing breakups and enticing mothers to divorce. Bryce Christensen
points
out a "linkage between aggressive child-support policies and the erosion of
wedlock."

In her new book, Stolen Vows: The Illusion of No-Fault Divorce and the Rise
of
the American Divorce Industry, Judy Parejko exposes how government-funded
marriage therapists in fact destroy marriages. Parejko was locked out of her
office as a court- affiliated mediator for trying to reconcile couples. Now
she
is challenging no-fault divorce, the legal basis for the decline of
marriage.
Her group, Defending Holy Matrimony, is unlikely to receive federal funds.

Child-support enforcement is corrupting government throughout America (see
"The
Politics of Family Destruction," Crisis, November 2002). HHS now promises to
spread this corruption to the churches and to the institution of marriage
itself. Recently, the American Prospect castigated the administration for
"promoting religion." But they are missing the point. By recruiting churches
and
citizen groups to collect child support, HHS is profaning religion. It is
turning the clergy into informers and churches into extensions of the
federal
government.

Horn also invokes the bugbear of "domestic violence," implying that
government
agents are necessary to make marriage "safe" (from husbands, of course). In
fact, marriage is already the safest environment for women and children,
since
most domestic violence takes place after separation and involves disputes
over
child custody.

In short, the government destroys marriage with one hand, and claims to
rebuild
it with the other. And when-inevitably-it cannot rebuild it, it takes the
"batterers" or the "deadbeats" away to jail, thus fulfilling the true
function
of all government.

If Horn confronted the question honestly, he would find there is a great
deal
government could do to preserve marriage without destroying what it touches.
It
might begin by adopting the Hippocratic precept: First, do no harm.

As Allan Carlson recently said in a lecture at the U.S. Senate (with Horn as
a
respondent), if the government is serious about reviving marriage, it must
roll
back no-fault divorce. At the federal level, it could also rein in the
federal
divorce enforcement gestapo created in the name of child support and
domestic
violence. Putting more therapists and now churches on the government payroll
will merely expand the gravy train of those that benefit from broken
marriages.

Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
Howard University
Washington, D.C.

Wade Horn responds:
Throughout the ages, different theories have been advanced about the central
purpose of government. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the role of government
is
"to promote the welfare of the territory." President Theodore Roosevelt
said,
"The object of government is the welfare of the people." Stephen Baskerville
has
a very different idea. He wrote: "Government's role is to coerce, on pain of
incarceration or death." Put me on the side of Aquinas and Roosevelt.

As assistant secretary for children and families within the U.S. Department
of
Health and Human Services, it is my job to try to understand, as best I can,
the
problems facing children and families today and seek to solve them. Yes,
some
lawmakers, politicians, and judges have made some bad decisions when it
comes to
children and families. But rather than simply acquiesce to the decline in
child
well-being, we should seek to institute policies that help promote stronger
families, healthy marriages, and the well-being of children.

On the subject of marriage education, Baskerville asks, "What precisely can
government add that couples and counselors cannot do on their own?" The
answer
is: access. While it may be that affluent couples have ready access to
marriage
education services, that is frequently not the case when it comes to many
lower-income couples. That's because such services often are not available
in
low-income communities, and even if they are, low-income couples have less
resources available to them to access those services. Given the importance
of
healthy marriages to child well-being, the Bush administration simply seeks
to
provide low-income couples greater access to marriage education services
that
can help them form and sustain healthy marriages.

In this, Baskerville sees "a formula for turning pastors into police," yet,
as
Crisis readers know, the Catholic Church requires all who are to be married
in
the Church to receive Pre-Cana instruction before the sacrament is
administered.
Far from transforming local parish priests into agents of a police state,
allowing low-income couples more opportunities to access marriage education
will
simply help improve the chances that they will form and sustain healthy
marriages.

As for child-support enforcement, Baskerville believes it is "a mechanism
for
destroying marriages by subsidizing breakups and enticing mothers to
divorce." I
respectfully disagree. It is an unfortunate fact that too many children are
growing up in broken homes, either because of divorce or out-of-wedlock
childbearing. In such cases, are we to simply turn our backs on negligent
non-custodial parents who refuse to support their children financially?
Baskerville apparently believes we should. We don't.

But Baskerville is correct in one regard: Child-support enforcement alone is
not
sufficient to deal with the current crisis of fatherlessness. Rather, at the
same time that we endeavor to ensure that children are not financially
disadvantaged by negligent parents, we also should endeavor to prevent
family
breakup from happening in the first place. That's precisely the goal of
integrating healthy marriage initiatives into the child-support system. By
doing
so, we are creating forward-thinking policies that will lessen the need for
child-support enforcement in the future.

I assume even Baskerville would agree that a healthy marriage is the
environment
that will confer the most advantages to the most children. The question,
then,
is how do we improve the odds that children will grow up within the context
of a
healthy marriage? His solution is to abolish the child-support enforcement
system, after which, apparently, everyone magically will settle down into
lifelong, healthy marriages. As a child psychologist, I gave up on magic as
the
solution for improving the well-being of children long ago. I prefer
commonsense
and practical solutions. That describes precisely the president's healthy
marriage initiative.


--
"The most terrifying words in the English language a
I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
--- Ronald Reagan


 




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