Marriage and Social Policy

Many thanks to Harry Brighouse of Crooked Timber for linking to my post on Alabama and the likely rejection of Amendment 2, which would have removed the language which denied the existence of any general right to an education from the state constitution. Quite a few people posted insightful comments, including Harry himself; I'll have to fish some of those out (along with a few comments from some earlier posts as well) and present them along with some comments of my own about libertarianism, Christianity, and "moral values." But for now, a couple of quick notes on some related subjects, specifically having to do with welfare, marriage, and the role of the state.

This week, Slate ran a dialogue which featured posts from Mickey Kaus, Ron Haskins and Jonah Edelman on Jason DeParle's new book, American Dream, which closely describes the lives of the poor in America during the era of welfare reform. All of the e-mail exchanges on DeParle's book are superb; one should read the whole series (here, here, and here). Among their praise for DeParle's work, several conclusions emerge: that Clinton-era welfare reform got at least a few very crucial things right; that linking welfare to work is a crucial step in breaking the cycle of poverty; and that an immense distance remains to be traveled if equal opportunities are truly to be available to the urban poor. All three discussants agree that the single greatest contributor to that distance is the dreadful state of the family in inner cities. Again and again, the facts makes themselves undeniable, in the words of poor women themselves as well as in statistics: the violence, despair and bad choices which plague the poorest communities in America are profoundly wrapped up in the irresponsibility and criminality of men who father children, refuse to look for or keep jobs, abuse girlfriends and the welfare system, sell and do drugs, intimidate friends who try to change, and generally fill the lives of so many struggling working mothers, desperately trying to raise their children (usually illegitimate, generally torn between multiple homes as well as the street), with pain, confusion, and fear. What could possibly alter this dreadful legacy? Obviously what's really needed is both a general cultural revival as well as the preservation of a economic world where the jobs which cities once provided cannot so easily be taken away by globalization or illegal immigration; but the discussants don't go in that direction. What they do talk about is increasing the minimum wage (to try to compete with the drug economy which "employs" so many poor black males) or even legalizing drugs (if only to bring some disciplinary consequences and legitimacy to the "jobs" most of these men have at least some familiarity with). Mostly, however, they talk about marriage: whether the slowly increasing earning power of formerly welfare-dependent working mothers will lead to more women finding the strength to refuse to put up with unproductive men in their lives, and what, if anything, the state can do to them help get to that point. This leads to a discussion of Bush's "marriage initiative"--which DeParle, who has long been associated with liberal critics of Republican efforts at welfare reform, has cautious approval for. It isn't every day that one sees a discussion about welfare embrace both promoting marriage and universal health insurance--but to my mind, they both have the same goal in mind: helping people get into the sort of situation where they can live a life of security, both financial and emotional. The pathologies of poverty in the U.S. make it clear that both the Republicans and the Democrats have missed, or refused to see, for a very long time how both of these two securities are profoundly mixed.

Meanwhile, here in Arkansas, our governor is pushing "covenant marriage"--a recent legal innovation, also available in Arizona and Louisiana, which requires couples to accept pre-wedding counseling and allows divorce only in cases of adultery, imprisonment, abandonment, abuse and after a substantial waiting period. Arkansas has a very high marriage rate, but also an extremely high divorce rate, which is pretty common throughout much of South (a point that can be legitimately made as part of an accusation of red-state hypocrisy). Again, the real issue here is one of education (the lack of it), poverty (the extent of it), and the culture of divorce itself--which is present everywhere, but more easily manifest in areas where the sort of habits and choices that clearly work in favor of staying married are less common. Fighting this culture is thus only one part of the problem (and a difficult one, so long as no-fault divorce remains the law of the land), but nonetheless an important part, and trying to make marriage into a stronger and more binding association through political and social pressure sounds like a good (if limited) strategy to me. For those who find any sort of state intervention or involvement in the supposedly "private" matter of marriage to be distasteful (which is really a way of saying that any sort of public judgment about one's lifestyle is to be avoided), Governor Huckabee's agenda will of course seem like more moralistic interference. It think, on the contrary, that it's one aspect of a broad and necessary movement, a movement to strengthen and make more valuable the marriage relationship for everyone, for dozens of easily empirically demonstrable reasons. Of course, that won't satisfy those with philosophical objections, which is why my arguments about the legitimacy of (some) state actions in relation to a popularly held, communally articulated moral agenda continues (and will likely long continue) to run up against the arguments of those who don't see why there need be many (or perhaps even any) collective obligations, whether financial or personal, in a liberal state. But in the meantime, the fact that at least some people are recognizing the relevance of the "moral issue" of marriage to social policy, both for the inner cities as well as elsewhere, is an encouraging sign.