I’m quoted on the marriage movement and federal marriage programs in Mary Meehan’s recent article Marriage as social medicine (Lexington Herald-Leader, 9/25/07). According to the article:
“[Sacks] said the pro-marriage movement has become ‘kind of a mania’ and is ‘very dismissive of non-custodial fathers.’ It makes the assumption, he said, ‘that no man will take responsibility unless the government coerces them to do it’ and puts responsible fathers on the defensive.”
One of my criticisms of the marriage movement and its influential thinkers–including David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, and Elizabeth Marquardt (pictured), author of Between Two Worlds–is its view of divorced fathers.
In Fatherless America, Blankenhorn has many good things to say on the importance of fathers and of intact families. In one email exchange with David, I told him that I had been reading his book on a Sunday when my wife and kids had gone to see a movie, and that while reading it I kept looking out the window to see if they had come back yet–the book really made me want to be with my kids.
Yet Blankenhorn errs by placing almost all blame for family breakdown on fathers, who allegedly “abandon” their children. A couple years ago there was a little three-sided debate over this assertion between Blankenhorn, Stephen Baskerville and I at the Family Scholars blog here.
Marquardt does make a substantive effort to be gender-balanced in Between Two Worlds, and she makes a good case that what children need are married parents, though she overstates it a bit. Yet Marquardt is very opposed to shared parenting and has a low regard for the contributions of noncustodial parents after a divorce. To her credit, she acknowledged this issue at the Children’s Rights Council conference last year, explaining that her previous analysis seemed to end at family breakdown, providing no answers for the millions of families which have already broken down.
The Herald-Leader article mostly deals with federal marriage programs. One is the “Bluegrass Healthy Marriage Initiative, one of the federally funded programs, [which opertaes] under a three-year, $1 million grant with the goal of promoting marriage and increasing the amount of money unwed fathers pay in child support.”
I’m all for promoting marriage, but some of these federal programs seem to be more oriented towards fathers-as-wallets than serious attempts to create stable families.
We did a His Side with Glenn Sacks show on this a few years ago called “Bush’s Marriage Initiative: A Step Forward for Families or a State Intrusion?” The show featured a debate between Stephen Baskerville, a critic of the Initiative, and Rozario Slack of First Things First, one of the most prominent advocates of the proposals. To learn more and to listen to the show, click here.
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