The debate below has just been published in the November issue of Crisis magazine and is now online.

My letter is in response to Dr. Horn's article in the June issue, "Closing the Marriage Gap," where he promotes the administration's "healthy marriage" initiative. Dr. Horn's original article is posted here.

Stephen Baskerville

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.

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.

Wade Horn