Social Engineers vs. Divorcées: The Real Marriage Movement Steps Forward

January 12, 2004

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by David R. Usher

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In her recent Reason Magazine article "Divorcées and Social Engineers: Fathers face off against the marriage movement", Cathy Young misses the real issue: The real Marriage Movement has stepped forward. We are the Marriage Movement, and we now challenge the social engineers pretending to be the "Marriage Movement", whose work slyly continues the same failed agenda set by their forebears of the 1960's

Both myself and Dr. Baskerville have called for an end to "irresponsible divorce", which is the driver of the "divorce revolution". I do not understand why Cathy Young views this with doubtful eyes. It makes perfect sense to suggest that a spouse should be "shown the door" if (usually she) wants to end a marriage for anything less than a responsible reason, instead of rewarding (usually her) with chattel control over property and children, the blessings of society, and victim-status as a "struggling single mom".

Anybody who cares about the well-being of women and children must agree with us. Studies overwhelmingly point to the fact that the futures of women, children, and men are much better, by every social and economic measure, within the context of the intact two-parent family. We must look to policy changes that will encourage marital responsibility over time, for the benefit of everybody. This immediately requires that we take reasonable steps to discourage "irresponsible divorce".

Reforming divorce does not mean turning marriage into a trap

Dr. Felicity Goodyear-Smith, author of "First, Do No Harm", agreed with me that we need to do things to help spouses work though the normal processes of marriage and aging, instead of selling divorce as the preferred option. It is normal for marriages to go through the baby blues, the four-year boredom, the seven-year itch, the 15-year midlife crisis, menopause, and retirement. It is truly radical that we normally reward the party most irresponsible to the marriage, instead of helping people through these problems and being supportive of the spouse responsible to the marriage.

What we advocate cannot possibly turn marriage into a trap. Under the concept of "marital responsibility", anybody can have a divorce anytime, for any reason. A wide variety of perverse incentives have been driving the "divorce devolution" ever since Ronald Reagan signed the first "no fault" marriage statute as Governor of California. We simply advocate for removing these perverse incentives by holding the irresponsible spouse (who has no legitimate cause of action to break the legal and religious contract of marriage) responsible for their actions.

By encouraging personal responsibility, we encourage individuals to work through the normal processes of marriage and aging. By encouraging personal responsibility, we reduce the numbers of individuals who divorce at a weak moment, end up with much greater problems, and inflict social and economic damage on themselves, their children, and society. Certainly, this is a reasonable policy goal for anyone who believes that freedom cannot exist without personal responsibility.

The fundamental problem with the existing "Marriage Movement"

Dr. Baskerville is absolutely correct in pointing out that the divorce industry is a multi-billion dollar industry -- a complex amalgamation formed of many professions empowered solely by insisting that wreckless divorce is a necessary institution (particularly if the petitioner is a woman). What is truly radical here is that anyone would suggest that Baskerville's writings, which merely point out reality and hard facts, are anything less than reasonable.

This illustrates the fundamental problem with the so-called "Marriage Movement", which has assumed an illegitimate policy role ever since Dave Blankenhorn published his book "Fatherless America" in 1995. "Fatherless America" is the political cookbook from which social policy and legislation has emanated since it was published 1995.

Political theorists know that the best way to control people is to form an organization purporting to do something that looks good, while it is actually something entirely different, and issuing misinformation to cover its tracks. This is a fundamental element of Marxist theory, for example.

Such is the case with the present so-called "Marriage Movement", which I am calling out on the carpet to face off with the real Marriage Movement, which is comprised of a long line of (feminist-inspired) scholars and policy wonks who, over a time span of forty years, have become quite adept at using all sorts of illusory language as a veil for enacting child support and other anti-family legislation.

Why the so-called "Marriage Movement" is Illegitimate

To fully realize why the present "Marriage Movement" is illegitimate, we must first take a brief tour of social and political history between 1960 and 1995.

In the early 1960's when the divorce revolution hit, feminists had a tremendous number of angry poor single mothers on their hands. This problem immediately spawned Johnson's "Great Society". But continuing senseless divorce and illegitimacy was driving politically-unsupportable deficit spending, which by the mid-960's caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others to talk about the divorce and illegitimacy problem. Feminists had to stop this quickly, and gave politicians a convenient solution: Instead of dealing with the problem, a dangerous change was made to the Family Support Act in an attempt to institutionalize the problem and make somebody else pay for it. Instead of welfare being a public tithe, every time the Government gave out welfare it could collect if from a man. We see that the personalities of the Pied Piper, Robin Hood, Cinderella, and Blackbeard had merged to form an aggressive institution that would rip through society for years to come.

Feminists continued to try to violate the laws of socioeconomic gravity: How to make the single-parent family economically and socially viable. We all know that one parent cannot do the work of two. We all know that an intact family is most likely to have both the economic and the social resources to raise children and do well. During the 1970's, high maintenance awards were popularized, to hide the problem and hopefully make up the difference. Maintenance fell out of favor over time, so feminists called on peers interested in making money to invent the "Williams Model", convenently characterized maintenance as "child support", while giving fathers no credit for their own living expenditures. Most states quickly adopted this model, to keep the welfare state off the political horizon as much as possible.

This still did not work. In divorce everyone necessarily comes up short. Government still expected fathers to pay for it all, but actual welfare collections could not nearly match welfare outlays -- because few men can afford to support two households. By the early 1990's, there was tremendous public pressure for ending the welfare problem -- which was as large as the deficit itself. The Taxpayer simply had enough of this nonsense. Social engineers had to act fast. Feminists knew something had to be done to keep the welfare state but to make it appear as if it went away. Enter Dave Blankenhorn.

In 1990, Dave Blankenhorn was appointed a leading member of President Bush's National Commission on America's Urban Families, chaired by then-Missouri-Governer John Ashcroft. Being a Missourian active in politics, I contacted Governor Ashcroft and Dave Blankenhorn. Dave Blankenhorn spent a lot of time in Jefferson City organizing and framing the Commission report, and Governor Ascroft relied on him heavily to produce it. I spoke with both of them a few times and submitted a heavily-footnoted 62-page research paper titled "Generation One". My paper went into great detail about the etiology of the divorce and welfare problem, making suggestions for historic changes to tax and other federal code to do things to break the welfare cycle while stimulating job creation in urban low-income areas -- first as a Presidential waiver initiative, and later nationwide. These changes would have put low-skill manufacturing jobs in a competitive position with offshore manufacturing, while putting the welfare state in a position where it could no longer pre-emptively "buy out" the marriage market in the lower-income brackets. It would have been a great first step.

But something astonishing happened on the way to the Forum. The meat of the Commission report only discussed policy changes to increase child support collections, and it made no recommendations about how to meet the pro-marriage goals defined in the Statement of Findings.

The 1994 Presidential elections were inundated with political rhetoric about marriage. Dan and Marilyn Quayle truly meant business about reforming the divorce problem -- and they were buried alive by feminists everywhere. Other Republicans took the cue, adopting a fuzzier approach that simply promised some sort of welfare reform -- "The Contract For America".

When "Fatherless America" was published in 1995, we found out what Dave Blankenhorn really stood for. But it wasn't until later that I discovered what the real political objective of his book was, or the importance it (and Dave Blankenhorn) would play in congressional approach to welfare reform.

"Fatherless America" was the "kickoff" for the present "Marriage Movement" It is laden with authoritative citations about the tragic costs of father absence (expanding Moynihan's technique). But he brutally blamed this problem on men without even one citation to support the claim, buttered with evanescent pro-family and pro-child language. But he did not offer up solutions in the book, which apparently published to establish him as the authoritative policy wonk du-jours.

Shortly after the book came out, I contacted Dave Blankenhorn several times requesting even one citation that would support his claim blaming the problem on fathers. To this date, I have never recieved a response. I subsequently organized the men's movement to ask Blankenhorn for a citation everywhere he went. The only response we have ever had from him was in a San Diego restaurant after a talk he gave. His response: "Stop bothering me".

"Fatherless America" took a shallow look at the fathers movement, conveniently coming to the convenient conclusion that it was basically an illegitimate collection of disorganized men with questionable motives. In support of his views on the "fathers movement", he cited my group, Parents Demanding Equal Justice ["Fatherless America"; FN 48, page 297]. But Blankenhorn certainly knew better -- my "Generation One" report was much more than the work of an misguided, ill-informed lout.

PRWORA: Making the Rabbit disappear

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was enacted in 1996. Those who were alive at the time couldn't possibly forget frequent use of the words "deadbeat dad", "responsible fatherhood", and "personal responsibiltiy", bandied about with reckless abandon in support of PRWORA. Blankenhorn spent a lot of time in Washington in those days, providing ideology and spin, eventually powering PRWORA through Congress with virtually no opposition.

PRWORA did put time restrictions on how long welfare could be recieved (which has to a small degree reduced illegitimacy). But PRWORA was only mildly opposed by feminists, because PRWORA was predominantly a bookkeeping change intended to make the welfare problem invisible (again). The net result of PRWORA: Instead of calling it "welfare" whenever the government handed out welfare, it would be called it an "Advance on Child Support" and accounted for as an item for child support collections.

PRWORA was a bet that the government could find all those awful deadbeats in five years or less, get a child support order against them, and then clean them out. The bulk of the 1" thick final PRWORA bill focused on establishing a tremendous centralized federal bureacracy with powers greater than the IRS ever enjoyed to quickly order and collect all this "child support" under expedited procedures, to fund and mandate a national database to track it all, and punish states that didn't enact pass-through legislation immediately.

Since passage of PRWORA, increasingly wild claims about increases in child support collections (the lump-sum of welfare collections and all child support payments) are made frequently. To this day, nothing has been done to stop welfare fraud, which according to my research into state audits, may actually be greater than the amounts of "child support" collected.

The Accomplishment of the "Marriage Movement" to date:

The only thing the players in the "Marriage Movement" have accomplished since 1993 is to transmogrify the welfare problem into a percieved problem of child support collections and "deadbeat dads" -- according to the "Blankenhorn fallacy". This does nothing to strengthen prospects for the intact family, or increase the number of children having the benefit of two parents in their lives. It only stimulates divorce and father-absence.

By anybody's measure, is not radical to say that the majority of those who claim to be the "Marriage Movement", particularly those who have been working inside the beltway for the past decade, may actually be serving to preserve the amalgamated business alliance of various trades that profit handsomely from the divorce industry. This amalgamation includes:

• Trial lawyers, who are guaranteed at least a decade of work in virtually every divorce, and who profit from divorce-related bankruptcy
• Mental health workers who have up to a 1000% larger client base (both voluntary and involuntary) because of divorce-related problems,
• The APA (whose division 51 has consistently approved any policy that would make more work for psychiatrists and psychologists regardless of harmful consequences)
• Drug companies (who provide a white rabbit pill to make everything appear to feel better)
• Certified Systems Inc (CSI) -- a questionable company which runs many prisons and runs a wide array of for-profit work programs while collecting child support and paying as little as 25-cents an hour (http://www.crxs.com/csi_des.html)
• Private child support collection agencies
• Social Services in every state -- who employ many thousands of single mothers to collect child support and run a tremendous variety of programs which exist solely to reactively deal with downstream problems of divorce, and whose budgets have become the #1 line item in most states over the past decade.
• Child Abuse state agencies -- the vast majority of child abuse problems emanate from the father-absent family, and provides "product" for the new "expedited" child adoption industry, which recieves over $30,000 per child adopted.
• Politicians -- whose careers are founded on getting the bureaucratic vote and making the average voter think nothing is wrong.
• Radical Feminists -- who feeling safe in the current political environment, have moved on to enacting the final blow to fatherhood: creating an illegitimate Constitutional protection for "same sex" marriage so that women (regardless of sexual orientation) can assume pre-emptive proprietorship of the civil, legal, and religious institution of Marriage, and of the family -- having chattel control over children, property, and the future incomes of fathers.
• The accomplishments of the "inside the beltway" Marriage Movement are proof that it is not the "Marriage Movement". Certainly there are individuals in the movement who wish to do the right thing, but the leaders of it have pre-empted the purpose.

The real Marriage Movement has stepped forward, but it is not yet a unified movement. Some of us don't even know we "are" the Marriage Movement. Some of us are father's rights activists. Some are pro-family activists. Some are working the shared-parenting issue. Some are working to block lesbian marriage. Many want to reform divorce or child abuse laws. Others are religious activists who are just beginning to understand that you have to do more than work things at the moral level in order to win in the courts and legislatures. Some are beginning to listen to those who have been working the hard social and legal divorce issues for many many years. Some have done reasonably well, such as former Louisiana Rep. Tony Perkins, who I worked with fairly closely, and who has gone on to become President of Family Research Council.

The real Marriage Movement needs an organization capable of working all these issues with a unified message, and organizing the various factions into a potent political force. It appears that the American Coaltion for Fathers and Children, under the leadership of Dr. Baskerville, might be ready to build the big tent that will put the false Marriage Movement of the 1990's out of business, restore sanity to divorce laws, and put government back in its legimate role of providing proactive help, security for families, and a safety net for the few families that legitimately don't make it.

Will the real Marriage Movement now step forward and assume its rightful position?

David R. Usher