Who’s Who in the Counterfeit Marriage Movement

November 6, 2004

A watershed report titled “Families First” was issued by the National Commission on America’s Urban Families, chaired by then-Missouri-Governor John Ashcroft, in the closing days of the H.W. Bush administration. (1) The report contained the brilliant family-values language Republicans applied in the “Contract for America”, which ultimately gave Republicans control of Congress in 1992. Dave Blankenhorn served on the Commission and did much of the report preparation in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Dave Blankenhorn’s book “Fatherless America” was published in 1995, to an astonished America and horrified husbands. After shaking the nation awake to the widespread problem of father-absence (read: divorce and illegitimacy), Blankenhorn made an incredible claim: "Never before in this country have so many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers" …. "Today, the principal cause of fatherlessness is paternal choice.... the rising rate of paternal abandonment" …. “For the first time in history, millions of men today are voluntarily abdicating their fatherhood.” (2)

Most men were shocked. Most everyone who can read this piece witnessed the feminist cultural and legal war on marriage, husbandry, and family.

I attempted to initiate a debate on the cause of father-absence with a fax to the Institute for American Values on the day “Fatherless America” hit the bookstores. My request was simple: “Please provide a citation of authorities for your position that men caused the father-absence problem”. Blankenhorn never responded.

A decade later, Blankenhorn has not provided any citation, despite requests from hundreds of men’s activists organized over the years to pursue the issue. My favorite Blankenhorn response was blurted out in a restaurant in San Diego shortly after a lecture. A few men’s advocates who were brushed off at the lecture followed him to the restaurant. Blankenhorn’s response: “Leave me alone!”

Blankenhorn’s latest evasion to Dr. Stephen Baskerville request for a citation was met with Kerry-esque four-facing. Dave tried to suggest that we were merely taking him out of context.

But Blankenhorn ‘splains himself anyway. His teaser about “Fatherless America”, located on the IAV website cries out the same neanderthal conclusion – premised by classic feminist anthropological theory at that: “Because men do not volunteer for fatherhood as much as they are conscripted into it by the surrounding culture, only an authoritative cultural story of fatherhood can fuse biological and social paternity into a coherent male identity.” … “I see the Good Family Man as the principal casualty of today's weakening fatherhood scripts.”

Mr. Blankenhorn, understand this: Feminism has spent forty years throwing good husbands out of the family. The problem is one of discrimination, not a lack of conscription. In fact, when fathers can have a stake in family and the ownership society, and are held in high esteem because they do so, most of them do so with gusto. But feminism has made this a dangerous upstream swim. When men are raised as feminists, believing that all other men are irresponsible wife-abusing loose-zippered louts, they don’t trust other men. When you don’t trust other men, you are helpless when feminists decide to clean your whistle. After watching your father, and half the fathers of your friends get thrown out of their families for no reason whatsoever, and charged at least 1/3 of their pretax income for the luxury of being thrown overboard the ship of society, you might have doubts about what it means to be a man in America today. And if you dare to try it, your chances of being tossed overboard are one in two, no matter how good a husband you are.

Dave Blankenhorn is the lead counterfeiter in the Marriage Movement. He is the Godfatherlessness. And he retains this position because he is quintessentially adept at making feminist policy and policy sound really conservative. In our play (as Blankenhorn loves to paint things) he is the “Godfatherlessness”, because he is the man generating all those federal dollars funding much of the Marriage Movement propping up more fatherlessness. This is no accident: feminists have studied Marxist political subterfuge harder than anybody except perhaps Marx himself.

He is accompanied to the trough by plenty of other liberal Godfatherlessnesses, to name a few:

Tom Sylvester is a former NFI and ACF worker. His vitriolic attacks on Steve Baskerville and other credible marriage reformers suggest he is in the wrong movement – and is most likely a feminist plant He voted for Kerry and doesn’t understand why so many Bushies cited “Moral Values” supporting the President’s opposition to gay marriage. He doesn’t understand that the only difference between “civil unions” and “marriage” is what you call it. In fact, Sylvester admits his lack of values – degrading the work of those protecting marriage to the status of “hype”: “All this hype about “moral values” makes the name “Institute for American Values” either more relevant, or more misleading.”

Speaking of NFI: Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Family Support in the Bush Administration and former President of the National Fatherhood Initiative is another Trojan Marriage Movement political foil. After writing elegantly for years about the problem of father absence, he introduced a bill in Congress designed solely to coax poor fathers into getting jobs and paying child support on the theory that they might get to be fathers. The funding bill gave millions to NFI for this purpose. He was very upset with me and other leaders of the shared parenting movement who refused to endorse his legislation because it would not allow even a nickel to be spent helping men get access to be the fathers that feminists won’t let them be. He also refused my request for federal legislation to protect military reservists called into active duty to guarantee a modification of child support to match military pay.

Elizabeth Marquardt is another Blankenhornian mainstay in the marriage movement. She voted for Kerry and Gore. Her take proves that the Institute for American Values knows that Dave Blankenhorn lied when he blamed father-absence on men: “I understand why father’s are angry that moms so often get custody, especially when two-thirds of divorces involving young children are initiated by the mother. But mandating joint physical custody is one of the worst things we can do for children of divorce.” Here is what she means: the marriage movement isn’t about to do anything to increase shared parenting in divorce. Marriage is still “not necessary”, and its too bad that men don’t like it.

Elizabeth admits her roots openly … ”marriage education is a liberal idea. Like drug or sex education, marriage education teaches couples communication and behavioral techniques that promote healthy marriages”.. What she forgot to say is that liberals are also blocking real reform of divorce laws, which is the root cause of the father absence problem they are supposedly funded to address. The idea that a little marriage education can reverse an entire upbringing in feminism (an “attitude” in street parlance) is a weak premise, at best. The maturity level necessary for marriage is something one either has or does not have.

This is not to say that encouraging people to marry could not be useful. However, if not accompanied by reform of divorce revolution, the Trojan Marriage Movement is only pushing good men into marriages half of which will be served up on the platter of liberal radical feminism. Certainly, youth drug education programs would be a downhill battle if liberals were also selling drugs on every streetcorner. So goes the marriage movement.

Sara Butler, a wide-eyed trainee in the Trojan Marriage Movement, believes we can solve the problem by making it harder to get married. Go figure. Folks have been getting married on a moment’s notice for centuries. It was not until the feminist movement inflicted the divorce revolution that marriage fell apart. She believes civil unions are a “winner”.

Sara adamantly rejects the notion that feminist culture discrminates against men in the family. In response to Cathy Young’s article “You’d be Wrong”, she writes: “…I definitely don’t like Ms. Young’s argument here. Throughout the piece, she focuses on how fathers are discriminated against by the legal system..”, and goes on to change the subject to more comfortable illusions. She does not take a position on gay marriage, but rather finds queer relationships a rather fascinating thing to behold.

This brings us back to “culture”. Dave Blankenhorn waxes deeply on culture, but points the finger at everything except “the culture”. Read our lips Dave: “It’s the feminist culture, stupid”.

There are many other Trojan conservatives in the Marriage Movement – a large book full of them in fact. Dave Blankenhorn, the Institute for American Values, Americanvalues.org, and FamilyScholars.org are a few of the ranking perches from which liberals anesthetize core conservatives by singing nostalgic lullabies in their ears. We know who these implants are -- because they always denigrate positive reforms of family law suggested by the true-blue shared parenting advocates now entering the marriage movement.

The real marriage movement has much to offer this nation. It is inevitable that liberals in the Marriage Movement will be pushed aside – hopefully before public outrage over social problems propels liberals back into the White House.

The first step is for Conservatives to realize that allowing liberals to run the marriage movement only guarantees that we will spend a lot of money pumping more humans into the divorce system. Federal expenditures for social problems caused by the divorce revolution are now larger than the federal deficit itself. (3) Abatement of this humongous expense would permit aggressive Reagonomics while we continue to fight an aggressive war on terrorism – all on a nearly balanced budget.

The second step is for Wall Street to recognize the costs of husband-absence that it gets tagged with. Corporate America has a tremendous stake in real pro-marriage reforms. When marriage is important, employee productivity is higher. The vast array of social problems that lead to corporate taxes will abate substantially. When marriage is important, government will not try to move the living room into the board room. When marriage is important, health care for single mothers will no longer be an issue, and Corporate America will not become the imputed “big daddy”. When marriage is important, the most crucial social security reform will be accomplished: Married retirees need less money to stay out of poverty than do their single counterparts.

Wall Street must oppose both civil unions and gay marriage: If any two Murphy Browns can marry each other (under whatever arrangement you want to call it), there will be a lot of socially-disenfranchised men dropping out of society and the workplace in record numbers – only adding to the known problems of crime and violence. When a man has no place in home or society, he is quite unlikely to be interested in working to support that society.

Christian Conservatives have a tremendous stake. When marriage is important, abortion is not necessary. When marriage is important, the concept of gay marriage falls apart.

The evidence that the Trojan Marriage Movement has failed is self-evident. Eight years after passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996 [H.R. 3734], we have not seen reduced divorce (4), illegitimacy (5), or improved marriage rates (6). There is no evidence that the Marriage Movement has accomplished much of anything.

George Bush has four years to straighten this mess out so that liberals cannot capitalize on it in 2008. This brings us to the third step.

The third and most important step is for someone to have a serious tactical and strategic chat with El Hefe. Once the President understands that the Marriage Movement is riddled with liberals undercutting the Marriage Movement, and that this is undercutting all his other major initiatives, he will make major changes in staffing and funding priorities.

It is my promise to deliver pro-marriage policy directly to the President’s desk that are truly compassionate, beneficial to all, and politically and morally sound; policies that will quietly and productively unwind the divorce revolution in a profound manner. It is indeed unfortunate that policy can’t find its way to the President’s desk the customary way. But there really isn’t anybody I can find in the present marriage movement that isn’t effectively working for the National Organization of Women.

I have the policy framework drafted. I am not stupid enough to put it on the internet where the Godfatherlessnesses can steal the words and do a Kerry dance with them. When that day comes, a new and effective policy initiative consistent with the directives called for in “Families First”, will finally be on President Bush’s desk. Let the second Republican revolution begin.

David R. Usher

1 Governor John Ashcroft and Honorable Annette Straus, Co-Chairs; National Commission on America’s Urban Families; “Families First” (GPO, January 1993 [ISBN 0-16-041600-0] ).
2 David A. Blankenhorn, “Fatherless America” (Basic Books, 1995) pp 22-23.
3 Robert Rector, ”Welfare: Broadening the Reform” (Heritage Foundation, 2000) p 287. Total cost of welfare is since 1960 is estimated to be $7.9 trillion. This does not include related fallout costs of husband-absence such as illegitimacy, crime, drug abuse, personal bankruptcy, child abuse, suicide, and educational and disciplinary problems.
4 U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002”, p 59.
5 National Center for Health Statistics, “Health, 2003”, Table 9, p. 107.
6 U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002”, p 8.

Also see FamilyScholars.org, MarriageMovement.org, and AmericanValues.org.