An Historic Social Policy Opportunity for Mainstream Conservatives

August 18, 2005

It is unsurprising that Republicans are fast-tracking the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) through Congress. So, why would the moral and rational party want to give a few more billion in anti-family feminist pork to National Organization for Women?

The right direction -- but wrong facts -- availed us nothing

In the run-up to the 1994 elections, America was in an uproar because Dan Quayle anointed Murphy Brown “Queen of the problem of single motherhood”. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead more rationally pointed out that “Dan Quayle Was Right”. Marilyn Quayle gave the most electrifying speech ever delivered at a Republican convention, stating “Not everyone believed that the family was so oppressive that women could only thrive apart from it”. Unfortunately, there were no policy ideas to back up these long-overdue directions.

The liberal wing of the party was hard at work too – cooking up policies actually antithetical to true Republican values. David Blankenhorn’s book “Fatherless America” made fatherlessness a national issue, vacuously blaming it all on men. Bill McCartney, President of Promise Keepers, also erroneously blamed society’s problems on men in a National Review article, causing an immediate collapse of the organization.

For lack of anything else to do, Republicans settled for redecorated liberal plans. Unfortunately, Republicans didn’t notice that David Blankenhorn spent much of his time cooking up neo-welfare-state policies with feminists and selling them to Tommy Thompson. A hastily-created “Contract With America” contained some pro-family concepts, but effectively converted the Johnson “Great Society” into a predatory privatized alternate socioeconomic system that permanently entitles non-marriage for women. Tommy Thompson’s idea to morph the welfare state into a nasty child-support state was a Democrat’s dream. His plan became the basis for the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996 [PRWORA].

Lots of Americans were not happy. Many women were forced into the workplace. Children were raised by day care centers, television sets, or other kids. Millions of good men were cruelly turned out of the family and transformed into deadbeat dads in the name of “personal responsibility”. Fathers, grandmothers, parents, sons, and daughters alike witnessed devastation of themselves or relatives in continuing record numbers.

Liberal and conservatives were greatly dissatisfied and took revenge. Newt Gingrich championed all of the above, and ended up the bipartisan sacrificial cow for suggesting that poor mothers should use orphanages more often.

Congressional Republicans have vigorously eschewed social policy ever since. They still consider core social issues (excluding abortion and gay marriage) to be pestiferous. So, they gag themselves and blithely do anything Democrats want. This explains why Senate Republicans are meekly fast-tracking the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization (VAWA), as if Senator Joe Biden were pro-tem of the U.S. Senate.

VAWA is several billions in chauvinistic shush money for the National Organization of Women to use fortifying the feminist oligarchy that has unquestionably hurt more women, children, and families than it has helped by pretending that heterosexual marriage is a dangerous, antiquated trap.

Why Republicans must take the lead in social policy

The results of a decade of PRWORA are lamentable at best. Illegitimacy and divorce are still at near-record highs. Welfare outlays (now called “advances on child support”) continue at record levels, and record amounts of uncollectible child support are millenium headline news. Poverty is now a crime – if one happens to be a male. And we lock them up if they cannot magically earn whatever some welfare-state bureaucrat imagines they should. Then we call them felons so they can’t get (or keep) a job, and take away their driver’s licenses so they can’t get to work.

Republicans have millions of moral and political reasons to be very interested in aggressively pursuing new moral, proactive social policies. Poor women and poor men have not benefited from the last nine years. In fact, the greatest problems faced by Congress such as the deficit, lack of health care insurance, retirement income shortfalls, personal bankruptcy, poverty, child abuse, illegitimacy, problematic children, shortfalls in military recruitment and re-enlistment, and domestic violence, are either partially or substantially driven by continued entitlement of non-marriage.

These budget-busting emotional human conditions are always the tear-jerkers that put Democrats into office. Johnson Democrats ran out of broken promises in the 1990’s, and the public could take no more. Republicans came up with something that sounded better and won in 1994.

Unfortunately, these problems loom larger than ever. It is only a matter of time before voters give up on Republicans and again give deference to Democrats. Republicans still have enough time to take command of social issues with brilliant, reasoned policies, and produce results in time for 2008.

The “Contract for the American Family”

Republicans have an historic opportunity to seize control of social issues and make it impossible for Democrats to find anything to run on in 2008. The following seven-point plan will completely change thinking on social policy – moving politics to safe ground that liberals simply cannot win on.

A new “Contract for the American Family” would return us to a society where marriage is happily preferred, without shotgun marriages or turning marriage into a “trap”. It works by deregulating the marriage market, and allowing marriage to once again thrive naturally.

The precepts for the compassionate conservative “Contract For The Family” are as follows:

• We must apply Reaganomics to stimulate marriage and bring back low-skill jobs to America. New federal tax policies should waive all federal taxes and corporate contributions on salaries that pay less than $13 per hour, and encourage similar pass-though legislation at the state level. There is no need to redistribute money among low-income citizens. Elimination of the 15% corporate tax contribution on low-paying jobs will cause an explosion in manufacturing as corporations repatriate operations from overseas, thus providing jobs for millions of presently-unemployable low-skilled individuals. This, in turn, will stimulate marriage while reducing crime and violence in urban cores. This is the ultimate conservative answer to liberal demands for “living wages” and “safe streets”.

• Premarital education programs should be continued. But we must realize that these ultimately have marginal impact years later when common marital problems turn vituperative and spouses are pushed to the edge.

• Social services programs and funding should positively assist and expect spouses to work through the common problems of marriage and aging. Studies indicate that divorce rates spike in parallel with normal marriage stressors such as the “two-year baby blues”, the “four-year boredom”, the “seven-year itch”, the “fifteen-year mid-life crisis”, menopause, and retirement. Spouses presently have no choice in these situations but to “put up with it” or get a divorce. We must provide troubled couples with a more positive choice in the form of optional continuing “Marriage Care” programs.

• Courts and social service agencies must assist positively, upon request or by petition to a family court by a responsible spouse, in limited circumstances. We must expect the troubled spouse to be responsible to the marriage by actively recovering from the common problems that drive divorce, such as chemical dependency, gambling, and serious sexual addictions. For example, 86% of serious domestic violence involves a spouse who has been drinking or drugging (DOJ-BJS). This is the pro-family choice most people want and need, which has never been available to them. We can substantially reduce divorce, fatal highway accidents, the majority of domestic violence and serious child abuse, child support and welfare problems, teen suicide and psychological problems, and illegitimacy by expecting marital responsibility. By intervening positively when requested by a spouse (and keeping the history for determining custody of children if divorce or removal of children from a single-parent family is needed), we ensure the best possible outcome for children even if the troubled spouse does not recover. Personal responsibility dictates that individuals should pay what they can afford for treatment, perhaps via guaranteed government loans if necessary.

• Welfare (and child support) can never replace the economics of the intact two-parent family. It is impossible for a divorced middle-class family to remain in the middle class while supporting two households. The “disappearing middle class” is substantially a structural problem predominantly caused by our failure to help families work through the normal problems of marriage and aging.

• Much of what we call “child support” is actually “alimony” – which frequently confers the benefits of marriage on irresponsible divorce petitioners. New social policy must restore marriage to its natural purpose by ending massive governmental interference in the marriage market. We must end permanent entitlements for non-marriage. Imagine what would happen to our economy if unemployment was a permanent entitlement! Welfare should provide temporary assistance during periods of frictional non-marriage. Child support, which also institutionalizes non-marriage, must also reduce over time. Removing hidden alimony from child support after approximately four years, and setting child support at the “actual cost of raising a child” (as established by payment amounts to foster care parents), will encourage remarriage.

• Child support should be ordered as a percentage of each paycheck with statutory percentage caps (much like taxes). There is no reason to hold non-custodial parents to a substantially higher standard of support than their married counterparts. We must end the criminalization of poverty presently impacting millions of poorer men in middle and lower income groups under the “fixed-monthly-amount” system. Feasible support orders will substantially reduce the number of men presently forced into the “underground economy”. It will also empty our prisons of men whose only crime is being unable to earn what some liberal bureaucrat thinks they should.

When Republicans finally apply Reaganomics to the marriage market and social policy, astonishing changes will take place in America. We will break the cycle of intergenerational illegitimacy and divorce – happily and profitably.

We will naturally restore the cultural and legal value of heterosexual marriage, and weaken the agenda of those hoping to transform marriage to serve the purpose of lesbians and radical feminists who want to monopolize the family.

When we finally put our money where marriage is, and stop financing the corpse of the Johnson Great Society, marriage will naturally take root again as the culturally-preferred institution for progress, for the benefit of nearly all women, children, families, and the taxpayer.

David R. Usher