This article recently appeared in BeliefNet. What is your take as
collaborative practitioners?
Bruce Peck
Collaborative Law
9202 Tyne Lane
Inver Grove Heights, MN 55077
(651) 994-9944
(651) 994-9955 Fax
********************************************************
Fixing Marriage at the Wrong End
President Bush's proposal to make marriage easier for young, low-income
couples won't work until divorce gets harder
By Roberto Rivera
In the weeks leading up to the State of the Union address, the Bush
administration has been floating a proposal to promote marriage among
lower-income
Americans. The program would spend "at least $1.5 billion" for, in the words of
The New York Times, "training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that
sustain 'healthy marriages.'"
This kind of proposal is hard to quibble with without coming off as just
plain cranky. Who would want to come out against healthy marriages, or, for
that
matter, better "interpersonal skills"? Representatives from the left and right
were reduced to mouthing the usual dreary rhetoric about their pet causes. A
lawyer from NOW's Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the Times that
programs like this one "may ignore the risk of domestic violence and may coerce
women
to marry." (Actually, women are more likely to be physically abused by a
cohabiting boyfriend than by a husband.) Social-conservatives, though more
favorably inclined, suggest that the president strengthen marriage by
supporting a
constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. (He says he'll wait to see
what the courts do.)
There's little doubt that marriage is in trouble, and could use a boost from
the White House, just as NASA might be revived by planning a mission to Mars.
But trying to address the marriage crisis by massively funding premarital
education makes me think that the president is looking at the issue through the
wrong end of a telescope.
What is society's stake in making marriages healthy? Or stated differently,
what harm is caused by the lack of healthy marriages? The answer is the
well-being of our children. Forgive me for sounding like Whitney Houston, but
it's
obvious that children are our future: our future leaders, producers and
defenders will come from the youngest part of society. And as a parent of a
growing
child, I can tell you that future will be here before we turn around twice.
Thus, anything that puts our children at risk for what social scientists call
"adverse outcomes" adversely affects the entire society. While there are
dissenters out there, the large majority of social-science data points to the
same
conclusion: children who are not raised in intact two-parent households are,
in the aggregate, more at risk for these "adverse outcomes." These include
poverty, delinquency, drug abuse, suicide, dropping out of school, and
psychiatric illness, to name but a few.
This doesn't mean that a particular child raised by a single-parent will have
any of these problems--only that a society where children are increasingly
raised in single-parent homes can expect, as a whole, more of these "adverse
outcomes." (Hence, the "in the aggregate.")
As the president will likely point out in tonight's State of the Union
address, our children are more at risk today than ever before. But it's not
because
American parents aren't getting married (although this is true in certain
communities), but because they aren't staying married. Divorce is the principle
reason why half of all American children can expect to spend at least part of
the time prior to their 18th birthday living with only one parent.
Improving "interpersonal skills" won't make a dent in this social reality.
Such help already exists, at least for middle and upper-class couples who can
afford it. The helpers are called marriage counselors. Yet, as Diane Sollee,
director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, observes:
"Over the past 30 years, the number of marriage therapists and counselors has
dramatically increased, and the divorce rate hasn't budged."
The best—perhaps the only--way President Bush can make a meaningful
difference is to make it harder for parents to get a divorce. Period. I know
this
sounds barbaric. Some will answer that you can't force people to stay married
anymore than you force to get married in the first place. Most "no-fault"
divorces--as many as 80 percent--arise from unilateral decisions. As Maggie
Gallagher,
who wrote "The End of Marriage," puts it, "divorce . . . is not usually the
act of a couple, but of an individual." Once the individual has made the
decision to leave, the law gives them the upper hand. The other spouse, who is
usually open to reconciliation, can only hope to cut the possible best deal on
the
marital property and custody of the kids.
That's why William Galston, a domestic policy advisor to President Clinton,
wrote in The New York Times that "for couples with dependent children, we
should eliminate unilateral no-fault--where one person can readily obtain a
divorce
without the other's consent--and return to an updated fault-based system,
with the alternative of a five-year waiting period. And even in cases where
both
parties consent, there should be suitable braking mechanisms: a mandatory
pause of at least a year for reflection, counseling and mediation."
The White House proposal does nothing to change the status quo and,
consequently, does nothing to address society's interest in the well-being of
its
children. To be fair, divorce is a matter of state, not federal, law. That
doesn't
mean that there's nothing the president, and his administration, can do. At
the very least, he could use his office to begin a national conversation about
the impact of "no fault" divorce laws on children.
Don't hold your breath. If same-sex marriage, which directly affects a tiny
portion of our population, is too hot a political potato to handle, imagine the
political risk in talking about opposite-sex divorce. Just as with that most
divisive of social issues, abortions, Americans become accustomed, and even
dependent, on the easy availability of "no fault" divorce. Asking them to
contemplate giving back some of that freedom, even for their children's sake,
is
risky political business.
Rather than put his re-election at risk, the president is happy to have
everyone look through the wrong end of the telescope and believe that the
problem
lies in lower-income people not getting married or being unprepared when they
do. After all, who doesn't want to believe that the problem lies in what we see
through that telescope and not ourselves?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
