Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (12 page)

There is no denying that we face strong cultural headwinds. Our marriage rate is at a record low.
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Marriage is seen as a temporary lifestyle choice, not the foundation of society.
Many people are deferring it, and many others are dropping it entirely. That’s not good news for our children or our future. In fact, we have seen that if the family retreats, the government will take its place. Parents have authority over their children because they are responsible for them. As the government takes over that responsibility for some children, it will try to assume that authority for all children. A comment by MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry reveals where we’re headed: “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
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Despite the mountain of evidence that strong families are the best antipoverty program, many liberals, blinded by ideology, peddle the fantasy that children will be fine in almost any conceivable domestic arrangement. A famous controversy two decades ago showed us how ferociously they will defend that delusion. When the protagonist of the popular TV show
Murphy Brown
, a liberal news anchorwoman, deliberately chose to have a child out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle, in a speech delivered shortly after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, criticized the message the show was sending. Addressing the breakdown of many black families, Quayle said, “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong, and we must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman, mocking
the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice. I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but . . . it’s time to make the discussion public.”
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Quayle’s remarks did not go over well. He was ridiculed by the late-night talk-show hosts and political pundits as out of touch, sexist, and racist. “How dare he suggest such a thing?” was the common refrain from Hollywood, feminists, and Democrats in Congress. Eventually, in 1993, a brave social scientist named Barbara Dafoe Whitehead changed the tone of the controversy with an article in the
Atlantic
titled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” There was actually strong evidence from social science to support Quayle’s views, she wrote, and now, more than twenty years later, the evidence is overwhelming and unmistakable.
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But have you heard many—or any—liberal apologies to Dan Quayle? More important, have you heard any liberal apologies for all the lives they’ve wrecked through their policies and the messages they’ve sent through our popular culture?

Now, I recognize that rebuilding our families isn’t something our government can legislate very well, but for starters we can at least remove the perverse incentives in many government programs that discourage marriage. Our public schools used to take it for granted that they were educating future mothers and fathers who needed to be prepared to take on the future responsibilities of parenthood. That meant
developing a work ethic, learning personal responsibility, and acquiring the skills necessary to hold down a job.

Our political leaders should express their support for marriage and family. President Obama demonstrated the power of his “bully pulpit” when his endorsement of same-sex marriage contributed to the dramatic change in public opinion on the issue. What if he used his considerable influence in favor of a child’s right to be raised by both parents in a home founded on the commitment of marriage?

When I was a congressman, I was one of the principal authors of the welfare reform proposal in the Republicans’ 1994 Contract with America. I was elected to the Senate that year, and I decided to practice what I preached by hiring five people for my staff who were on welfare, food stamps, or other government aid. One was Billy Jo, a girl not long out of high school and already a mother of two children. She was attending a community college part-time and receiving subsidized childcare at a first-rate facility in Harrisburg. I hired her to work part-time in my Harrisburg office while she finished her degree. We didn’t realize then that after a year of working in my office she would lose her subsidized childcare benefit.

She was an outstanding employee, but she resigned when faced with the loss of her benefits; she simply could not get by
without childcare. She had no extended family to call on for support, for she was also the child of a single mother.

That is another unspoken advantage of stable two-parent homes—there are a lot more grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who are connected to you. That is a social safety net of its own—extended families look after and support each other. But in Billy Jo’s case, the family was fractured, and her older, unemployed sister was, initially, not inclined to help. But just as we were about to say our sad farewells, Billy Jo’s sister had a change of heart and decided she could watch the children, because she wanted to help the sister she loved. By her act of service, she not only helped Billy Jo but she got her own life back on track. In a family and in a community, charity benefits the giver as well as the recipient. That doesn’t happen in a government program. Billy Jo finished her degree and became a schoolteacher. But what would have happened to her, to her sister, and to the kids’ relationship with their extended family if the government had stepped in? Everyone would have been made poorer where it really matters. Family makes us stronger.

In too many neighborhoods, single motherhood has become a norm passed down from generation to generation. If we want to change that, we can start by reemphasizing the importance of two-parent families. Imagine if instead of
expending enormous amounts of time and money trying to redefine marriage, we had channeled all that passion into a national discussion about the importance to all of society for men and women to get married before having children? What if government agencies produced ads showing the truth—that married people are happier or more successful or any number of positive attributes for individuals and society? Imagine the news media, Hollywood, businesses, schools, and political activists joining with government at all levels to form a national consensus about having children after marriage and the importance of building healthy marriages. There might be no bigger step toward restoring the American Dream.

This has been done on a small scale in several communities around the country. When I was in the Senate, I asked a group to testify before my committee about their efforts in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to encourage marriage before having children, reduce illegitimacy, help hold together existing marriages, and promote the importance of healthy marriages. First Things First worked with schools, churches, government, businesses, and the media. This effort has resulted in a 62 percent decrease in unwed teen pregnancies and a 29 percent reduction in divorce.

Churches and organizations like First Things First hold the key to a marriage revolution in lower-income communities. The top income earners in the country have figured out the importance of marriage. According to Charles Murray,
roughly 80 percent of wealthy thirty- to fifty-year-olds are married, a figure that has declined only slightly in forty years. Among their low-income counterparts, the marriage rate is about half that. Don’t you think it is time for the elites in our society, including the elites in government, to preach what they practice?

But there is one more thing government can do, or better yet, one
less
thing—quit trying to replace the family with cradle-to-grave government programs. Some will object that I’ve got cause and effect mixed up. Did more government assistance cause the breakdown of the family, or did the breakdown of the family require more government assistance? Let’s review the numbers. Look at the out-of-wedlock birth rate in 1964, the year the War on Poverty was launched with the passage of a permanent food stamp program, which was followed by Medicare, Medicaid, and an expansion of other welfare benefits in the late ’60s and early 1970s.

From 1930 to 1960, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was remarkably constant—around 3 to 5 percent. From 1960 to 1965, it started to rise gradually, reaching 7 percent in 1965. In the next twenty years, it went to 22 percent and jumped to 33 percent in 1995. The rate flattened out over the next ten years and then began its ascent again from 2005 to the current rate of over 40 percent. So in only one period during the last forty years did the increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births abate, the ten-year period after the passage of the Welfare
Reform Act of 1996. That act required work and put a time limit on the receipt of income assistance for unwed mothers. It also required the establishment of paternity in order for the father to take better responsibility for his children. By 2006 many of these reforms had been watered down by big liberal states like New York and California. President Obama, with his mighty authoritarian pen, has made it worse.

Obviously, there are other more important factors affecting the illegitimacy rate—the sexual revolution, birth control, abortion, the popular culture, and much more. Government policy, however, is at least facilitating the dramatic decline in stable two-parent families through what on the surface seems to be compassionate assistance for families in crisis. That is why reforming these programs by adding work requirements, putting a limit on benefits, and reintegrating the father into the picture, if possible, is essential to stop this slide.

The great British statesman Edmund Burke—America’s greatest friend in Parliament as the colonies’ grievances against the mother country grew in the years before the Revolution—insisted on the importance of society’s “little platoons”—the myriad associations and communities through which men conduct most of the important business of life. They constitute the bonds of a healthy society, and because they are the essential buffer between individual citizens and the state, they are the guarantors of freedom. The primary little platoon is the family. For America to be strong and free, we must have strong families.

And strong families often rely on churches. The correlation between regular church attendance and strong marriages and healthy families is thoroughly established. Regular church attendance also correlates with far lower levels of crime, addiction, and depression.

Dr. Patrick Fagan of the Family Research Council has collated all the data and can show that married couples who do not attend church are twice as likely to divorce as married couples who attend church regularly. Moreover, churchgoing kids are far more likely to do well in school (especially poor children) and to be better behaved. And churchgoing families are far more likely to be involved in community and volunteer work. Dr. Fagan concludes, “No other dimension of life in America—with the exception of stable marriages and families, which in turn are strongly tied to religious practice—does more to promote the well-being and soundness of the nation’s civil society than citizens’ religious observance. . . . Social science data reinforce George Washington’s declaration in his farewell address: ‘Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.’”
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Instead of President Obama’s war against faith-filled businesses, not-for-profits, and individuals, why don’t we do something really radical and talk about religion’s civic and personal benefits?