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From the New York Times:
quote: Welfare Chief Is Hoping to Promote Marriage
By ROBIN TONER
ASHINGTON, Feb. 18 — Wade F. Horn, the Bush administration official who oversees the welfare program, says "it would be wholly inappropriate for the government to run a dating service."
Nor, he says, does he want to push poor women into marriages with abusive boyfriends, as some feminists have asserted.
But Dr. Horn does want the federal government to promote and encourage marriage more aggressively among low-income people, and the administration is proposing to spend $100 million a year to do just that.
The money is intended to finance experimental programs in the states — like education campaigns on the importance of marriage and premarital counseling for people who decide to wed — to find out what works. The question of marriage, and what the federal government should do to support it, is expected to be front and center in the welfare debate this year in Congress, as it reviews and reauthorizes the landmark 1996 welfare law.
The law imposed sweeping new work requirements for recipients and saw substantial reductions in caseloads, but many policy makers agree that it has been much less successful in its other goals: to "reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies" and to "encourage the formation and maintenance of two- parent families."
Some poverty experts point to progress in recent years. Birth rates among teenagers have dropped substantially, for example, and some studies have shown a rise in the proportion of poor children living in two-parent households.
Wendell Primus, a former Clinton administration official and an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group, said such progress should not be dismissed. "It's so hard to move social trends," Mr. Primus argued.
Still, many policy makers — including Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of Health and Human Services — say much more should be done. A third of births were to unmarried women in 2000, including 68.5 percent of the births among blacks, according to data released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Children growing up in one-parent families are four times as likely to be poor as those growing up in two- parent households, said Isabel V. Sawhill, a welfare expert at the Brookings Institution, a research organization in Washington, and a former Clinton administration official. A majority of families who end up in the welfare system, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, are single-parent households, experts said.
Dr. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an interview, "My central overriding concern is not marriage, it is the well-being of children."
He added that "the empirical literature is quite clear that, on average, kids who grow up in stable, healthy, married, two-parent households do better than kids who grow up in some other kind of arrangement."
Representative Wally Herger, the conservative California Republican who is chairman of the House subcommittee that will play a major role in reviewing the welfare law, said, of the marriage programs, "I can't think of a better use of money."
But some poverty experts question whether the government's promotion of marriage is the best way to deal with these problems. "Marriage is a good thing," Ms. Sawhill said, "and it would help kids a lot if more were born to married parents, but I'm not sure we know how to do it."
The problem is not the lack of marriage, she said, "it's that people are having babies at an early age, before they're ready to have babies or get married."
The Bush administration wants to use the $100 million to figure out what works, in part by underwriting demonstration projects, Dr. Horn said. The money will be redirected from another program that granted bonuses to states where rates of out- of-wedlock births declined.
Dr. Horn suggested that the experiments would revolve around giving people the "skills and knowledge" to have a healthy marriage, like premarital counseling or marital enrichment classes. Mr. Thompson has said the administration would also propose a matching grant program "to strengthen families and reduce out-of-wedlock births." The details of the administration's welfare proposal are expected to be announced within the next month.
Some states, using existing funds, have already started marriage projects. Oklahoma, for example, is channeling part of its federal welfare block grant to finance a training course on marriage and relationship skills. The course is available to all state residents.
Some critics are dismayed at the notion of government entering such an intimate realm. "This is a crowd that says it wants to get government out of people's lives," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, "And here they are pushing people they don't even know to get married."
Ms. Gandy said that if the administration wanted to improve the economic lot of women and children, it should provide them more assistance. "To say that the path to economic stability for poor women is marriage is an outrage," she said.
But Dr. Horn, a 47-year-old child psychologist who has been married 25 years, insists there would be no coercion, direct or indirect, in these efforts. "Here's the mission statement," he said. " `We're going to support activities that help couples who choose marriage for themselves develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage.' "
He added, "I just find it almost unfathomable why anyone would be against helping a low-income family who chooses marriage for themselves access the skills and knowledge to build a healthy marriage."
Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, scoffed at the idea that government should not teach marriage skills.
"A class on parenting, that's fine, a class on breastfeeding, that's fine," Mr. Rector said, "but somehow this particular matter is something we don't want to touch."
Mr. Rector has advocated devoting much more federal welfare money for promoting marriage.
Referring to the rise in the percentage of children born to unmarried women, to 33.2 percent in 2000 from 5 percent in 1960, Mr. Rector said, "This is something that's really happened in the last 40 years."
He added, "It's not socially inevitable, and it can be reversed."
Still, Bruce Reed, a domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration who played a major role in steering the 1996 law, said the best way to promote families was "to promote and require work."
"The theory behind the '96 law," Mr. Reed said, "was that by requiring work and ending welfare as a way of life we would get government out of the business of enabling a culture of single parenthood. It took us a long time to get into this mess. It's going to take a long time to get out of it."
Others maintain that simply easing the economic distress on low- income, two-parent families would do more to strengthen marriages than any class on relationship skills. Dr. Horn said the government should do both.
Dr. Horn is a longtime participant in the marriage and fatherhood debates. He served in the previous Bush administration, as commissioner for children, youth and families, and later headed the National Fatherhood Initiative, a private group intended to promote the importance of fathers.
Even before he joined the current Bush administration, he was a strong advocate of public policies to encourage marriage, arguing that too often the government was not neutral on marriage but actually created disincentives against it.
The nomination to his current job generated some controversy because in the mid-1990's he suggested that government encourage marriage by giving preference to married couples in programs like public housing. He has since repudiated the idea.
Dr. Horn said the moment is right for a new effort on marriage.
"Ninety percent of Americans either have been married, were married or will be married," he said. "It isn't like some product we have to sell. So how do we help people achieve the goal of a healthy marriage, which most people say they want?"
Low-income people, he said, were no different.
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