Family-Friendly Europe
The belief that single motherhood is the preeminent cause of poverty in America has become a bipartisan cliché. The welfare reform enacted in 1996 was designed, among other things, to discourage single parenthood and to promote marriage. Yet a look at the experiences and policies of other nations suggests a more complex story behind the…
Marriage Plus
The public has been concerned about “family breakdown” for a long time, but it was not until the passage of welfare reform in 1996 that the federal government decided to get into the business of promoting marriage. Although it was little noticed at the time, three of the four purposes of the welfare legislation refer…
Reconcilable Differences
In the true marriage relation the independence of the husband and wife is equal, their dependence mutual and their obligations reciprocal. — Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) Feminists have long been queasy about marriage, but our queasiness is not about marriage per se; it concerns the way marriage has been practiced. The religious right paints feminists as…
The Myth of the Model Minority
Mali Keo fled Cambodia with her husband and four children in 1992. Several years later, she was still haunted by searing memories of “the killing fields,” the forced-labor camps where millions of Cambodians died, victims of Communist despot Pol Pot’s quest for a perfect agrarian society. Because of the brutal beatings she suffered at the…
Immigration’s Aftermath
It is well known by now that immigration is changing the face of America. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of foreign-born persons in the United States surged to 28 million in 2000 and now represents 12 percent of the total population, the highest figures in a century. In New York City, 54…
Marriage and Divorce American Style
On average, recent studies show parents and children in married families are happier, healthier, wealthier, and better adjusted than those in single-parent households. But these averages conceal wide variations. Before betting the farm on marriage — with a host of new government programs aimed at promoting traditional two-parent families and discouraging divorce — policy makers…
Hitting Home
A leathery woman with a darkening black eye smokes cigarettes through the spaces of her missing front teeth and tells the police how her boyfriend slapped and bit her because he didn’t like her grandchildren. Another woman tells a counselor at a shelter that she’s tried to leave her husband 15 times in the two…
What About Black Fathers?
Emboldened by the reduction in the welfare rolls, conservatives have renewed their demands that our welfare system reflect traditional family values, specifically marriage. But if marriage becomes the heavily favored family strategy of welfare policy, family-service providers and other supporters of responsible fatherhood will find it harder to help families as they actually exist –…
The Color Of Love
With at least three million people in the United States in interracial marriages, racially mixed marriage is no longer a rarity. And with one degree of separation — all the family members of these couples — it touches many millions more. Allowing a second degree of separation — friends, coworkers, acquaintances — intermarriage likely affects…
The Other Marriage War
Imagine waking up one morning to the news that because of a recent court decision, you may no longer be your child’s legal parent. Forget all those times you’ve read Goodnight Moon, those long nights you spent in a steam-filled bathroom trying to keep your sick child breathing. In the eyes of the law, you…
Politics for Democrats
Pity the poor Democrats. They thought they had discovered the perfect issue: “fiscal discipline.” By draping themselves in the mantle of fiscal rectitude, Democrats discovered they could oppose tax cuts without advocating any specific government spending — thereby avoiding both the potentially controversial nature of any new outlay and the generic “Big Spender” label (as…
Child-Care Quality Matters
Child care is a fact of life in America today. More than two-thirds of all children under the age of five are cared for on a regular basis by someone other than a parent. These children may attend day-care centers or nursery schools, go to the home of a provider who tends to a number…
Introduction:
A recession was supposed to rescue the Democrats in next November’s midterm election. Even if they had little else, Democratic strategists expected, they could bash Bush for a weak economy. But the recession evidently is over almost before it began, and it’s not even April. The unemployment rate has declined for two straight months and…
Taking Care
In her new book Power Politics, the novelist Arundhati Roy observes the way that the government of India with one hand causes distress and with the other directs people’s anger about it elsewhere. Do harm; then scapegoat. She calls it a “pincer action.” Does it sound familiar? In the United States, we have been subjected…
Is Lack of Marriage the Real Problem?
Marriage is now a hot topic in Washington policy circles. Ensuring that more children are born and raised within marriage is, in my view, a worthy objective. Marriage as a value has begun to disappear from the cultural lexicon, and affirmative efforts to underscore its importance, especially to children, should not be dismissed. But this…
Nostalgia as Ideology
The more I listen to debates over whether we should promote marriage, the more I am reminded of one of my father’s favorite sayings: “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” Yes, kids raised by married parents do better, on average, than kids raised in divorced- or single-parent homes. Yes, the long-term commitment of…
Control Freaks
It just seemed like a lot of kids were getting killed with guns,” mused Andrew McKelvey, recalling the days after the Columbine school shootings in 1999. “I said to myself, someone should do something about it.” So McKelvey — a multimillionaire business executive and political neophyte — did. In the three years after Columbine, McKelvey…
Trouble at High Levels
Last fall I interviewed a number of current and former CIA officers who worked the Pakistan-Afghanistan border during the days of the mujahideen’s fight against the Soviets. I also spoke with current and former military officers with combat experience in Vietnam, the Gulf War, or the Balkans. The war in Afghanistan was in its earliest…
Economics for Democrats
Even if the recession’s over, not everyone’s making out fine.
Karl Rove’s Wedges
Some doctrinaire conservatives are growing a bit cranky over the ideological impurities of George W. Bush. California Republicans rebelled when he promoted the candidacy of Richard Riordan — Horrors! An electable moderate! — for governor. Free-market ideologues blanched when he supported protections for the steel industry. “Steel tariffs are not just anti-market,” grumped Sebastian Mallaby…
Rethinking the Unthinkable
History seems to have cheated us out of the freedom from anxiety we expected after the Cold War ended. When the Soviet Union collapsed, no power on earth appeared capable of threatening our security. And for a decade, until September 11, we enjoyed the happy illusion that we had safely arrived in a future that…
Free money: Take some.
Suppose the government decided to place bushel baskets full of cash at every street corner, with the following note: “Please read the attached instructions and take the appropriate amount, if any, from the basket. Write your name, address, and the amount you took on the sign-in sheet. WARNING! We will check one out of every…
A Belief in Force
The ruling arrived like a letter from another era, written in strange script, waiting to be deciphered. In mid-February, the Israeli supreme court upheld a lower-court decision, thereby dismissing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s libel suit against the Ha’aretz newspaper and its political commentator Uzi Benziman. At issue was a column Benziman wrote a decade ago…
Ashes to concrete.
Pastor Charles Cornwell of Center Point Baptist Church in Noble, Georgia, attributes the macabre dereliction of duty by local crematorium operator Ray Brent Marsh to sin: “Sin blinds us and sin makes us do dumb things.” Neglecting to cremate more than 300 corpses and leaving them to rot in your backyard surely is “a dumb…
