I'm not necessarily against the right's focus on marriage as a poverty prevention strategy (though I am deeply concerned that incentivized marriages may be bad, and even abusive, unions), but I do find the whole thing rather confusing. As my understanding of the data goes, the utility of marriage stems from the combination of incomes and the relative flexibility offered by two separate parents. But if those are the criteria, there appears to be any number of ways to structure the families, from communal arrangements where multiple single mothers and their children live in well-made, spacious public housing all the way over to lesbian relationships. And that's not a flip comment -- unless someone can show me some compelling data (a possibility I don't discount) that marriage has some intrinsic, causal role in positive family outcomes (beyond, as I mentioned, its multiplication of incomes and parenting time), it seems like the focus on single sets of male-female unions is strangely myopic.
