MORE MARRIAGE LEADS TO LESS POVERTY
November 30th, 2006 by Brian
Is promoting marriage a key to lifting Connecticut’s low-income children out of poverty? A national expert on welfare reform believes it is.
Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, and a special adviser to President Bush on welfare policy, pushed marriage – including same-sex marriage – as a tool for reducing poverty during an appearance this week in Hartford.
Haskins, a Republican and former staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee who helped write the country’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, said his research shows marriage as the second most influential factor in reducing poverty rates, according to a computer simulation he created based on census data for 2001.
The single most effective factor was an obvious one, full-time work. But marriage ranked second, Haskins said, more effective, in fact, than increasing education, reducing family size and doubling cash payouts for welfare recipients… “If you are concerned about children, then children will have a better chance in a married-couple family,” Haskins said. “There are advantages to children living in a married-couple family,” Haskins said. “And government cannot make up that difference.” Haskins told his audience that the “bully pulpit” – politicians, policy-makers and other opinion-formers must stress the case that marriage is one of the surest means of furthering the interests of poor children. He did not press for any specific governmental policies.
The Left will read this story as “Bush adviser supports gay marriage” and ignore the rest of it. The more interesting fact is that even a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institute understands the importance of marriage. True, his support for same-sex “marriage” undermines the very thing he is promoting, but we trust that others working for the White House’s current occupant—and those who hope to occupy it after him—are making the connections Ron Haskins is missing:
It is here that Mr. Romney performs a public service. Dozens of states have already enacted their own constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. But as these amendments have passed with overwhelming margins in even liberal states (and helped turn out Republican voters in 2004), the debate over the merits of traditional marriage has largely died down. Passing the marriage amendments have been exercises in the expression of the popular will, without also serving as an opportunity to reach a consensus on why marriage as an institution is worth protecting.
Although advocates of same-sex marriage will deny there is any connection to extending the institution to gay couples, a recent report released by the National Center for Health Statistics reveals why this debate is worth having now. The study found that although teen pregnancy rates are dropping, the number of out-of-wedlock births in America has been steadily rising since the 1990s. It seems women in their 20s and 30s are having children without getting married first. Last year the proportion of births that are illegitimate reached an all time high of 37%, or 1.5 million children.
Very nice. Now let’s see your post showing that a lack of faith also reduces poverty, since the higher the income, the less likely an individual is to attend church. Or do you just prefer to provide false statistical correllations that promote your propoganda?
B.L.Zebub has a point here. Sincere faith does impact material success. Most who practice the tithe won’t be able to afford a second house or yacht. We have to content ourselves with the spritual wealth that comes from caring for our fellow man.
Most opposite-sex couples are sexually faithful to one another. By contrast, David P. McWhirter, M.D. and Andrew M. Mattison, M.S.W., PhD, found that the notion of sexual fidelity is anathema to long-term male homosexual relationships. McWhirter and Mattison are themselves homosexual and a male couple. In their book The Male Couple (Prentice-Hall) they report the results of their study of 157 male couples. They concluded that “all couples with a relationship lasting more than five years have incorporated some provision for outside sexual activity in their relationships,” that “fidelity is not defined in terms of sexual behavior but rather by their emotional commitment to each other,” and that “the single most important factor that keeps couples together past the ten-year mark is the lack of possessiveness they feel.”
Of particular interest are the following parts of their analysis. From pages 253 and 254:
“When we ask the men in this study why they want sex outside the relationship, their answers include the following responses:
“1. ‘All my sexual needs are not met by my partner. Sex together gets boring at times, and I need new material for my fantasies.’
“2. ‘My partner is not really my sexual type. I still like to have sex with a certain type of man.’
“3. ‘It’s fun and adventure. The more variety and number of partners, the more adventure and fun.’
“4. ‘I have some kinky sexual interests that my partner doesn’t share.’
“5. ‘We have found that having sex with others often enhances our sex together afterwards.’
“6. ‘Sometimes I do it with another guy because I’m so angry at my lover.’
“7. ‘At times I get scared with how emotionally tied to each other we are. Having outside sex at times gives me a temporary distance I feel I need to have from my lover.’ . . .
” ‘We’ve never felt that either of us should be sexual only with the other. From the beginning that was absurd. He knew as well as I that we would trick out, so why start our relationship by making rules and denying the probability?’ ”
Page 255:
“Many couples in the earliest years together linked faithfulness with sexual exclusivity, while couples with a longer history think faithfulness has little or nothing to do with sex.”
Page 256:
“As a result of this study, we believe that the single most important factor that keeps couples together past the ten-year mark is the lack of possessiveness they feel . . . by the end of the fifth year or relationship more than 95 percent are in this group [of ‘sexual nonexclusivity’]. Bell and Weinberg warn: ‘Moreover, it should be recognized that what has survival value in a heterosexual context may be destructive in a homosexual context, and vice versa . . . .’ ”
McWhirter and Mattison conclude their discussion on page 259 by stating, “We do not trust it [the ‘sexual monster’] in our partners, and least of all in ourselves.”
Intellectual honesty requires serious consideration of how these very real differences between heterosexual marriage and male couples affects the institution of marriage; whether that which “has survival value in a heterosexual context may be destructive in a homosexual context, and vice versa.” For just one example, should adultery be excluded from the reasons for divorces of male couples? The answer appears to be, yes. If the marriage laws apply equally to everyone, then adultery also must be excluded as a reason for divorce among heterosexuals. This also raises the very real question of why male couples should be excluded from marrying as many men as they would like.
Intellectual honesty also requires serious consideration of how these very real differences between heterosexual marriage and male couples affect the children raised in that environment. Accounts from those raised in environments of sexual licentiousness indicate that such an environment is very harmful to development.