Do Taxpayers Need Marriage Workshops?

Rabbi Baars is just one of the many unlikely foot soldiers executing one of President George W. Bush's few big domestic policy initiatives. From its earliest days, the administration has insisted that marriage is not just a sacred institution, but a powerful way to restore family values, reduce poverty, and protect children. Announcing the creation of Marriage Protection Week in October 2003, Bush cited findings that "children raised in households headed by married parents fare better than children who grow up in other family structures." More than a not-so-subtle dig at gay marriage, it was a reaffirmation that the federal government was now in the business of "helping couples build successful marriages."

In early 2001, Bush appointed Wade Horn, a conservative psychologist, as the nation's first marriage czar. Horn spent the next six years as the Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary for children and families, making sure federal programs from Head Start to welfare were doing their part to get the wedding bells pealing. Previously, Horn had been one of the leading figures in the marriage movement—an offshoot of the family-values camp that sought to defend the traditional family from the destructive influence of women's libbers and single moms. As the president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, Horn attacked what he called the "we hate marriage" elites and infuriated women's groups by defending the Southern Baptist Convention's proclamation that women should "submit" to their husbands' "servant leadership." Horn believed that federal poverty programs should be vehicles for marriage promotion, proposing in a 1997 article that the government boost the marriage rate in poor neighborhoods by prohibiting unmarried people from taking advantage of programs like Head Start and public housing.

Once confirmed, Horn toned down his rhetoric, but plowed ahead in transforming federal poverty programs into vehicles for marriage promotion. During his first three years, the Administration for Children and Families took $62 million budgeted for anti-poverty programs and gave it instead to a host of new, largely faith-based organizations to implement new marriage-promotion programs. That diversion included $20 million from the block grant that funds local agencies that do everything from run Head Start programs to provide heating assistance to seniors. The agency also shifted $27 million in research money from studying things like whether people who are cut from welfare rolls get jobs to measuring how these new programs affect "marital satisfaction."

That was just the beginning.

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