By MARSHA MERCER
President Barack Obama made history and gladdened many
hearts when he endorsed gay rights and gay marriage in his second inaugural
address.
Just think what additional good he could have done had he
also endorsed marriage generally.
I know. The tired phrase “marriage between one man and one
woman” has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the political and religious right.
But that need not scare the president or anyone else from talking about its
benefits to individuals and society. Married people live longer, healthier, more
prosperous lives than singletons, studies show.
And you don’t have to be Rick Santorum to know that marriage
is a grand anti-poverty program. Many studies have shown that If people marry
before they start families, the children fare far better. This isn’t a news
flash.
In 1965, an obscure assistant secretary of Labor named Daniel
Patrick Moynihan wrote a report for President Lyndon Johnson about the
breakdown of the black family. Moynihan warned that the crumbling family
structure left many households headed by single women and these were more
likely to be stuck in poverty. He hoped
the report would be the impetus for a national strategy to break the cycle of
poverty.
But Moynihan’s report was leaked to the press, causing an
uproar. Any hope of a national conversation was lost as critics lambasted
Moynihan for blaming the victims of poverty, insulting single moms and ignoring
supports in the black community. His
controversial report notwithstanding,
Moynihan went on to serve 24 years in the U.S. Senate. He died in 2003.
The problem of the collapsing American family has only
gotten worse since the Moynihan report.
“Nearly 50 years
later, the picture is even more grim – and the statistics can no longer be
organized neatly by race,” says Isabel V. Sawhill, a budget expert and scholar
at the Brookings Institution. “Moynihan’s bracing profile of the collapsing
black family in the 1960s looks remarkably similar to a profile of the average
white family today.”
Sawhill writes in the latest Washington Monthly: “White
households have similar—or worse—statistics of divorce, unwed childbearing, and
single motherhood as the black households cited by Moynihan in his report.
“In 2000, the percentage of white children living with a
single parent was identical to the percentage of black children living with a
single parent in 1960: 22 percent,” she says.
While Moynihan saw family formation as a racial divide,
Sawhill says it’s increasingly a class issue.
“Because the breakdown of the traditional family is
overwhelmingly occurring among working-class Americans of all races, these
trends threaten to make the U.S. a much more class-based society over time,”
she writes.
When educated, middle-class couples form two-parent
families, they’re able to give their children “time and resources that
lower-and working-class single mothers, however impressive their efforts to be
both good parents and good breadwinners, simply do not have,” Sawhill says.
In his autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope,” Sen. Barack
Obama writes that liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders, in their
urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism, wrongly labeled
Moynihan a racist and “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched
behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to
intergenerational poverty.”
As president, Obama has approached making families stronger
by focusing on the responsibilities of fatherhood, usually around Fathers Day. In
June 2010, he announced a nationwide Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative, but
he conceded that it’s hard for government to change attitudes or behavior.
“Now, I can’t legislate fatherhood – I can’t force anybody
to love a child. But what we can do is send a clear message to our fathers that
there is no excuse for failing to meet their obligations,” he said.
That may be sound social policy, but it doesn’t make
anyone’s heart sing.
As Obama and other leaders promote the value of gay
marriage, they shouldn’t be silent on the value of marriage between a man and
woman. It’s not either-or. Both are good.
©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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