FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

It Takes a Wedding
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ


CHICAGO — With the Republican victory last week, Congress now appears likely 
to set aside funding for programs that promote marriage among the poor. A 
friend who provides services for inner-city children declared this marriage 
push "nuts." That had been my initial reaction, as well. But now I wonder if 
the conservatives who are driving this effort might be on to something.

There's a shift in the winds in our inner cities. On the heels of a 
fatherhood movement (which, incidentally, also had conservative roots), more 
and more young couples are considering marriage. A long-term study of 5,000 
low-income couples has found that eight of 10 who have a child together have 
plans to marry. "I was out in the field all of the time, interviewing 
low-income single mothers," Kathy Edin, a sociologist at Northwestern 
University, told me. "And what really struck me in those interviews was how 
many people talked about the desire to get married. And I would go back, you 
know, and talk to my friends in academia and they would say, 'Oh, they can't 
mean that.' But I would hear it again and again."

Might marriage be making a comeback in communities where the vast majority 
of children are born to single parents? A minister on Chicago's West Side 
told me that when he began preaching there 10 years ago, his congregation 
scoffed at his efforts to foster matrimony. But this year his church 
co-sponsored an event called "Celebrating Contentment," in which 
long-married couples testified to their happiness together. Last summer, 
there was such demand for the minister's weekly marriage enrichment 
workshops that he had to put some parishioners on a waiting list. In 
Baltimore, Joe Jones, who runs a program to promote fatherhood, is adding 
marriage classes to his curriculum. And the Nation of Islam, which organized 
the Million Man March, has now taken up the mantle of marriage, declaring it 
"a social institution in need of restoration."

Marriage can be treacherous terrain. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then 
a young official in the Department of Labor, issued a report titled "The 
Negro Family: The Case for National Action." It suggested that the breakdown 
of the black family — one-third of all black children at the time lived with 
only one parent — was keeping African-Americans from finding their way into 
the middle class. Mr. Moynihan was pilloried by progressives; he was accused 
of blaming the victim. Liberals essentially abdicated the discussion about 
family to the conservatives, and have had a tough time finding their way 
back since.

But there is now growing consensus among social scientists that, all things 
being equal, two parents are best for children. It would seem to follow that 
two-parent families are also best for a community. It may take a village to 
raise a child, but it takes families to build a village.

While liberals haven't done enough to emphasize the importance of marriage 
in reinforcing the bonds that hold society together, conservatives have put 
too much faith in the power of marriage alone to lift people out of poverty.

In 1988, Vince Lane, then the director of the Chicago Housing Authority, was 
conducting top-to-bottom searches of public housing high-rises, looking for 
guns and drugs. But the discovery that most dismayed him was the large 
number of men living with their girlfriends illegally. They weren't on the 
lease. In the raids, Mr. Lane found them hiding in closets and in bathtubs 
and in laundry baskets. At one high-rise, Mr. Lane got fed up. He told the 
men they could stay — if they got married. So the city hosted an 
all-expenses-paid (honeymoon included) eight-couple shotgun wedding.

What's happened to the couples since? Most have split up, which should come 
as no surprise. The stress of not having money, of living in decrepit 
housing, of sending children to poorly funded schools would take its toll on 
even the most committed relationship. So how then might we help get couples 
to the altar? By pushing marriage? Or by helping ease the strains in 
people's lives?

It would be wrongheaded to encourage marriage by stigmatizing single 
parenthood, a process that has already begun with the reintroduction of the 
word "illegitimacy" into the lexicon. After all, that's the very 
constituency the government is trying to reach.

Wade Horn, the Bush administration official who oversees the welfare 
program, has assured critics that the administration, by supporting 
demonstration projects that promote marriage, doesn't intend to coerce 
people to the altar. And, indeed, what tools government has available — like 
the relationship training seminars Oklahoma has begun to offer — seem benign 
enough, if unproven.

When it comes to social engineering, government has turned out to be a 
clumsy catalyst. Mr. Moynihan, whose report was in many ways prescient — the 
numbers he cited for black families in 1965 now apply to all families, 
regardless of race — has said, "If you expect government to change families, 
you know more about government than I do."

Even if conservatives don't know how to get there, at least they recognize 
that marriage, this very private institution, has very public consequences. 
Liberals, who have a much firmer understanding of the obstacles poor people 
face, need to enter that conversation.


Alex Kotlowitz, author of "There Are No Children Here," is correspondent for 
the forthcoming "Frontline" program, "Let's Get Married."



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