In 1998, there were more divorces than marriages in 35 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties. When he became governor, Frank Keating vowed to reverse this tide. The governor’s team has come up with what David Blankenhorn of the National Fatherhood Initiative says is the most comprehensive strategy for promoting marriage he has seen. “You need a search warrant,” Blankenhorn says, to find a politician with the courage to say government has a legitimate interest in promoting marriage.
But Keating’s team aims to do more than talk up the benefits of marriage. The initiative will promote pre-marital counseling, which many think is associated with a lower divorce rate. Working with nurses and social workers and clergy of all denominations, the marriage initiative plans to identify a significant population of unmarried live-ins with children who are open to the idea of marriage but do not pursue it. Such individuals will be apprised of classes, counseling, and other social services available to them should they want to get hitched.
The fiercest opponent of the Keating marriage initiative isn’t the culture of divorce and single parenting. It is a state senator named Kevin Easley, who has opened a smear campaign against Mary Myrick, a private contractor working on the initiative. Last week Easley called a press conference to mock expenses listed in her publicly filed billing records to the state. As one AP story put it: “A consultant is billing taxpayers thousands of dollars to read books, view videos, and perform other questionable tasks tied to Gov. Keating’s marriage initiative, a senator charged Tuesday.” It’s enough to make one wonder whether Easley believes reading books is a suspicious activity. Obviously, culling research material is an essential part of the work Myrick is doing for the state. The book, incidentally, was The Case for Marriage by Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher. Would that all state contractors had such good taste in policy literature.
Easley has also accused Myrick of being a covert political strategist working to boost the prospects of Republican candidates. True, Mary Myrick was once a political consultant and most of her clients were Republicans. But since 1990, she has worked on only one campaign, in 1994, Rob Johnson’s losing primary battle against Steve Largent. Other than that, her work has been confined to things like marketing and management consulting. Clearly, what irks Kevin Easley is the possibility that Oklahoma’s popular Republican governor may be on the verge of a major policy victory.
