Second of a three-part series While boasting the know-how to fix the health care system and rebuild the economy, the political class claims a curious impotence when it comes to family breakdown.
From the retreat from marriage to rising cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth rates, policymakers of both parties echo sociologist James Q. Wilson’s dictum: “If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do.”
Such fatalism, however, is merely an excuse to duck responsibility for indicting the legal and policy experiments of the 1960s and 1970s that departed radically from American ideals, history, and law.
By giving aid and comfort to the sexual revolution, these changes deconstructed America’s family system that flourished in the middle decades of the 20th century, leaving the country less free, less equal, less fair, and less prosperous.
Consequently, declining family demographics are not endogenous factors but phenomena that could be reversed, if Congress were willing to repeal the policy excesses of that earlier era.
That means taking on the Supreme Court, which has led the pernicious assault on the family by gutting state laws that had — since the founding — either privileged matrimony or stigmatized behaviors that weakened the marital bond.
In particular, Congress should nullify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 edict that spearheaded the retreat from marriage by eroding the custom of the shotgun wedding, the conventional response to “unintended” pregnancies for generations of Americans.
As economist John Mueller observes, the court’s elevation of abortion to a legally protected “choice” for unmarried pregnant women not only elevated abortion rates and sent birthrates into a tailspin but also prompted a precipitous drop in marriage rates.
It’s also time to bring down the no-fault divorce regime. In addition to triggering an immediate and permanent boost in divorce rates, no-fault divorce put the government on the side of family breakup, not family preservation.
And by undermining the idea of marital permanence, no-fault has caused couples — fearing easy divorce — to pull back from the robust commitment that makes lifelong marriage an economic bargain for both sexes.
Many in Congress argue they can’t interfere with state prerogatives related to family law — whether no-fault or the latest aberration, same-sex marriage. Yet that didn’t stop the federal government from taking over child-support enforcement in the 1970s, an intervention that turbocharged the no-fault machine.
In effect, Congress incentivized family breakup by creating a child-support system that virtually guarantees divorcing mothers and their children an income stream without requiring those women, who initiate two-thirds of marital disruptions, to demonstrate any wrongdoing on the part of the father.
All this needs to go. As does another policy monstrosity of the 1970s: sex-based affirmative action that favors not just women over men in the workplace but the privileged career woman over the homemaker-wife who depends on her breadwinning husband. According to a 2007 Pew Research Center study, this blatant rent-seeking has resulted in employment patterns that neither American men nor women consider ideal.
Most important, the workplace bias that Uncle Sam sanctions, in collusion with big business, has facilitated the movement of mothers out of the home economy and into the market economy, undermining the family as an economic unit, marriage as a lifelong partnership, and the well-being of children.
Moreover, by advantaging young women over their male counterparts, affirmative action has disrupted the marriage market and helped lead to dramatic increases in cohabitation and single households.
There’s a lot here to consider. Yet this isn’t sufficient to return the married-parent family to the centerpiece of American life. Tomorrow’s piece will add the finishing touches.
Robert W. Patterson is editor of the Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy.
