A Determined Couple Promotes Matrimony as the Solution to End Poverty

On a bit of a whim, Michael and Harriet McManus once spent a weekend at a conference in Connecticut designed to strengthen marriages. Already together for 10 years and seemingly happy, the McManuses hardly wore the look of a couple in need of help. Or so thought Michael.

During an exercise designed to heighten marital communication, the McManuses wrote love letters to each other. “I wrote pages and pages extolling Harriet’s virtues,” Mr. McManus recalls. “She wrote one skinny little paragraph. That’s how I knew she wasn’t a happy puppy in this marriage.”

Granted a more precise view of their imperfect union, the McManuses not only began to patch together a stronger relationship, they also started forming theories on what makes marriages work and looking at how churches and others counseled — or, to be more exact, didn’t counsel — troubled couples.

Now, 25 years later, the McManuses say they not only enjoy a happy marriage, but they also promote programs that advocate matrimony through Marriage Savers, the charity they founded five years ago.

While Marriage Savers has an annual budget of $231,000, the McManuses hope that their charity and others like it will get a serious financial investment from the federal government in the near future to help them expand their work, which Mr. McManus says has proven results.

It is time, he says, for the government to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to fraying families. Arguing that a dearth of married couples is a cause of poverty, the McManuses testified before a Congressional subcommittee in May to urge the government to earmark as much as $700-million in welfare funds to promote marriage and cut the national divorce rate.

The argument is one that is likely to get much attention once hearings begin early next year to renew the 1996 federal law that overhauled the welfare system. President Bush must sign updated legislation by October 1, 2002, to keep the changes in welfare in place. One of the four explicitly stated goals of the 1996 welfare law was to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

Mr. McManus, who prefers to speak for the couple, says he sees nothing controversial about the federal government channeling money for the poor into programs that encourage church- and state-recognized unions between men and women. Unlike those who believe the government should steer clear of backing one type of family over another, Mr. McManus argues that federal involvement in the marriage question hardly constitutes meddling. “If you want to talk about government interference, how about talking about divorce?” offers Mr. McManus, in an interview at his suburban Washington home here, which doubles as Marriage Savers’ headquarters.

And with divorce people and single-parent families accounting for a large number of the impoverished, he has few qualms about encouraging a national forum for his ideas. “Isn’t it time to make marriage a political issue?” Mr. McManus, a conservative syndicated newspaper columnist, asks.

69% Marriage Rate

Census 2000 data show that 69 percent of households today are headed by married couples, compared with 87 percent in 1970. In addition, 24 percent of households are “nuclear households” — ones that feature two married parents with children — the lowest rate ever, and nearly 30 percentage points lower than similar statistics in 1970. Meanwhile, the number of families headed by single mothers has jumped from three million in 1970 to 10 million in 2000.

Since its start in 1996, Marriage Savers says it has helped to lower the divorce rate in such places as Modesto, Calif., one of the 140 cities in which clergy and others are implementing the charity’s programs. Mr. McManus says that his touting of a “community marriage policy” to church leaders in Modesto helped reduce the rate of broken marriages by nearly 50 percent.

Among Marriage Savers’ ministrations to church members is the need for “mentoring” of couples-to-be and those who live together, as well as those in existing marriages for whom the ardor of wedding vows has waned over the years.

“Nobody wants to talk about the ‘M’ word and how important it is,” Mr. McManus says. “It’s not just the government. It’s the church. I’ve been going to church for 40 years. I’ve heard two sermons on marriage, one on cohabitation, and 100 on Abraham.”

Although teenage pregnancies and the high rate of divorces have drawn most of the attention during debates on marriage, Mr. McManus believes that living together has wrongly been winked at by religious institutions. “Cohabitation is the dominant way male-female unions are formed now,” he says. “Churches just stood by and let this happen.”

Although some studies show that the number of children living in two-parent homes has increased slightly in recent years, Mr. McManus takes little solace, saying that cohabiting couples account for the increase. Couples living together are “disastrous to marriage.” Those who do get married have a 50-percent higher divorce rate than couples that marry before moving in together, he says, citing a 1989 survey of Wisconsin residents.

Hence, Marriage Savers wants the federal government not only to spend more dollars on counseling programs such as its own, but also to set concrete goals for increasing marriage rates. The group also wants numerical objectives aimed at reducing the number of divorces and slashing the number of out-of-wedlock births in the revamped welfare legislation. By setting goals, the government will be more likely to make a commitment to the pro-marriage mandate set forth in the 1996 welfare law, Mr. McManus believes.

Few States Take Action

Even though encouraging marriage was one of the goals of the original 1996 bill, very few of the states receiving federal welfare block grants have doled out money to programs that seek to form families or keep them together. Mr. McManus says that only Oklahoma has taken a meaningful portion of its welfare grant — about $10-million — and applied it to family programs.

Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating’s “Marriage Initiative” plan includes training for welfare workers and nurses familiar with those bearing children out of wedlock to counsel women on how to communicate with a child’s father. (Marriage Savers may also be represented among Oklahoma’s pro-marriage movement; the McManuses have entered a bid to run some programs in the state.)

“Marriage is the forgotten component of welfare reform,” says Mr. McManus. He adds that he would favor spending government funds on a “legitimacy bonus” for welfare mothers who marry the father of their child.

Marriage Savers has predictable support from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, which is calling for as much as $1-billion in federal funds to be spent over the next four years on government programs to solidify traditional families.

“The government actively subsidizes single parenthood and discourages marriage,” says Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He deflects critics who say government subsidies of pro-marriage programs might constitute social engineering or a backing of a single way of life. “Is it a lifestyle decision to take money out of my pocket?” he asks. Mr. Rector adds that 90 percent of the federal welfare budget is delivered to single-parent families.

President Bush’s Pledge

Although it’s early on in the debate, it appears that Marriage Savers’ cause may be aided by a friend in a high place. President Bush said during the National Summit on Fatherhood in June that he would seek $315-million in new federal aid to strengthen families.

The president also recently nominated Wade F. Horn, a longtime Marriage Savers board member who heads the National Fatherhood Initiative, a charity that promotes traditional families, to be assistant secretary for family support in the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for administering welfare programs.

Such moves have earned the wrath of liberal and feminist groups, such as the National Organization for Women, who say that President Bush and other members of the so-called marriage movement are scapegoating single mothers.

Deepak Bhargava, director of public policy at the Center for Community Change, in Washington, says that spending taxpayer dollars on marital matters instead of what he believes are more pressing needs, such as job training and education, should not be a priority when Congress rewrites the 1996 legislation.

Marriage Savers’ proposal to add $700-million in government funds for pro-matrimony efforts “is a fairly ridiculous proposal,” says Mr. Bhargava, who also serves as director of the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, an antipoverty advocacy coalition. “It’s certainly true that support programs shouldn’t discriminate against the married. But anything that earmarks funds or results in penalties for one-parent families is morally and politically dangerous.”

Lack of Foundation Support

The McManuses had hoped private foundations would have done more to pave the way for support of programs such as theirs, but it hasn’t happened. Although the group is backed by grants from the Maclellan Foundation, in Chattanooga, Tenn., and the Scaife Family Foundation, in Pittsburgh, among others, Mr. McManus says as many as 50 foundations have turned Marriage Savers down for grants in the past year.

“Foundations avoid marriage like the plague,” Mr. McManus says. “They’ve known for years the damage fatherless families cause. Why aren’t they leading on this?”