IS THE DES MOINES REGISTER AGAINST MARRIAGE?

[ahbappy852]

In an editorial this morning, the Des Moines Register bashes the Bush Administration proposal to include money for marriage promotion programs in the new Welfare Reform bill before Congress. The first paragraph reads:

If another reason is needed to oppose President Bush's push to allocate government money for marriage-minded initiatives for the poor, here's one to add to the list: They don't work. When combined with another Bush proposal to force welfare recipients to work more, new studies have found the stricter rules actually discouraged marriage. Iowa was one of the states participating in an extensive study demonstrating this.

There are numerous problems with theses studies, as noted recently in Kausfiles. Yet shop the New York Times article about the studies notes that the studies only found that welfare moms who go to work are less likely to get married. The studies did not, as the Register suggests, find that marriage promotion programs do not work. The reason for that is simple—such programs don’t yet exist. Thus, there is no data on whether marriage promotion programs would have a positive effect on marriage rates.

The Register’s real beef isn’t that such programs might not work. The real problem is something else, and the editorial writer goes to great lengths to divert readers' attention from it:

-The bottom line is the government has no business advocating specific lifestyles.

Would the Register make a similar argument regarding the government’s campaign to promote a no-smoking lifestyle? If so, they need to encourage the government to remove all of the JEL billboards in Iowa. But I doubt that we’ll see that editorial in the Register anytime soon.

The fact of the matter is that the government promotes all sorts of lifestyles all the time. The Register just doesn’t want the government to promote one particular lifestyle, marriage. But instead of coming right out and saying that, the Register tries to cover it up with specious reasoning.