An eager reader brings to my attention an opinion column from Rapid City furniture mogul Bob Fischer. The essay starts of gently enough, reminding us that Jesus was poor (Occupy the Temple!) and that we ought to help the poor.
But then Fischer veers off to blame poverty on the breakdown of the family. He commits a spectacular logical fallacy, claiming that the higher rate of poverty among children of single moms demonstrates that failing to get married or stay married causes poverty. There is a correlation between poverty and divorce, but it would be just as logical to conclude that poverty causes marriages to break down. Given that the average cost of a wedding tops $26,000, maybe poverty stops marriages from even getting started.
I would suggest that the root cause of poverty is not lack of a spouse but lack of income. Acquiring a spouse (and a child!) hasn't increased my income. If you want to tackle poverty, you look for ways to increase income, like expanding access to education, affordable health care, and transportation, as well as promoting job creation.
Alas, such approaches to beating poverty are too direct for Fischer. He says we can beat poverty with covenant marriages. He laments no-fault divorce laws, then proposes making it harder to bail out of marriage:
South Dakota was one of the last states to succumb and fell prey to the siren song to make divorce easier and quicker in 1985. The resulting fallout has been an increase in divorce and broken families.
Again, bad government policy can contribute to poverty, but good government policy can reverse this trend. In Louisiana, covenant marriage laws have been passed to allow couples to get married and stay married by making their marriage much more of a lifelong commitment. Over a dozen other states have passed or introduced such laws in their legislatures. South Dakota should look at reversing no-fault divorce laws and establishing covenant marriage laws for those couples who want to reverse the downward trend for the benefit of themselves and their children [emphasis mine; Bob Fischer, "Breakdown of Family Harming America's Poor," Rapid City Journal, 2011.12.25].
...laws passed to allow couples to get married and stay married... Here lies Fischer's greatest contradiction. He preaches personal responsibility, but then posits that we need a law to allow people to engage in personal responsibility. The only laws I can think of that prevent couples from getting married and staying married in South Dakota are our statutes banning same-sex marriages (SD Const. 21-9, SDCL 25-1-1, and SDCL 25-1-38). Except for homosexuals, any South Dakotans who want to get married and stay married are perfectly free under current law to do so.
Even if the South Dakota Legislature can find time in its busy schedule to codify covenant marriage, such a law seems unlikely to make a dent in divorce rates. In Louisiana, which passed the nation's first covenant marriage law in 1997, the divorce rate is still higher than the national average, and women are waiting longer to get married. The number of divorces in Louisiana increased during the first six years during which the covenant marriage law was in effect. Most importantly, as of 2009, fewer than two percent of married Louisianians had chosen to sign on to a covenant marriage. Results have been no better in Arkansas or Arizona, the only other two states to codify covenant marriage. Both Arizona and Arkansas are among the ten states with the highest rates of divorce.
One researcher studied 700 covenant marriages and found those nice couples divorcing at half the rate of non-covenant couples. However...
...other factors were in play as well, including a couple's level of professed religiosity, premarital counseling and a general belief in the institution of marriage as a lifetime commitment. "They were substantially committed to marriage, which drew them to the covenant relationship to begin with," [Professor Laura A.] Sanchez says [Kevin Allman, "Covenant Marriage Laws in Louisiana," BestOfNewOrleans.com, 2009.03.03].
If people want to get married and stay married, they will, with or without a covenant marriage law. Creating a new law to recognize a form of marriage that fewer than one in fifty couples will sign on for is about as irrelevant and ineffective a means of fighting poverty as our Legislature could dream up... which is why I wouldn't put it past them to actually consider this idea.
Divorce is a convenience. You can go through life without getting a divorce. In today's hard times, it's taking longer for people to file for divorce because of the money it takes. It's also amping up the fight by the time the divorce is filed. Money is a huge issue in, I would say, 60-70% of the divorces.
So, to clean up the "his bills/debt, her bills,debt" we file a bankruptcy before the divorce so there's little to no debt to divide, taking the money issue out of the equation.
Take away the money issue, they still divorce. Never had one that didn't.
KW put up a post about Fischer's newest wife some time ago but I can't find it in the Blogmore archives.
One gets the sense that this guy is kinda the Marcus Bachmann of Rapid City, therapy is like divorce: it's expensive because it's worth it.
My divorce lawyer told me we would hate eachother more from the divorce process that we did before. So now the next generation just becomes single moms. Of course that is not the courts fault because they just blame everyone else for not obeying them when they caused the most problems themself.
The courts method of dealing with a Dad with values is to run him off since he is causing problems. So the Dad's called it going through hell and the kids learned that men leave. Everyone in the state pen did not have a Dad(told to me by a prison chaplin). So the kids learned that men leave so we now have a whole generation of single mom's and youngmen who have learned this from the courts. I even heard a young lady say, "It does not matter that mom was a whore, because I learned from the court that if you have a positive attitude you will get everything you want." How is that for court taught disfunction.
Deregulate marriage. Let individuals define marriage as they see fit (gay, straight, poly, trees, whatever)... don't need government involvement at all. Take it away from the government and it ceases to be a culture war battle.
Cory, you analysis is way off. Number one, two incomes are greater than one. Two, married couples need one house, not two. married couples need less child care. Married couples have one heat bill, not two. Then you have the host of social problems of children who don't have a father living in their home.
Clearly, marriage is the key to removing children from poverty.
"Clearly, marriage is the key to removing children from poverty."
Also, when I was young, I was never attacked by a bengal tiger. Clearly, my parents' marriage was the key to preventing bengal tiger attacks in South Dakota.
Chris, I provided many details to come to the conclusion. What is wrong with those details?
David-
Agreed. Right now though the government uses marriage as a method of assigning additional legal rights to individuals that desire to have them. That system would need to be reworked so that those rights could be properly assigned but the general concept is sound. No need for the government to recognize your beliefs, it just needs to not interfere with them. Just like confirmation or any other right of passage.
Steve-
Doesn't your analysis assume that both parents are bread winners? I've been kind of shocked at the number of "Dads" that refuse to work and simply sit around mooching off of the mothers of their children. In such cases it would be more economically beneficial not to have the "Dad" in the picture.
Also, regarding the "host of social problems" I tend to think this is more a function of poverty rather than not having the father in the picture. I don't have numbers but from my experience 2 parent low income house holds are on average just as malfunctioning as single parent low income house holds.
Lastly, if you look at the world rather than just the US, things start work much better when women become educated and independent (as opposed to in a dependent situation). Living conditions improve, violence decreases, and regions begin to stabilize. Similar gains are not seen if an entire region's average income goes up. It has to go to the women if stability/conditions are to improve.
Covenant marriage laws are brought to you by the same people who think that if two gay people somewhere marry it will somehow damage their marriage.
Call me crazy but I always thought the strength of a marriage depended on the people party to the marriage and their willingness to live and work with each other.
From Sibby: "Number one, two incomes are greater than one. Two, married couples need one house, not two. married couples need less child care. Married couples have one heat bill, not two."
Boy, if I didn't know better, I'd say Sibby was advocating for communismim here. ;^)
Steve, we know full well that the advocates of covenant marriage aren't really making an economic argument. They are making a religious/culture-war argument. If the covenant marriage proposal were purely economic, its advocates would support extending the same contractual opportunity to homosexuals and polygamists.
Nick is right: the strength of marriage depends entirely on the commitment of the people entering it, not the moral grandstanding of legislators. Empirical evidence shows covenant marriage laws do not achieve their stated goals. Let's roll with David and Tony and get government out of marriage. Everyone will be better off.
Steve: Your details for why marriage reduces poverty all boil down to this: Two incomes and/or shared expenses reduce poverty. In other words any increase in income or any sharing of expenses reduces poverty. It doesn't have to be marriage. It could be cohabitation. It could be living with your parents. It could be two families sharing a car, a house, or other resources.
To boil the argument down even further: Money reduces poverty. Well, that's kind of what most liberals would tell you, and why we need anti-poverty programs, not why we need to force people into marriages.
Ha. What. You mean to say that all this time polygamy was the answer? Are headed back to the Old Testament to save money? Belinda isn't going to like this.
The Blindman
"City Council to discuss ordinance banning discrimination on basis of sexual orientation." Omaha Public Radio †@KIOSOmaha.