For Wade Horn, fathers of our country are key to its survival

Insight on the News, August 18, 1997 by Stephen Goode

That doesn't mean some divorces shouldn't happen. It doesn't even mean that there aren't some kids who benefit from divorce. But we have to be careful about divorce. When we say that there can be such a thing as a relatively painless divorce, it can delude some into believing it is relatively painless for the children, too. I do not believe it is possible for us to have divorces that don't have negative consequences emotionally and behaviorally for the kids.

Insight: What government policies might help?

WFH: What is government policy when it comes to marriage? Basically what it says is, "We're going to punish you if you get married. We're going to tax you more. If you're low-income, we'll take away your welfare benefits."

The government is very clear. Domestic-partnership laws are antimarriage, leaving aside the gay and homosexual issue, because what they say is, "If you're not married3 guess what! You don't have to pay the marriage tax."

It seems to me that what we ought to do is dramatically revise the tax code at least to provide government neutrality toward marriage, and maybe even marriage bonuses, as we used to do with income splitting. I think what we ought to do, if we're serious about putting marriage back into low-income communities where it is disappearing at a frightening pace, is to privilege marriage.

Take the places in Head Start programs, for example. Who gets Head Start and who doesn't? What we ought to say is, "If you are low-income and income-eligible and you're married3 you go to the front of the line."

There are still going to be plenty of places for children of single women. There are just not that many married low-income families. But we ought to make a clear statement that marriage is important and we are going to provide incentives for it.

The same thing with public housing. We used to say, "If you want a place in public housing and you're married, go to the front of the line." We stopped doing that in the mid-1960s, and guess what happened to marriage starting around the mid-1960s? It also started to disappear.

Insight: Is feminism the culprit in the decline of fatherhood?

WFH: Let me be very clear. I think feminism has done a lot of very good things. I have a 12-year-old daughter who wants very much to be a physician. I know that 40 years ago her option if she was interested in medicine would have been to be a nurse.

Where I think radical feminism is to blame, at least in part, for the collapse of fatherhood is when it confuses social equality with androgyny and insists women don't need men. What it says is not only should my daughter be able to become a physician, but we ought to have a culture which says men and women are exactly the same. They should behave exactly the same.

From what we know, that's just not true. That's right, men are different from women! When it comes to parenting, it's the same thing. Men and women parent differently. Not in every circumstance, but they do tend to parent differently. When children do best is when they're exposed to the complementary aspects of what a man and a woman bring to the parenting equation. It's not that two-parent households are better than one-parent families because of a second pair of hands. It matters to whom that second pair of hands is attached.