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Do Taxpayers Need Marriage Workshops? Rabbi Stephen Baars is here from the government to help your love life.
Ohanian Comment: OK,
this is outside the ordinary realm of what we
deal with on this site. But it definitely
is pertinent to the theme of overall
corruption in the Bush administration in
general and to their reading policy in
particular.
So read about Rabbi Baars, one of the many
unlikely foot soldiers executing one of
President George W. Bush's few big domestic
policy initiatives. You may think this belongs
over in The Eggplant, but truth is always
stranger than fiction.
Your tax dollars at work.
by Stephanie Mencimer
Stephen Baars has a few impediments to
connecting with his current audience. Among
them: He's a redheaded white guy. He's a rabbi.
And he has a British accent.
None of these was a big problem when Baars was
offering his "Bliss" marriage enhancement
seminars to suburban Jews in Bethesda,
Maryland. But in 2006, much to his surprise,
the Department of Health and Human Services
awarded him a five-year, $500,000-a-year
"Healthy Marriage" grant. His federally
mandated mission: to bring down the divorce
rate in Washington, DC, whose population is
more than 55 percent black and 20 percent poor.
So for the past two years or so, Baars has been
running ads in local papers and on black radio
stations to entice couples to drop by his
office in a gritty area just north of the
Capitol and "create relationships that win!"
On a warm Thursday night in May, Baars, dressed
in a gray suit and yarmulke, is sitting alone
in his third-floor conference room, awaiting
some bliss seekers. He understands that
achieving his federal grant's goal is "a tough
nut to crack." "When you're dealing with that
degree of poverty, it's very hard for people to
take this seriously," he says. "I read many
black magazines," he adds—but even so, the
cultural disconnect can be daunting. "Twenty or
thirty percent of the people who come here
can't deal with it."
Baars says his course usually draws 8 or 10
people a night. He acknowledges that many of
them aren't married, just looking for
relationship advice. "We've even had gay
people." Tonight, though, 45 minutes after
start time, not even one straight person has
shown up to get Bliss.
Rabbi Baars is just one of the many unlikely
foot soldiers executing one of President George
W. Bush's few big domestic policy initiatives.
From its earliest days, the administration has
insisted that marriage is not just a sacred
institution, but a powerful way to restore
family values, reduce poverty, and protect
children. Announcing the creation of Marriage
Protection Week in October 2003, Bush cited
findings that "children raised in households
headed by married parents fare better than
children who grow up in other family
structures." More than a not-so-subtle dig at
gay marriage, it was a reaffirmation that the
federal government was now in the business of
"helping couples build successful marriages."
In early 2001, Bush appointed Wade Horn, a
conservative psychologist, as the nation's
first marriage czar. Horn spent the next six
years as the Department of Health and Human
Services assistant secretary for children and
families, making sure federal programs from
Head Start to welfare were doing their part to
get the wedding bells pealing. Previously, Horn
had been one of the leading figures in the
marriage movement—an offshoot of the family-
values camp that sought to defend the
traditional family from the destructive
influence of women's libbers and single moms.
As the president of the National Fatherhood
Initiative, Horn attacked what he called the
"we hate marriage" elites and infuriated
women's groups by defending the Southern
Baptist Convention's proclamation that women
should "submit" to their husbands' "servant
leadership." Horn believed that federal poverty
programs should be vehicles for marriage
promotion, proposing in a 1997 article that the
government boost the marriage rate in poor
neighborhoods by prohibiting unmarried people
from taking advantage of programs like Head
Start and public housing.
Once confirmed, Horn toned down his rhetoric,
but plowed ahead in transforming federal
poverty programs into vehicles for marriage
promotion. During his first three years, the
Administration for Children and Families took
$62 million budgeted for anti-poverty programs
and gave it instead to a host of new, largely
faith-based organizations to implement new
marriage-promotion programs. That diversion
included $20 million from the block grant that
funds local agencies that do everything from
run Head Start programs to provide heating
assistance to seniors. The agency also shifted
$27 million in research money from studying
things like whether people who are cut from
welfare rolls get jobs to measuring how these
new programs affect "marital satisfaction."
That was just the beginning. The
administration's ultimate goal was to dedicate
a significant chunk of the $16.5 billion
federal welfare budget to marriage promotion.
When the 1996 welfare reform bill came up for
reauthorization in Congress in 2002, the White
House sought to divert $300 million a year from
the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
program into its marriage initiatives. It also
wanted to force tanf (i.e., welfare) recipients
to attend marriage-promotion classes as a "work
activity," and sanction them if they didn't.
"We used to joke, 'Does dating count?'" says
Kate Kahan, a former staffer for Sen. Max
Baucus (D-Mont.) who worked on the bill. "The
focus was so much on the certificate of
marriage," she says. "It was so ideological and
disconnected from what was happening on the
ground with families."
The White House eventually won much of the
battle to make welfare more marriage minded—in
large part, says Kahan, because Democrats never
really figured out how to fight back. Many
liberal members of Congress were genuinely
concerned about the disintegration of low-
income families, particularly the fact that 70
percent of black children are born out of
wedlock. And of course, no one wanted to come
out against marriage. The final welfare bill,
passed in 2006, provided no new money for
family assistance, but it set aside $100
million a year for creating new marriage
programs.
that's how the federal government started
helping Americans put a little sizzle back in
their love lives. Taxpayers are now paying for
Brownsville, Texas, residents to attend island
retreats where they can discover "how to keep
the romance alive." They're paying for couples
massage classes, date nights, and "sexual
enhancement" workshops in Clearfield,
Pennsylvania; a "sweetheart dinner dance" in
Sacramento; courses on deciphering your
spouse's "love language" in Wyoming; and "10
Great Dates" seminars in dozens of cities.
According to the federally funded National
Healthy Marriage Resource Center, a third of
the grantees whom the Healthy Marriage
Initiative rushed to fund have no previous
experience in marriage education. Many of the
rest are marriage entrepreneurs—motivational
speakers with businesses that sell seminars,
books, CDs, and videos. Among them is Dr. Susan
Heitler, a Denver psychotherapist who created
an online video game in which a middle-class
African American couple bickers over the
flowers for its upcoming wedding. Click the
wrong answer, and Heitler appears on-screen to
gently correct you—and pitch her book, Power of
Two: Secrets to a Strong & Loving Marriage.
Mark Gungor, a minister in Green Bay,
Wisconsin, has received a $265,000 annual grant
to present his "Laugh Your Way to a Better
Marriage" seminars to Hispanics around the
country. Chris Ferrell, who translates the
sessions into Spanish, says his boss always
wanted to get in touch with his Latino roots.
In 2006, acf awarded a $548,000 annual grant to
Granato Counseling Services to offer its FIT
Relationships™ program to low-income married
couples with children in Washington, DC. Unable
to find enough married parents in a city where
more than 90 percent of poor women with kids
are single, the program expanded to the
Virginia suburbs. There, explains company
founder Laura Granato, it now tries to reach
recent Hispanic immigrants—some of the same
people that the administration has tried to
deport.
Some state social service agencies have gotten
marriage money, as have some old-line anti-
poverty organizations that have tacked marriage
programs on to their existing services. And a
good chunk of the funding has gone to anti-
abortion and pro-abstinence groups, as well as
right-wing Christian organizations that lobby
against gay marriage.While the marriage money
comes from welfare, it's not actually required
to go toward serving low-income people. Nor
does the federal government require Healthy
Marriage grantees to show much in the way of
progress. Programs aren't required to track
their participants' marital fortunes. When
asked if any of the programs are working,
Theodora Ooms, a consultant to the National
Healthy Marriage Resource Center, responds,
"What do you mean by working?" Ooms says that
sometimes the measure of an effective marriage
education program is a couple that decides not
to tie the knot.
If Democrats had proposed spending hundreds of
millions of dollars on a social program whose
only measure of success was whether its
beneficiaries were happy in love, they would
have been laughed out of town. But Republicans
have stuck by Healthy Marriage, for better or
for worse. "It's only $100 million a year,"
says Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution and the former senior
adviser for welfare policy at the Bush White
House. And, he adds, "If we had the marriage
rate that we had in the 1970s, the poverty rate
would fall 30 percent."
That questionable statistic has convinced some
liberals to get on the marriage bandwagon.
Robert Lerman, an economist at the Urban
Institute, says the disintegration of the
American family is having a devastating effect
on poor children, and it's "long past time that
we took the family structure issue more
seriously."
However, marriage advocates have not satisfied
critics who claim that marriage is a product—
not a cause—of financial security. After all,
one poor person married to another poor person
equals two poor people. A 2004 study by the
University of Tennessee's Center for Business
and Economic Research found that single moms on
welfare who got married were in fact no better
off financially than those who stayed single,
and their children didn't fare any better
either. In fact, poor women who never got
married were often better off than those who
got married and then divorced. For instance,
welfare recipients whose marriages ended during
the study were twice as likely to have their
power cut off and twice as likely to move in
with other people because they couldn't afford
housing than women who remained single.
Even if marriage is a bona fide anti-poverty
tool, there is virtually no research indicating
how, precisely, the government might get poor
people to embrace it. The only social program
that's ever demonstrated an increase in the
marriage rate of poor women with children
caused it by accident. Started in 1994, the
Minnesota Family Investment Program allowed
women to keep more of their welfare benefits
when they went to work, rather than cutting
them off. During the three-year experiment and
for a few years afterward, black women's
divorce rate fell 70 percent. The positive
effects on kids also continued for several
years.
Minnesota's experience suggests that President
Bush wasn't entirely wrong to think that the
government can play a positive role in
stabilizing families. Yet it also showed that
strengthening poor families requires something
quite simple: money, which the administration
has been extremely reluctant to allocate. For
seven straight years, it has proposed freezing
federal child care funding; if Congress
approves the continued freeze, an estimated
200,000 kids will lose their child care slots
next year. Bush has also twice vetoed a bill
that would have expanded the State Child Health
Insurance Program (schip) to include more poor
working families. And since 2004, budget cuts
have eliminated more than 150,000 housing
vouchers for poor families; only one-quarter of
eligible families now get housing assistance.
All of which may help explain why the marriage
president's legacy includes an out-of-wedlock
birthrate that stands at nearly 40 percent, an
all-time high.
one year ago, Donald and Octavia Knight were
living in a dank basement in a drug-infested,
crime-ridden Baltimore neighborhood. The space
often flooded, and it crawled with rats. Though
Octavia was nine months pregnant, they slept on
crates. Despite their dire circumstances, on
June 24, 2007, they got married—with no
prompting from President Bush. "We were in
love," laughs Donald. Two weeks later, Tavien
Donald Knight was born, the only baby they know
whose parents are married to each other.
From the start, the Knights' marriage faced
long odds. Octavia, now 22, only finished 11th
grade. Donald, 49, got his high school diploma
while he was in prison in the 1980s. Both
worked, but their earnings fell well below the
federal poverty line of $17,170 a year for a
family of three. Tavien's birth nearly derailed
their relationship. The baby was born with
light skin; Donald is dark skinned. "I went a
little Jerry Springer," he confesses.
Before they left the hospital with their
newborn, the Knights were recruited into the
Baltimore Building Strong Families program, one
of the Healthy Marriage Initiative's showcase
projects. Unlike the work done by many of the
newer marriage grantees, Building Strong
Families is based on actual research. Social
scientists have found that more than 80 percent
of unwed, low-income parents were in a romantic
relationship at the time of their babies'
birth; while many hoped to marry, most split up
soon afterward. Those studies suggest that
supporting parents at this critical time might
keep men more involved in their kids' lives.
The centerpiece of Building Strong Families is
a support group for new parents that meets
weekly for six months, teaching couples a
variety of skills from conflict resolution to
money management—standard marriage education
stuff, tailored to poor, black Baltimoreans.
The program provides free dinner, child care,
and transportation. Caseworkers visit
participants at home to help with housing,
child care, health insurance, and other
services; the visits continue for six months
after they finish the program. Even if the
participants don't get married—and most won't—
the hope is that they will do a better job of
raising their kids together. As of June, there
had been a grand total of 8 weddings among the
680 or so couples that had been through the
program in the past three years.
The Knights have attended nearly every one of
their classes. Donald says that the program,
with its focus on navigating domestic disputes,
helped him work through the crisis that
followed Tavien's birth. (It helped that the
baby soon became the spitting image of his
dad.)
On a rainy Wednesday night in May, a Building
Strong Families van delivers the Knights and
their 10-month-old son to the program's office
in Sandtown-Winchester, a neighborhood that
frequently served as the backdrop for The Wire.
After leaving Tavien in child care, the couple
joins six other people for a session on
managing money. Two women are here solo because
the fathers of their babies are now in prison;
one says she hopes the classes will help her
choose a better mate in the future.
Afra Vance White, the program director, starts
the discussion by asking, "Is money a cause of
stress in your relationship?" Donald Knight
volunteers that he needs to get a new job, but
needs child care to make that happen. Vance
White asks whether the couple has tried to get
a subsidized child care voucher; Donald says
the paperwork is too complicated. He doesn't
mention that Octavia actually received a
voucher after the baby was born. But once she
got a $6.30 an hour job at Burger King, social
services cut her off, saying she was making
enough to support her family and pay her own
child care bill. The cost of child care would
consume more than half of her weekly paycheck,
so taking care of Tavien has fallen to Donald,
leaving him earning $100 a week as a church
janitor.
Six months of group therapy seems like a thin
shell protecting the Knights' marriage from the
ravages of poverty. Though they've moved to a
new, rat-free apartment in a quieter
neighborhood, they don't have health insurance.
(Tavien only recently got coverage.) And the
child care problem remains a huge obstacle to
any hopes of upward mobility. "We're married,"
Donald says, "but we're still broke."
back at his still-empty office, Rabbi Baars
does Bliss for an audience of one—me—with the
poise of someone who has flopped in front of a
crowd. (He took a class in stand-up comedy at
ucla and once performed at the Improv in Santa
Monica.) His yarmulke keeps falling off as he
gets into his material, which is thoughtful and
occasionally funny. Baars likes to quote Woody
Allen: "Sex is like pizza: When it's good, it's
really good, and when it's bad, it's still
pretty good."
An hour and 15 minutes after the session was
supposed to start, a black woman in a turquoise
tank top comes up the stairs and collapses into
a chair. Chan Taylor says she heard about the
seminar on the radio. "I need Bliss because
right now I'm getting blistered," she says with
a hearty laugh. Taylor wants to know if Baars
will talk about "what happens if we marry frogs
and turn them into princes and they hop away?"
At a loss for an answer, Baars chuckles
nervously.
Taylor isn't married, nor does she have a
boyfriend. Her two children are grown, placing
her squarely outside Healthy Marriage's target
group. But she hopes to be a good wife someday
and asks Baars if his class will teach her "how
to pick the right person." Baars gently tells
her no, and refers her to his dating program,
Bliss for Singles.
I ask Baars if he's saved anyone's marriage. He
insists that he has, but admits that progress
is difficult to document. "It's hard to measure
if you're happily married," he says. "Is it
achieving the government's goal of reducing
poverty? That I can't answer."
— Stephanie Mencimer
Mother Jones
2008-09-02
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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