Wade Horn: How a U.S. Official Promotes Marriage To Help Poor Kids - 11/20/06

[Smartmarriages]

The Matchmaker 
How a U.S. Official Promotes Marriage To Help Poor Kids
The Wall Street Journal
November 20, 2006 
By LAURA MECKLER
__________
To Encourage Couples to Wed, Wade Horn Plans to Spend $500 Million in
Five Years
__________

Mr. Cobb Starts a Family

The notion that government can help children escape poverty by promoting
marriage for their parents was once considered a fringe idea from right
field. It is now federal policy.

In very large part, that's due to Wade Horn, a child psychologist turned
bureaucrat who has put marriage atop the Bush administration's limited
antipoverty agenda.

As head of the federal Administration for Children and Families, Dr. Horn
has employed the zeal of an ideologue and the discipline of an academic to
inject marriage promotion into a host of government programs under his
purview, even before Congress authorized an official marriage program.
Today, more than 200 programs are at work across the country, seeking to
change public attitudes surrounding marriage, persuade teenagers to aspire
to matrimony and teach relationship skills to young couples.

Along the way, Dr. Horn has co-opted critics, fine-tuned his rhetoric, and
persuaded Congress to insert his marriage agenda into this year's welfare
legislation, winning $500 million over five years. A host of grants were
doled out last month, to organizations ranging from large coalitions of
social-services groups to antiabortion pregnancy-counseling centers that
plan relationship classes for teens.

"Wade Horn has shown the influence a bureaucrat can have," says Ronald
Haskins, a welfare expert who has worked for Congress and the current
President Bush's White House. "Anything that wasn't nailed down over there
is now devoted to marriage."

Not everyone is persuaded. Women's groups say his emphasis on marriage
unfairly demonizes unwed mothers, and pressures women to stay in sometimes
unhealthy, violent relationships. Libertarians say government has no
business using tax dollars to probe so deeply into people's personal lives.
Some note that there's no proof yet that any of these efforts can work.
Others say the money would be better spent elsewhere.

The idea that poverty is, in significant measure, the result of broken
families and unwed mothers has been contentious since Daniel Patrick
Moynihan's controversial 1965 warning that the disintegrating black family
was an obstacle to black advancement. In that year, 8% of children were born
to unmarried parents. Today, more than one-third of all children -- and
nearly 70% of black children -- are.

Study after study show children are better off in two-parent homes. They are
less likely to be poor, drop out of school, become teen parents or get
arrested. The theory: Two parents bring stability and emotional support to
children and one another, not to mention providing two incomes. But can
government do anything to actually promote marriage? And should it?

Dr. Horn offers an emphatic yes, and saw proof on a recent evening in
Baltimore where he observed six couples participating in a federally funded
effort called Building Strong Families. The program, being tried in seven
cities, hosts weekly discussions for unmarried couples who have recently had
or are about to have a baby. It doesn't specifically push couples to marry,
but the curriculum sets out marriage as the ideal. Group leaders regularly
mention marriage. Posters on the wall proclaim "Marriage Works."

On that evening, Myckel Cobbs, age 24, talked about how trust and openness
come hard to him. But since meeting his girlfriend, Tashanna Harvey, 21, and
joining the Baltimore program, things seemed different. "I came up on the
streets, no family," he explained, glancing at Ms. Harvey, nearly nine
months pregnant with their child. Now, "this is my family, with her."

On the drive back to Washington, Dr. Horn was still thinking about Mr.
Cobbs's fatherless childhood. "Here they are, this young couple, trying to
break that cycle. It takes a lot of courage," he said. "If this works, the
real impact will be on their kids."

Six years into the Bush administration, Dr. Horn is one of the few remaining
political appointees interested in "compassionate conservatism," the slogan
from the President's first campaign. Mr. Haskins, now with the Brookings
Institution, advised the White House on welfare for only a year.
Political-science professor John DiIulio launched the White House's
faith-based initiative to direct federal dollars to religious charities, but
left after less than a year.

Dr. Horn endured in the Department of Health and Human Services, using his
position to push the theory that families with married parents can pave the
path out of poverty.

Even before Congress authorized the marriage program in the welfare bill,
Dr. Horn began using discretionary funds from his Administration for
Children and Families to inject marriage promotion into the agency's
programs -- ranging from refugee assistance to aid for Indian tribes to
child-support enforcement. The efforts included marriage-awareness campaigns
and couples classes. Over its first four years, his patchwork of spending
added up to a $200 million program, which Dr. Horn dubbed the Healthy
Marriage Initiative.

Dr. Horn didn't always succeed. He failed to get similar marriage-promotion
efforts into Head Start, the preschool program, in the face of opposition.
"We've never had parents request that," says Sarah Green, president of the
National Head Start Association. "Most of them want help in how to get out
of marriages that are not healthy." Dr. Horn says he dropped his marriage
proposal in order to focus on other Head Start priorities.

Dr. Horn, 51, grew up in New Jersey, one of seven children of a liberal
mother and conservative father. Over dinner, they would disagree about
Vietnam, Watergate and abortion, he says, yet "no one remembers my parents
leaving the table mad at each other."

He earned a doctorate in child psychology at Southern Illinois University
and went into practice. He and his wife, Claudia, and their two daughters,
moved to Washington in 1986 because Claudia, now a consultant, was promoted
to be the associate rehabilitation director at the national headquarters of
Goodwill Industries.

During his years as a therapist, he got interested in the importance of
marriage. A divorcing couple asked if he would work with their child to "be
sure the child was not impacted by divorce in any way," he recalls. "It was
so cavalier. I won't go along with the idea that it is perfectly OK to
assume divorce will have no impact on children."

He helped write policy papers for the first President Bush's 1988
presidential campaign and afterward landed the post of HHS commissioner for
children, youth and families at age 34.

In 1989, the president appointed him to a commission on children, chaired by
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.). Dr. Horn successfully pushed to have the
final report include rhetoric condemning divorce and out-of-wedlock
childbearing as bad for children. The White House, fearing Sen. Rockefeller
might challenge Mr. Bush for president in 1992, leaned heavily on Dr. Horn
to vote against the final report. But Dr. Horn thought Sen. Rockefeller had
accommodated his concerns and voted yes. The report was approved
unanimously.

After President Bush's 1992 loss left him without a job, Dr. Horn joined the
burgeoning fatherhood movement, launching the private National Fatherhood
Initiative, which promotes the notion that fathers have a special role to
play that isn't always appreciated.

During those years, Dr. Horn also began thinking about the incentives built
into the welfare system that discouraged marriage, such as reducing
government benefits for women who got married. Social workers were known to
hunt through homes and cut women off welfare if there was a man present. It
was no surprise that few single moms married, he says, because the message
was, "Don't do it."

Then in a 1997 paper published by the Hudson Institute, a conservative think
tank, Dr. Horn proposed reversing these incentives for programs such as
public housing. "Only after all income-eligible, married, two-parent
families are offered the benefit should it become available for
income-eligible, single-parent families," he wrote.

After President Bush took office in 2001, he nominated Dr. Horn for an
assistant secretary's post at HHS, but 90 groups opposed his confirmation,
citing the 1997 paper and complaining his policies would keep women trapped
in violent, unhealthy relationships out of fear of losing benefits.

In the hearings, Dr. Horn renounced his earlier comments, saying he was now
convinced that preference for married people in social services could
translate into discrimination against single moms. Sen. Rockefeller vouched
for him and he was easily confirmed.

A key assignment for Dr. Horn was to help develop the Bush administration's
proposal for renewing the 1996 welfare law. He pushed to include funding for
marriage promotion, despite some reluctance from his boss, HHS Secretary
Tommy Thompson. "It wasn't my first priority," Mr. Thompson acknowledges,
but says he came to see the political advantages. "The religious right
certainly found this a plus and we could find more supporters" for the
legislation.

As the job of hashing out welfare reauthorization shifted to Congress, Dr.
Horn worked to mollify his critics. He directed that every program work with
local domestic-violence experts. And he agreed to hire a domestic-violence
expert as part of the national program team.

"One of the smartest things I did," Dr. Horn says, "was put the word
'healthy' in front of 'marriage.'" Every speech and handout on the
initiative now uses that phrase.

He also was careful to steer clear of religious overtones. Dr. Horn is
religious and active in his Presbyterian church. But he avoids using
religious arguments to make the case for marriage.

Dr. Horn put Diann Dawson, a 27-year HHS veteran and an African-American, in
charge of outreach to the black community. And, to woo welfare experts and
academics eager to attack the program as ideological and unsupported by
research, Dr. Horn incorporated evaluation requirements into many early
programs and recruited prominent researchers in the field to study them. "He
co-opted the whole damn academic world," Mr. Haskins, the onetime White
House aide, says admiringly.

He still faced opponents. In Congress, the most vocal was Sen. Max Baucus,
the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, who reflected Montana's
libertarian leanings. Marriage is a "personal and private choice, not
something the government should interfere with," he told a Washington rally
on the welfare bill in March 2002.

To help negotiate the welfare legislation, Sen. Baucus in 2004 hired Kate
Kahan, now 32, a single mother and former welfare-rights organizer. Pregnant
at 18, Ms. Kahan had married the father, then left him after a year and a
half because she says he was violent. She and Sen. Baucus knew that the
welfare bill inevitably was going to include a marriage program, but she
fought for explicit protections: a promise that the domestic-violence
experts hired would be experienced and qualified, and guarantees the
programs would be voluntary. Dr. Horn, insulted that anyone would question
his commitment to protecting women, pushed back.

The tension came to a head at a meeting during negotiations aimed at writing
a bipartisan bill. Ms. Kahan was surprised to find Dr. Horn there. By her
account, he began by asking what Sen. Baucus had against marriage. Ms. Kahan
shot back that the senator is not against marriage but had more questions
than answers about government promoting it. In any case, she said, poverty
is complex and isn't going to be solved with marriage classes. Frustrated by
her repeated insistence on that point, Dr. Horn threatened to walk out of
the room, according to two people in the meeting.

After that, the two couldn't be in the same room, those involved in the
talks say, and a Republican Senate staffer says she resorted to "shuttle
diplomacy."

Dr. Horn says that characterization overstates the tension. But he allows
that he sometimes aggravates his opponents. "There are times when I may push
a little bit harder than other people may feel comfortable," Dr. Horn says,
adding that he doesn't recall the specific debates with Ms. Kahan. A
Republican staffer who participated in the talks confirmed Ms. Kahan's
account.

When the welfare bill finally passed Congress early this year, there was
$500 million for marriage promotion -- minus the specific guarantees Ms.
Kahan had fought for.

Among the programs that received the recent round of grants from HHS last
month, some are religious groups, though the recipients say they won't use
the federal money to promote religion. For instance, the Meier Clinics
Foundation of Wheaton, Ill., which won $2 million, is a Christian counseling
group whose Web site gives marriage tips starting with: "Sincerely commit
your life to Jesus Christ as Lord." The group plans to conduct relationship
classes for teens.

Other recipients are secular organizations, such as the National Multiple
Sclerosis Society, which plans to spend $531,000 on marriage education for
couples where one spouse is struggling with MS.

Although the newly funded programs are just beginning, previously funded
programs are being studied to see how well they work. Research suggests
marriage education works for middle-class white families; the new studies
will see if it works with poor, nonwhite couples.

In the Building Strong Families program in Baltimore, couples are randomly
assigned either to join the program, or to receive no services but be
contacted later for follow-up. Researchers will study the relationships --
including how many pairs marry -- and the couples' children.

On the night Dr. Horn visited Baltimore, he spoke to the young couples,
without using the word marriage. "There's not a couple that doesn't have
problems. It's work," he said. "But it's really worth it when you look at
your kids."

Copyright 2006 The Wall Street Journal


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