Not Liberals,Not Teapartiers, nor the Religious Right
Not Liberals, Not Tea Partiers, nor the Religious Right
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The title of this symposium invites a jeremiad lamenting the disappearance of the morality and family structure of the 1950s. Yet the past cannot be restored; there have been fundamental changes.
We have a service economy, not a manufacturing or agricultural economy, enhancing demand for the labor of women and college graduates and devaluing the labor of unskilled men. Children are no longer an economic asset, at least in micro-economic terms: Society is more crowded. There are new technologies for birth control. These factors lead to postponed marriage, to what was once regarded as promiscuity, and to lessened prejudice against those who “neither beget nor bear.”
The late Max Rheinstein, perhaps the most learned student of family law, concluded that fidelity could not be coerced by criminal or divorce laws. Hope can be found only in premarital counseling (urged in the 1920s by the pioneer social worker Mary Ellen Richmond) and in measures to relieve economic pressures on families with children (child tax credits, like those in Canada and Norway and now proposed in Germany, and family allowances).
Our current higher education and student loan policies, with no limits on tuitions like those in Britain and Australia, make young workers into indentured servants. Well-intentioned day care policies tax young women into the full-time workforce, even though Mary Richmond’s study of 985 Widows and the British Government’s 1968 Plowden Report, Children and Their Primary Schools, found that part-time employment of mothers had more to recommend it.
If unwanted pregnancies are to be discouraged, the experience of countries like Mexico suggests that making the advice of nurse practitioners available to young women is more effective than birth control campaigns that outrage religious sentiments. In The Netherlands, social services are largely delivered through church organizations, producing some of the lowest illegitimacy and abortion rates in Europe, notwithstanding sexual license. Even the French solution stigmatizing divorce but not irregular relationships is preferable to complete laissez-faire.
A regime in which young women are encouraged to marry the state has the added vice, discernible in our inner cities, of leaving men without a social function. All this is exacerbated by policies relying on various doles (e.g., extended unemployment insurance, food stamps, and disability payments), rather than on work relief, and by policies accepting youth unemployment rates double those of adults.
Here is what is needed: Premarital counseling, child tax credits, other tax policies that do not penalize part-time employment, work programs and payroll tax preferences for the young, distance learning, ceilings on student loans, a preference for domestic rather than foreign adoptions, and the removal of all aspects of family policy from the naïve and easily influenced Federal courts. This, of course, is not the agenda of liberals, the Tea Party, or the so-called Religious Right.
George Liebmann, author of Six Lost Leaders: Prophets of Civil Society, among other works, is the volunteer executive director of the Calvert Institute in Baltimore.
Links:
[1] http://www.americanexperiment.org/author/george-liebmann
[2] http://americanexperiment.org/issues/culture-religion/fragmented-families-and-splintered-classes
[3] http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=augustash
[4] https://twitter.com/share
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