Debate: Government Needs to Renew Its Marriage Vows

(Aug. 13) -- There they go again.

Following last week's federal court decision tossing out Proposition 8 -- California's constitutional amendment defining marriage as uniting one man and one woman -- we're witnessing a new surge of throw-up-your-hands assertions from conservatives and liberals alike that government should resolve the issue by "getting out of the marriage business."

After all, traditional matrimony is one of many alternative living arrangements adults should be free to enter without Big Brother peeking into their bedrooms. Besides, marriage isn't doing so hot: divorce rates remain high and 40 percent of all births are now out of wedlock. So what's wrong with keeping it a private matter?

Plenty.

Consider this: There were nearly 1.4 million violent crimes in the U.S. in 2008, according to the FBI. More than 270 banks have failed since the beginning of 2008. More than six million kids dropped out of high school in 2007. And an outrageous 16 million civil lawsuits were filed in 2002.

Yet no one is calling for government to get out of the "businesses" of law enforcement, financial regulation, education or running civil courts. That's because society has recognized that it's good public policy to have less crime, smoothly operating markets with clear rules, a well-educated populace and enforceable rules of contracts and torts. Where we're falling short of the ideal, leaders are proposing reform, not resignation.

But possibly the best of all public policies is the "business" of promoting traditional marriage. With all its challenges, it remains the single best way to promote longer, healthier, more financially rewarding lives.

Don't take my word for it. Here's how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put it earlier this year:

"Research findings consistently document associations between formal marital status and health and well-being. Married persons have generally better mental and physical health outcomes compared with unmarried persons. ... Research also indicates that marriage is positively associated with the health and well-being of children. Children born to unmarried mothers are at greater risk than children born to married mothers for poverty, teen childbearing, poor school achievement and marital disruption in adulthood."

Marriage is about the economy, stupid! More than 28 percent of households headed by single women and 13.8 percent of households headed by single men were poor in 2008, compared with just 5.5 percent of married-couple households, according to the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center. Patrick Fagan of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute finds that married couples with children under 18 enjoy the highest median household income and family wealth, and that married men boast an earnings premium of between 10 and 30 percent over their unmarried counterparts.

Some of this economic effect reflects selectivity bias: higher earners make more desirable mates. But married households also benefit from efficiencies, the incentive to work harder and the economic contributions of stay-at-home moms.

Plus, government has a clear interest in preserving the salutary effects of matrimony on health and preventing the public-health nightmare associated with all forms of sex outside it: higher risk for STDs, deadly HIV, other infectious diseases, emotional illness and various kinds of cancer. Not to mention the pathologies linked to single parenthood: crime and juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancies, dropouts, suicides, runaways, obesity, drug abuse, divorce and homelessness.

So if I were a policymaker, I would want to promote, not abandon, the one relationship proven to boost prosperity, improve health, and reduce these social ills -- and avoid sanctioning, tacitly or otherwise, relationships that present clear hazards to health and well-being.

Preserving traditional marriage isn't a conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat or religious issue. It's simply about what works.

So at a time when the Obama administration and Congress are "doubling down" on dubious stimulus of the big government variety -- there they go again -- I would "double down" instead on a proven government "business" model: the demonstrated economic and social stimulus of monogamous matrimony between one man and one woman.