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Marriage Savers goes into cities around the nation to form "Community Marriage Covenants" with religious leaders.  These pastors pledge not to marry anyone who has not undergone "premarital preparation." The preparation can take whatever form the church or temple chooses, but the formula proposed by McManus assigns couples to marriage mentors who help them evaluate their relationships. These mentors are couples who've been happily married for more than 15 years (or who have been remarried for more than five years). They administer premarital questionnaires in order to spark discussions about conflicts that a promised couple is likely to face.

Sex is definitely on the agenda. For this thorny issue, McManus' own church offers intendeds an "Optional Premarital Sexual Covenant" because "the Marriage Saver answer for the unmarried is chastity." Moreover, says McManus, "Our church will not knowingly marry anyone who is living together."

If unmarried couples are tempted to extend their "physical activity" beyond "French kissing," the fiancé is supposed to call his mentor, like an Alcoholics Anonymous member who has wandered into a bar. If the male in question is unwilling to call his mentor, his fiancée is directed to call her female mentor for help in preserving herself for the honeymoon.

According to McManus, Marriage Savers is not a scientifically based campaign, but it works.  "All the cities I work with decrease their divorce numbers," he proclaims at appearances, in his literature and in an interview with Salon Mothers Who Think. To bolster this claim, the most prominent success story on the Marriage Savers Web site states that "Marriage Savers' churches" were responsible for reducing the number of divorces in two suburban Kansas City counties, Johnson and Wyandotte.

McManus cites court records to say that "the number of divorces in Johnson and Wyandotte Counties fell from 1,530 in 1995, the year before the Community Marriage Covenant was adopted, to only 1,001 in 1997, the year after. In two years the divorce rate plunged by more than a third!"

A check with the Kansas authorities significantly changes this perception. Johnson County's divorce numbers did indeed continue to decline in 1998; but the divorce rate in Wyandotte County soared 60 percentage points. Not surprisingly, this figure is missing from McManus' Web site and he claimed to be shocked and disappointed by the fact when asked about it.

According to McManus, "Marriage is the natural state for adults." Scientists disagree with this observation, but McManus tends to dismiss studies performed by social scientists, reiterating his mantra that "what I do works."

The office that formulated the Oklahoma Marriage Policy relies heavily on research cited by the National Marriage Project (NMP), a nonprofit organization that promotes the "revitalization" of marriage. Founders of the NMP, David Popenoe, a professor at Rutgers University, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, an award-winning journalist, are the authors of "Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation," a paper that cites any number of footnoted studies, surveys and impressive-sounding journals.

The problem is that Popenoe and Whitehead (author of the notorious Atlantic Monthly article "Dan Quayle Was Right," which supported the then-vice president's denigration of single motherhood) have twisted the findings of these sources to fashion a reactionary take on marriage and divorce.

What young adults need to know, according to Popenoe and Whitehead, is that cohabitation puts couples at increased risk for divorce if they marry.  Unfortunately, neither the sociological literature nor Popenoe's own professional colleagues support this position.

For example, professors James Sweet and Larry Bumpass of the University of Wisconsin, who wrote the academic paper that found a correlation between cohabitation and future divorce say that Popenoe and Whitehead have made "selective and inappropriate use" of their findings. Marital therapy researcher Andrew Christensen of UCLA says Popenoe and Whitehad have published "a classic error -- interpreting correlation as causation."

Most important is the simple fact that divorce rates have leveled off even as cohabitation rates have skyrocketed. If the Popenoe and Whitehead conclusion were correct, both cohabitation and divorce numbers would rise together.

To clarify the issue of cohabitation, Christensen cites well-documented sociological literature that proves "there is a huge component of self-selection" for less permanence among cohabitors, meaning that people who choose to live together often don't want permanent romantic arrangements. In fact, a sociological study published in the Journal of Family Issues in 1993 uses empirical evidence to conclude that couples who cohabit in preparation for marriage are no more likely to divorce than those who do not live together before the wedding.

While the National Marriage Project's Web sites and pamphlets are festooned with the logo for Rutgers University, where Popenoe is a professor and a former dean, it doesn't take a Ph.D. or full access to the sociological literature to poke holes in the report. Dorian Solot, co-founder of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, a support resource for cohabitors, does an admirable job of it.

On her (equally biased) Web site, Solot publishes "Ten Problems (Plus One Bonus Problem) With the National Marriage Project's Cohabitation Report."  Five of those 10 are misrepresentations of academic papers or convenient exclusions of contradictory research well known in the field.

Solot may have her own ax to grind, but at least she gets her facts straight, according to four sociology professors who reviewed her article. (They are Bumpass, Wendy Manning of Bowling Green University, Pepper Schwartz of the University of Washington and Christensen of UCLA.)

Next page | If they handed this paper in to sociology 101, they would flunk