But even if these approaches could work in tandem, how, exactly, does the administration plan on encouraging single welfare mothers to wed? Wade Horn, the Bush administration's top spokesman on family issues, told the Sacramento Bee that when an unwed mother gives birth, the father is often asked to sign paternity and child-support agreements on the spot. "We ought to ask at that moment if it wouldn't be a good idea for them to get married," explained Horn. "We would refer them to pre-marriage services."
Ah yes, imagine that magic moment when the parents of a newborn child stop and turn to each other, as if for the first time, and say: "Marriage! Of course! Why didn't we think of that?"
So, while the Alliance for Marriage seeks to deny homosexuals the right to legal matrimony under the guise of "protecting the sanctity of marriage," President Bush is feverishly pushing marriage on unwed parents who didn't consider it and weren't necessarily in love in the first place. All of which highlights the question: Is a marriage somehow more sacred when the two people involved are married for economic reasons, or don't really want to be married at all?
To hear the authors of a slew of books on marriage tell it, love and happiness are now entirely beside the point. "Marriage is not designed to make us happy," writes Iris Krasnow, author of "Surrendering to Marriage," "it is God's way of forcing us to grow into responsible adults."
To drive home her point, Krasnow has filled her book with chilling stories of infidelity and love lost. Like many of these authors, she seems to feel that most human beings are unruly animals who need marriage to save them from their own naughty urges. Forget the notion that love will lead us from temptation -- we need scary anecdotes and stern tones to prevent that. Krasnow pummels her readers with barrage of modern "We know you want to, but you'd better not" fables. Each one ends with an unwieldy lesson: "There are several hard truths to take away from Beatrice's story," says one. "Marriage is a sacred covenant that needs to be valued, not devalued. Illicit love can never really be satisfying. And, finally, if we do fall down, it is possible to pick ourselves back up." That is, if we never, ever tell our spouses what we did, and swallow down our guilt indefinitely, like Beatrice did. Ulcer, anyone?
Married writers of books on marriage ply us with clichés and unsubstantiated generalities, assuming, perhaps, that a marriage license is the only proof we need of their expertise. Experts, such as Robert Stephen Cohen, author of "Reconcilable Differences: 7 Essential Tips for Remaining Together from a Top Matrimonial Lawyer," deliver equally obvious bits of advice, like "Divorce is a life-altering and devastating process that should be avoided at all costs." This particular threat, invoked by one and all, is packed with ominous urgency that, when taken with the recent glut of books about the devastating effects of divorce on children, conjures marriage as deliverance from the fire and brimstone of those ungodly human relationships that remain unbound by legal contracts.
In her book "Married: A Fine Predicament," Ann Roiphe offers some insightful personal stories, a lot of generalizing, and some vague observations, all of which is punctuated by such ominous, weirdly disembodied statements as, "In marriage sex loses its novelty." "Sex can be withheld as a weapon against a partner in revenge for some other deed." "Even when a short marriage ends it feels like an amputation has occurred." When this short book ends, it feels like the long-awaited amputation of a gangrenous limb has occurred.
The bottom line for many of these authors is a prescriptive twist on "Misery loves company." If we managed to stay together, they tell us, then you should, too. Of course, there are the usual disclaimers about how divorce is sometimes necessary for those in physically abusive relationships -- a category that conveniently sidesteps the immeasurable range and breadth of emotional abuse that can occur in married relationships. But the overall thrust of these books -- and of marriage-related legislation in general -- is that there are no good excuses for avoiding marriage. One can almost hear the impatient blurt of "It's your funeral ..." being intoned by each of our myriad advisors.
Roiphe, for one, explicitly states that she is preoccupied by marriage in part because of her children. With all the modernity of a Victorian era aristocrat, Roiphe laments over her inability to marry off her daughters:
"As the mother of daughters, some of them still unmarried, I noticed that I was reading the wedding announcements with an indecent amount of attention. I read descriptions of weddings of people I didn't know and would never know as if hidden in the lines were a secret code that if I could decipher it would bring my children to their own marriages."
Next page: The language of a country under siege