MARRIAGES MADE IN POLITICAL HEAVEN: Urban Institute symposium

[excerpts]

WENDY SWALLOW: ...When the administration puts on its rose-colored glasses and promotes remarriage, particularly among single parents, I have to admit I get a little nervous. Remarriage challenges the most mature among us and most remarriages actually fail. In fact, three out of four remarriages with residential children, that is, kids that come in to live with the marriage, do not survive, and most of those break up in the first four years, which is very difficult for the children, obviously, who have been put through the experience.

Which brings us to the research before us today. The work that Greg and Gary will present adds several interesting pieces to the marriage debate that should help us understand the complex picture that is the modern marriage. Even Mavis Hetherington, who is one of the best respected researchers into the dynamics of divorce and remarriage, said that she found in her studies that families present so many different forms it can be difficult to actually do good research about them. In one long term study she was doing on stepfamilies, she told me she kept trying to cluster the families into types as a way of understanding them, but soon realized that every family was so idiosyncratic that it needed its own cluster.

The variables are staggering, especially when you're looking at remarriage. Are the parents widowed or divorced? Who brings children to the marriage and under what sort of custody arrangement? Do the kids live with the remarried couple or do they visit, or do some live with them and others come visit? The list goes on and on. Every family, as we all really know in our bones, creates its own version of heaven or hell. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand marriage better because it matters, particularly when it comes to child welfare.
So let's start with Greg.

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: Thank you. I'd like to begin with a controversial statement: Marriage promotion should not be controversial....

Marriage promotion initiatives are aimed at promoting healthy marriages by providing information about the benefits of marriage, funding programs that teach relationship skills, and reduce the financial penalties facing married couples in tax and transfer programs. Marriage promotion is not and should never be about things like banning divorce or penalizing unmarried parents.
The major impetus behind marriage promotion efforts is to improve the well-being of children and so I'm going to focus my remarks on the meaning of marriage for children. Children living with their two married biological parents are less likely to be poor, to exhibit behavioral problems, to struggle in school, and to engage in risky conduct than children in any other living arrangement, and this forms the strong prima [facie] case for marriage. More specific information, like real numbers, appears in your packets.

Two questions dog marriage promotion initiatives. Can they actually increase marriage rates; and if so, how much will the well-being of children actually improve as a result? So the first question: can we promote marriage? We just don't know. Clearly there are some counseling and relationship skills programs that have shown promise, but we don't know if these programs can be implemented on a large scale or whether their success depends uniquely on the cadre of individuals running these programs in specific sites. We don't know whether the benefits of these programs generate widely to all population subgroups. For example, a counseling program that works very well for middle-class families may not work nearly as effectively for low-income couples, but we're trying to find out.

Indeed, the federal government is sponsoring a series of interventions and evaluations to determine what, if any, approaches to marriage promotion actually work. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, the Urban Institute is involved in some of these evaluations. These interventions include sponsoring programs aimed broadly at whole communities, more narrowly at low-income couples, and even specifically at unmarried couples at the time they have a child.

In some cases, like when a romantic couple already exists, it's easy to believe that interventions could help maintain and promote marriage. In other cases, say when there's a single mother who is no longer romantically involved with the child's father, finding a potential spouse is more problematic and in fact may not even be wise.

At any rate, if it turns out that these interventions can increase marriage, how much improvement can we expect to see in child well-being? Well, that largely depends on the extent to which there are inherent benefits to marriage. Now clearly there are substantial differences in the characteristics of married and unmarried parents. Married parents are more educated, they have better jobs, and they have higher incomes than unmarried parents. And these differences won't simply disappear if unmarried couples were to marry. Further, there are clearly reasons, and in some cases very good reasons, why cohabiters and single parents have chosen not to marry.

In fact, it's fair to ask: are all the differences in the well-being of children between married parent and other families simply due to the differences in the characteristics of the people who choose to marry compared to those who choose not to marry? Technically speaking, are the apparent benefits of marriage just selection effects?

The answer is a qualified no. While much of the difference in child well-being between married and other families can be accounted for by selection (that is, differences in the observable and unobservable characteristics of married and unmarried parents), there clearly are some intrinsic benefits to marriage. Now, these benefits may stem from the extra security and motivations couples feel when they are married. It could come from increased willingness of extended family to provide support to married couples. It could even come from reasons that I'm not clever enough to think of.

How much will marriage promotion benefit children? It's difficult to say. It depends on the circumstances of the children. Encouraging unmarried biological parents to marry, forming a married biological family, will have some benefits, although the well-being of children in these promoted marriages on average will not begin to approach the well-being of children in existing married parent families, mainly because the characteristics of the parents are so different.

Encouraging single mothers to marry men who are not the fathers of their children may have less positive benefits because these would form stepparent families and research clearly shows that stepparent families, again on average, are not as beneficial for children as living with their two married, biological parents. And if promoted marriages are less stable, then the benefits of a short term marriage have to be weighed against the potential harmful effects of the disruption in family life if these marriages dissolve. ...

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: Thank you, Greg. My role here is to talk about the issue that I think has become sort of the [marquee] issue around marriage right now because it's been elevated to the level of a constitutional amendment, and that's the issue of same-sex marriage, and there is now much discussion about whether or not marriage should be defined in a particular way in the constitution.

While heterosexual marriage, and in fact heterosexual cohabitation, have both received a fair bit of scholarly research attention, the same cannot be said for understanding the dynamics and the characteristics of gay and lesbian couples. Most marriage and cohabitation research does not explore or compare outcomes for same-sex couples, so Greg's point about a prima [facie] case about the benefits of heterosexual marriage actually has not been made for same-sex couples. We do not know whether, for instance, child well-being differs for heterosexual, biological parents versus same-sex parents. It has simply never been studied.

Possibly as a result of the lack of the research in this area, the same-sex marriage debate has somewhat different parameters than the marriage promotion debate. Both opponents and proponents of same-sex marriage frame the debate less in social science research findings and more within a moral and ethical context. Many arguments underlying opponents of same-sex marriage defend a traditional interpretation in marriage that has roots in traditional moral and religious convictions, often those related to the well-being of raising children, while proponents of same-sex marriage increasingly frame the debate within the construct of civil rights protections.

For any of you who know me, it would be hard for you to believe that I would engage in an act of shameless self-promotion--(laughter)--but the principal objective of the book that has just come out on Monday, The Gay and Lesbian Atlas, and I do want to acknowledge my coauthor, Jason Ost, who is over in the corner there, and the focus really of my comments today is to interject an empirical framework into this debate by describing some of the kind of basic characteristics of same-sex couples in the United States.

One of the key questions about same-sex marriage is to what degree it will alter and potentially change the composition of married couples in the United States. According to census figures, even if all same-sex couples who identified themselves either as already married or as unmarried partners were to legally marry tomorrow, they would comprise less than one in 100 married couples in the United States. Another, and probably more compelling, issue in this debate is the degree to which introducing same-sex couples into the marriage mix, as it were, might alter the characteristics of married couples and potentially alter the institution of marriage. ...

The same-sex unmarried partners are actually twice as likely as their heterosexual counterparts to be living in the same house together for at least five years, so it suggests a certain stability of their relationships that's much greater than heterosexual unmarried partners. Homeownership is another typical way that we look at stable relationships, and in fact homeownership--almost two-thirds of same-sex couples in the census own their home, compared to less than half of heterosexual cohabiting couples, so assigning the traits of heterosexual cohabiting couples to same-sex couples is simply inaccurate.

The second issue is children and to what degree are same-sex couples raising children, and I think this is one of the biggest surprises that came out of the analysis of the census data. One in four couples of the same-sex couples in the census are raising children under age 18, and they live in 96 percent of U.S. counties. So while, again, as an overall fraction of the number of families raising children, same-sex couples are a tiny fraction, it is hardly an unusual circumstance among certainly gay and lesbian couples and it's not exactly completely unusual in many areas across the country.

I'll close with one of the more interesting findings from the atlas, which is this extent to which gay and lesbian couples often reflect the demographic characteristics of the heterosexual couples around them. And the example I'll give is raising children. The states where same-sex couples are most likely raising children are in order the top 10--I won't name all 50--Mississippi, South Dakota, Alaska, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Kansas, and Utah--oh, and one more. And Arizona is number 10.

All of these states have somewhat more conservative views around marriage and family, and in fact 5 of those 10 are the states where households of all types are most likely raising children, and actually three of the top five are in the top five for that statistic. ...

KELLYANNE CONWAY, The Polling Company, Inc.: ...My background, as is Anna Greenberg's, is as a survey researcher, so I'm going to share with you some of the results of recent national polls. ...

I thought the most remarkable thing there, and you see it in the data as well, is how many Asian-Americans mobilized. They're usually a very private population, but they have some of the most intact marriages in our nation's population, and as we say at my firm, "Asians are the new Hispanics"; meaning about 10 or 15 years from now they're going to be at a level where Hispanics have been growing over the last 10 to 15 years. And if we start paying attention to them now, the way we should have been paying attention to Hispanics the last 10 or 15 years, we'll understand that they are--Asian-Americans are incredibly powerful--prospectively powerful ethnic demographic in this country.

Let me just close by saying when we tested different 12 messages the most compelling message where people said that they would be more likely to support the Federal Marriage Amendment and protections for traditional marriage came not with the economic arguments. The second most popular message was that the FMA would lead to the protection of children. And among the 12 messages tested, --the number one was that this has a bipartisan precedent, and the way we just turned it was by reading the fact that in 1996 the United States Senate passed legislation--Defense of Marriage Act. We explained what that was and we said it was signed into law by President Clinton. The irony is the fact that this has bipartisan precedent at some level was the most compelling message to many people in saying, well, this is precisely why we should carry on with the same type of protections and the same type of definitions of marriage, at least at the federal level. ...

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm actually going to sort of pull back a little bit and talk about marriage more broadly because in a lot of ways I think the same-sex marriage debate or the gay marriage debate--it's not that it's beside the point, but it is a symptom of larger sociodemographic changes in our society that have huge implications for policy, but also for politics. ...

But the thing that is clear to me is that this country is changing and it's changing in a particular direction. If you look at the 1950s, 80 percent of all people lived in married households. Now, just about half of people live in unmarried households. Half of all people are--46 percent of all women are unmarried. Almost half of everybody is unmarried. That is a dramatic shift and it's a shift where we really have not as a society sort of caught up to, whether it's policies in the workplaces around how you get healthcare benefits, whether it's--how we--you know, retirement and the kinds of jobs that women are in and the way that retirement affects women who never get married or women who are widowed young, childcare, you name it. There are whole sets of issues around the fact that we're moving from a married society to an unmarried society in ways that policies have not caught up to it.

And certainly our politics have not caught up to it. I mean, one of the things that's most interesting to me about the Bush tax cuts are--you know, honestly I think it mostly went to the wealthy, but the other thing about it that's interesting is that it mainly went to middle-income married people with kids. If you are a single person and you're sort of lower income--middle-lower income, and you don't have kids, you are very unlikely to have benefited from Bush's tax cuts. Almost all of the president's economic policies are really centered around people who are married. So if you think about all the places where we exist, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's home, whether it's in politics, policy, this is a country that's moving towards being unmarried, but we haven't really sort of caught up with it yet.

...If you look at the way people say they're going to vote this election year and you look at the differences between married and unmarried people, they are enormous and they reflect real political disagreements about how our country is run. If you--for example, let me just give you some--I have my own data here. I'll use some data. This is looking at some combined datasets I put together from some of our national surveys over the last four months. If you look at unmarried women, 62 percent of unmarried women say they're going to vote for Kerry; 35 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. Married women, 44 percent say they're going to vote for Kerry; 53 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. That's bigger than gender gap. That's a much bigger gap than a lot of the gaps that we talk about.

But that gap actually exists for men too: so unmarried men, 53 percent say they're going to vote for Kerry; 43 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. So plus 10 for Kerry with unmarried men. Forty-nine percent of married men say they're going to vote for Kerry; 57 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. So there's obviously sort of an intersection between gender and marriage because unmarried women are the most Democratic and married men are the least Democratic or most Republican.

These are really, really big differences and they reflect real differences in the way that these groups believe that they are dealt with by government. ...

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posted by Eve at 10:48 PM VOTE

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