Writing to last Friday's Times Julian Brazier MP tackled the fallacy that the Conservative Party, as the party of economic liberalism, should also be a party of social liberalism. He noted how 'lifestyle choices' led to more misery and less economic liberalism:
"Fifty-six per cent of single-parent families in this country depend wholly or mainly on the State for their income. This remains one of the fastest-growing elements in the social security budget, which now accounts for one third of all public expenditure. Furthermore, evidence both here and abroad shows that children born and reared by married two-parent families, even from low-income groups, are far less likely to drop out of school, get into trouble with the law and, in extremis, fall into the state-funded care system."
Conservatives are good at recognising the costs of family breakdown. They're less good at finding remedies. Dr Wade Horn, George W Bush's 'minister for the family', is an honourable exception. Dr Horn runs the Bush administration's Healthy Marriages Initiative. This initiative is targeted on low income neighbourhoods where couples cannot access marriage support services because either they can't afford to, or simply because they're aren't any such services available. On today's National Review Online Dr Horn writes:
"The initiative is based on solid research indicating that what separates stable and healthy marriages from unstable and unhealthy ones is not the frequency of conflict, but how couples manage conflict. The good news is that through marriage education, healthy conflict-resolution skills can be taught."
He concludes with a powerful rebuttal of those small government fundamentalists who object to any kind of public policy intervention:
"The president's Healthy Marriage Initiative is an exercise in limited government. Here's how: I run the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. My agency spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs. If one goes down the list of these programs — from child welfare, to child-support enforcement, to anti-poverty assistance to runaway-youth initiatives — the need for each is either created or exacerbated by the breakup of families and marriages. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to understand that controlling the growth of these programs depends on preventing problems from happening in the first place. One way to accomplish that — not the only way, of course, but one way — is to help couples form and sustain healthy marriages."
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