by Arcenia Harmon

As the race for gay marriage heats up around the country, conservative members of the marriage renewal movement have sought to bolster their claims about the importance of heterosexual marriage with supposedly scientific research. In the latest salvo, the Institute for American Values (IAV) has created a Marriage Score that claims to show the health of marriage in the United States. To nobody's surprise, they find the health of marriage down over the past 40 years, and blame this for incredible negative consequences such as increases in poverty and absent fathers.

The report gleans information from US Census data to identify five leading factors in calculating the Marriage Score from 1970 to 2008. The first is percentage of adults married but only includes adults 20-54. (The argument is that too many people die off after that age and too many widows might skew their results.)

Of course the number of marriages tells us nothing about the quality of those marriages, a dilemma supposedly fixed by the second indicator which is the percentage of married persons who are "very happy" in their marriage. Here they include all adults 18 and up. The third indicator is the percentage of first marriages intact and they are back to including those 20-59 as adults. The fourth indicator is the percentage of births to married persons because marriage, according to the report, is "fundamentally about creating a link between adults and children." The report claims cohabitation is inherently less stable for children because unmarried partners come and go.

The last indicator is the percentage of children living with their own married parents. Sorry, stepparents--this report claims that "on some indicators, children in stepfamilies look more like children in single parents than children being raised by their own married parents." Even adopted kids turn out less stable.

The report shows the dramatic decline in the importance of marriage. According to IAV, the US had a marriage score of 72.2 in 1970. In 2008 the marriage score was 60.3. This report is co-sponsored with the National Center of African-American Marriage and Parenting and has a separate African-American index using the same five indicators. For African-Americans, the marriage score went from 64.0 to only 39.6. We all know that marriage isn’t as popular as it used to be. What the report doesn’t tell us is why marriage is declining. No where does it mention the feminist movements, class, or racism as factors for why marriage may be undesirable and even unattainable for some heterofolks.

The biggest problem with the study isn't the cherry picked data (i.e. some of the indicators use all adults and some don’t), but the way in which all families that are not the hetero-nuclear family are rendered not just invisible, but dangerous. How many cohabiting couples are "very happy" and have children living with biological parents. How many married couples are happy because they don’t have children? We are not given any data to compare anything. As noted earlier, in this report poverty and violence faced by single parent families are always caused by lack of marriages not structural reasons such as racism.

David Blakenhorn, the president of the IAV, is an well-known member of the marriage-will-solve-all-problems crowd. With the first page stating that "policy makers and opinion leaders rarely seem to care about marriage trends, or even notice them" despite millions in state and federal dollars spent on marriage initiatives and abstinence programs, it’s clear that this report is willfully presenting an inaccurate picture. This pro-marriage bias is more pronounced in the second part of the report, "101 ways to increase the Marriage Index" many of which I found more insulting than the study itself. The proposals cover all aspects of life from neighborhoods to schools to state and federal legislatures, and of course the role of churches.

If being in your neighbor's personal business is your thing, then you can help "create a council in your community that seeks to strengthen marriage and family life" (No 2). The study warns we should "avoid the mistake of equating marriage with concepts such as 'committed relationships' which have no institutional embodiment" (No 19).

In urban America it is important to provide job opportunities for young males "since jobless males are less likely to marry" (No 22). (I guess finding work for poor women doesn't strengthen marriage.)

It goes on to say that marriage should be promoted in schools (No 32), and teachers should be monitored for what they teach about marriage (No 33). Clergy should require marriage prep (No 41), and help congregants understand that marriage is "an accountable promise before God and the faith community" (No 48).

On the federal level, Congress should pass a resolution that all domestic legislation should be debated on whether or not it strengthens marriage (No 53). Congress should also work with state legislatures to reduce "unnecessary divorce" by creating longer waiting periods (like one to two years) and requiring counseling (No 57).

Some of the proposals involving workplace policy would fit in line with feminist thinking if they applied to all families. They suggest creating social security benefits for stay at home parents (No 64) and implementing policies that would permit children to spent more time with working parents such as expanding parental leave to five years. (No 96)

The only mention of same-sex couples is vague. Blakenhorn suggests only that proposals regarding the legal recognition of same-sex unions could be evaluated "according to whether it would be likely to help or hurt the goal of strengthening marriage" (No 71). You'd think increasing the number of married people would help marriage, but apparently not.

In short, between the bias, cherry-picked data, wildly overdrawn conclusions, and negation of millions of people in and out of relationships, this report embodies all that is wrong in the marriage renewal movement. It proves that they are not interested in helping families as they exist now in all their diversity, but in foisting an idealized life on all of us.

Arcenia Harmon, M.A. Women's Studies, is a Chicago-based writer and activist. She'd be interested in meeting Chicago area supporters of the Alternatives to Marriage Project.