Taken the wrong way, a correlation can be a dangerous thing. Consider the relationship between marriage and well-being. There's much undisputed evidence that married people are, on average, wealthier, healthier and better educated than their single counterparts. Even the novice student of statistics will tell you that association does not mean causation--that being poor, unwell and uneducated is as likely to discourage marriage as the other way around. Nevertheless, the notion that tying the knot can alleviate poverty and bring about positive social change has become the central justification for the Bush Administration's push for low-income women to get and stay married.

If the Administration is really concerned about poverty and other social problems it claims are caused by divorce and singleness, why not tackle those ills directly? Instead, what the Administration calls the "Healthy Marriage Initiative" is an array of programs that promote the institution in its narrowest sense. While debate has centered on the proposal attached to the stalled welfare bill, which would allot $1.6 billion toward marriage-related projects over the next five years, the federal government has already committed more than $90 million to marriage-related projects since 2001, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy. (The funds have been drawn from such diverse--and inappropriate--sources as the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Administration for Native Americans and the Developmental Disabilities Program.)

The Bush marriage strategy can be broken into two parts: efforts to encourage single people to marry and those aimed at keeping married couples together. The theory underlying the first category, which includes pro-marriage media blitzes featuring billboards, posters, calendars and pamphlets as well as premarital classes for high school students, singles and unmarried couples, is that explaining the benefits of marriage will nudge people to the altar. The assumption seems to be that the targets of these campaigns somehow forgot about the institution--or that they don't know enough to desire it.

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