Jilted: why Bush's marriage czar went soft.

• Author: Wieler, Susan

WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH NOMINATED Wade Horn to become assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), social conservatives couldn't have been happier. Horn was one of the country's leading figures in the Christian right's "pro-marriage" movement. As the pro-life, pro-abstinence conservative president of the National Fatherhood Institute (NFI), Horn had spent much of the late '90s crisscrossing the country exhorting state welfare officials to spend some of their welfare block grant on marriage promotion.

Long inveighing against the "extremist" views of what he has dubbed the "we hate marriage" left, Horn spoke the language of the religious right and was a strident proponent of traditional marriage as the cornerstone of a moral society and the best strategy for lifting single mothers and their children out of poverty.

For five years, Horn had trumpeted the superiority of the married, two-parent family in a weekly syndicated column for the conservative Washington Times, "Fatherly Advice," in which he put forth his views on everything from cohabitation ("the most dangerous place for women and children") to gender-neutral parenting ("trying to make little boys into little girls not only doesn't work, it enrages little boys"). Horn also used his column to come to the defense of the Southern Baptist Convention, which in 1998 had proclaimed that a wife should "submit" to her husband's "servant leadership" and serve as his "helper." While women's groups expressed outrage, Horn quoted from the New Testament that "the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church" and explained that while Dad may be the boss, true "servant-leadership" is humble and self-sacrificing.

In a 1997 article for the conservative Hudson Institute, Horn proposed increasing the marriage rate in poor communities by denying single parents and their children access to certain welfare benefits such as Head Start and public housing until all married, two-parent families had been served. And just last summer, Horn wrote in a Brookings Review article that Congress should "use the upcoming reauthorization to require states to build support for marriage into their welfare reform efforts."

Given his gold-star conservative background, Horn's nomination seemed to signal that the administration would push for the social conservative agenda, which includes a call for devoting 10 percent of the entire federal welfare budget--$1.5 billion--to marriage-promotion programs, and mandating that all states implement them.

Of course, Horn's selection infuriated liberal groups as much as it pleased conservatives. Feminists dubbed him the "marriage czar" and took issue with his opposition to no-fault divorce and particularly his views in the Hudson Institute article. Before his confirmation hearing last June, they were brewing for a fight, but just weeks before the hearing, Horn did a Clarence Thomas and renounced the Hudson Institute policy. He sailed through the Senate in 10 minutes.

After the hearing, Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, told reporters that she suspected that Horn's change of heart was due only to his desire to avoid a messy confirmation fight. As it's turned out, though, Horn's conversion may have been a real one--or at least a necessary one if he is to keep his job in the administration.

Since...