Family matters: Welfare reform has liberals and conservatives calling for government action.

• Author: Lynch, Mike
• Position: Columns

LATELY, I'VE BEEN questioning why I'm not an enthusiastic modern liberal, a real let's-call-in-the-government-to-do-good-things progressive. After all, I relish the world that the forces of liberalism seem to have produced. The liberationist movements of the 1960s and '70s have enriched my life immeasurably. I was free to marry whom I wanted thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court decision made two years before my birth that abolished state laws banning interracial marriage. My 6-month-old daughter has an openly gay godfather, a man who'll no doubt provide her with a moral foundation less disturbing than the one given to hundreds of children by certain Catholic priests. My wife has a better job than I do, if such things are measured in money and cultural prestige. I have no interest in trading this world for any that has gone before, even if the feds neither taxed personal income nor published the Federal Register back in the supposedly good old days.

Then the mailman brought the April 8 issue of The American Prospect, a magazine dedicated to presenting a "practical and convincing vision of liberal philosophy, politics, and public life."

This special double issue calls on assorted social policy mavens to enlighten us on "The Politics of Family." The issue (available online at www.prospect.org/issue_pages/children) is in part a reaction to George W. Bush's welfare reform package. Bush is calling for $300 million in taxpayer spending to promote marriage among people unfortunate enough to be dependent on the federal government.

"The federal government is suddenly very interested in marriage," says the Prospect. "The principal target of this matchmaking is the welfare population, though many traditionalists would turn the marriage movement into a generalized crusade. It adds up to something that most conservatives ordinarily abhor--social engineering, and in the most intimate of human realms."

There's plenty to lambaste "pro-family" right-wingers about, and the Prospect scores many points against the conservative marriage counselors. For instance, if marriage is the cornerstone of civilization, then why not allow gays and lesbians access to wedded bliss? Furthermore, contrary to the hippie-hating right, family breakdown didn't start in the 1960s. Historian Stephanie Coontz, author of the important book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, shows that marriage has been in "crisis" at least since the 1920s, when everyone began...