"Inequality" has nothing to do with divorce. But personal behavior does.

Sen. Rubio: Marriage is a route out of poverty

So, I'm writing a book on divorce. Actually, it's on why you should NOT divorce. Therefore I collect articles on the subject, and one I was just filing was from last week's New York Times, titled "Marriage, Poverty and the Political Divide."

The piece suggests that economic inequality works against marriage. It discounts Sen. Marco Rubio's assertion that marriage can lift parents and children from poverty.

But it doesn't get to the point--that the values of marriage shrink poverty rates, and it takes personal behavioral choices, not scrapping "inequality" with legal and policy change, to both support marriage and curb poverty. 

Sen. Rubio bases this pro-marriage remark on a Heritage Foundation report showing that 71% of families in poverty are headed by unmarried individuals. Of those who are not poor, 73% are headed by married couples. Married people are better off financially.

Makes sense. Certainly a couple pulling together can bring in more income than a single parent, and make what they have go further. Stay-at-home parents contribute by saving on day care and providing other services that make the family function.

One would hope that an absent parent would contribute to his child's support. The trouble is, among the poor, this is infrequently the case. In 2011, only half of all custodial parents had a child support agreement. Those with child support agreements actually received only 62% of what they were due. Of all custodial parents receiving child support, 24% were in poverty. Thirty percent of custodial mothers live below the poverty line.

So how does inequality shape a couple's future together?  How does the fact someone else earns a lot more than you do harm your marriage? Not clear. 

Writer Andrew L. Yarrow's article claims "Poorer Americans already aspire to marriage at similar or higher rates than their higher-income counterparts, according to a 2012 UCLA study. But when they do marry, their marriages are much more likely to end in divorce."

The piece neglects to mention that divorce not only correlates with poverty but also with education of the partners. The more education partners have, the more likely a couple will stay together, finds the Heritage Foundation.

And of course education is highly correlated with income. In other words, those with the tenacity and ability to make it through college or advanced degrees more often have the tenacity and ability to both earn more money and form an enduring marriage. 

This isn't sinister "inequality,"a societal ill to be corrected by policy-makers. This is simple variation among individuals. Certain personal abilities, values and behaviors promote certain outcomes. It's less a governmental problem than a personal problem, a values and behavioral problem. Individuals who exhibit characteristics that promote happy marriage can much more often sustain happy marriages.

The term "inequality" implies that something's askew, that everyone would have the same positive outcomes were it not for unfairness. Look at how the poor scramble to survive, while the rich buy $5,000 designer purses! If you believe that all individuals begin with the same potential, it follows that only factors imposed by luck or malice stand in anyone's way. And therefore laws and policies should remove those barriers. But if you look around, you notice that humans were not created with the same potentials, though we rightly offer everyone the same opportunities to maximize the potentials they have.

"Marriage is far from the magic bullet to end poverty that some conservatives claim," says Melissa Boteach of the Center for American Progress in the Times piece.

Nobody says it's magic, but being in a marriage is one of those opportunities that allows us to maximize our best selves. Says W. Bradford Wilcox of the National Marriage Project,"Americans are more likely to realize the American dream if they get and stay married, and grow up in communities where marriage is stronger. Marriage fosters saving, facilitates economies of scale and encourages stability and family life, all things that are good for the average American's pocketbook."

In other words, the same values that support marriage support financial success. So it seems Sen. Rubio is right--a shortcut out of poverty could be living the commitment and values marriage requires. 

Escaping Poverty, and the Cultural tolerance for Sex

Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution researched causes of poverty and found three controllable factors make all the difference.

Pres. Johnson on his fact-finding War on Poverty trip to Kentucky, 1964

"Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children," they write in the Washington Post. "If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent."

Important to note is that 88% of people have little chance of being poor, and 56% are likely to join the middle class--even without the three magical factors. But high school grads who marry before procreating and hold a job can be confident of a solid financial future.

Of these three factors, I believe the most important is married childbearing. Pew Research Center data from 2013 shows that the poverty rate for single mothers climbed for the fourth straight year, to 41.5%, comprising 4.1 million households in the population. At the same time, just 8.7% of married couple families were in poverty, a total of 2.1 million households in America.

In the half-century since Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson declared the War on Poverty with massive government assistance programs, the national poverty rate has fallen only modestly--from 19 to 15% of the nation.  Investment of billions of tax dollars failed to eliminate poverty. Why?

Because unmarried childbearing is closely correlated with child poverty, and the disassociation of marriage with parenthood occurring over the past decades has placed more women in a dependent financial state.

Poverty is not just a marriage issue; it's a morals issue. With the re-defining of marriage from a one man-one woman commitment centered around raising children to a declaration of love, there's little stigma if new parents skip the party. And, one could argue that the programs initiated to combat poverty have relaxed any pressure to wed, since unmarried moms qualify for government support more easily than couples do.

As Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation notes, "When the War on Poverty began in the mid-1960s, only 6 percent of children were born out of wedlock. Over the next four and a half decades, the number rose rapidly. In 2008, 40.6 percent of all children born in the U.S. were born outside of marriage."

In perhaps the most illuminating article on the subject, Dr. Rector concludes, "Marriage remains America’s strongest anti-poverty weapon, yet it continues to decline. As husbands disappear from the home, poverty and welfare dependence will increase, and children and parents will suffer as a result."

 The broken connection between parenthood and marriage, at root, isn't just about childrearing but about sex. The promiscuity urged in the 1960s and '70s by baby-boomers eager to fulfill adolescent hormonal desires now masquerades under a pretentious banner of tolerance for any sexual expression. When stigma against free, easy sex disappeared, more babies resulted--and the compassion-fueled post-facto response was to rescue them from poverty with government programs.

Perhaps the national conversation should return to the basis of poverty--the sexual culture that leads to out-of-wedlock births, and that allows individual feelings to trump the welfare of children and society.