PAYOLA MARRIAGE IF YOU CAN'T JOIN 'EM, BRIBE 'EM

REMEMBER not so long ago when politicians wanted to give needles to heroin
addicts? The idea was to pass out clean, unencrusted needles so folks could
get high without all the nasty diseases that might come with a used one.
That way, an addict might not die of AIDS, just of an overdose. We never
did figure out the rationale.

We are similarly confused by Dubya's trial balloon to fix the problem of
unwed mothers: another government grant. That's right, pay off young
pregnant women to marry their boyfriends. Or maybe just the anonymous
one-night-stands they had the misfortune to meet. The women would get an
additional thousand bucks a year for the first five years. After that,
they're on their own like everybody else.

Payola Marriage is the brainchild of Wade Horn, President Bush's assistant
secretary for family support. And he aims to provide it. With our money.
Anything to save the institution, if not the essence, of
marriage--including a not very subtle form of bribery.

ACCORDING to oft-quoted statistics, half of all marriages in this country
end in divorce. Which sounds like a problem any decent Assistant Secretary
for Family Support would be concerned about. Also, your average governor
and associated bureacracy. Because we now measure success by statistics--as
in grade point averages. A grade of only 50 percent in Marriage 101 is
enough to get a slew of bipartisan politicians worked into a lather.
They're out to get that score back up--by any means necessary. Even bribery.

Oklahoma's governor, for example, has pledged to cut his state's divorce
rate by a third. Neat trick. He's vowed to spend a lot of money doing it,
though he hasn't quite figured out how to spend it yet. Watch for something
Results Oriented, something measurable but maybe not meaningful, something,
anything, that shows the divorce rate declining. If we can just count any
woman not divorced as Happily Married, then, hesto presto, family values
are upheld, at least on paper. And just in time for the campaign trail. It
all makes about as much sense as any clean needles program. The numbers are
elevated, even if lives aren't.

Payola Marriage doesn't surprise, it just disappoints. It continues a trend
of reducing sacrament to shell game. Or, in this case, to a mail-in rebate.
You want to believe intentions are good, but you still find yourself
shaking your head and asking aloud, Why do people do these things?

"I want as many kids as possible to grow up with a loving father as well as
a loving mother," Wade Horn explains. So what's a father's love going for
these days--a grand a year?

THINK OF Payola Marriage as a kinder, gentler version of this state's
newest bit of socio-theological engineering: Covenant Marriage. Both aim to
keep the divorce rate down; one uses a carrot, the other a stick. Rather
than bribing folks to marry, this new Covenant brand just won't let 'em out
of it once they're hitched. As if they'd been married at the Hotel
California. Oh, there are a few, very narrow ways to get out of a Covenant
Marriage and spoil the stats: You could get beat up or abandoned. Or claim
adultery. Which should keep the private eyes in seedy business.

Having to prove that you've been beaten senseless in order to get out of a
bad marriage seems to be setting the bar a bit low. It seems to miss the
point of making a vow to honor and cherish till death do you part. Just as
paying off some poor mom to marry her uncaring consort seems to miss the
point of fatherhood. Is a father who has to be bribed worth the money?

Wade Horn seems to assume that any father makes a good father. There are a
lot of kids out there with broken bones and shattered hopes who'll tell him
different.

We don't want to be too hard on poor Mr. Horn. Like the well- intentioned
folks stepping over junkies in alleys to pass out clean needles, he means
well. Both have noble goals.

It's only after stepping back, away from a rainwet morning curbside where
some poor woman lies sleeping her heroin sleep, that you find yourself
shaking your head sadly. Just as you do when you think of some poor girl,
abandoned with baby, marrying a man whose only incentive for fatherhood is
payola.

Yes, we may indeed get the divorce rate down, but somehow we'll still feel
like we're just stepping over bodies.