FATHERLESS AMERICA: I’m strongly sympathetic to the point I think Jane Galt is trying to make here, about Bush’s “marriage promotion” plan. I haven’t looked at the plan and am very skeptical of the efficacy of governmentally-funded (and therefore governmentally-constrained) marriage promotion.

But I think her angle of attack is just silly: “As I was saying, if our mothers can’t browbeat us into getting married, what hope has a faceless government bureacracy?”

Well yeah, whatever. But every week, I speak with women who have nobody pushing them to marry, asking them to consider marriage, or even honestly discussing what marriage is like. I often ask whether they have any couples they can speak with who are in good marriages, so they can get a realistic idea of what marriage is. Pretty much never do they have such role models. Pretty much never did they spend their girlhoods with their own fathers. They generally aspire to marriage and are very happy to talk about what they can do to make a good marriage more likely–since they do not hear this stuff every day, and they do not see models of good marriages all around them. Very much the opposite. So you know, I am not really sure Jane Galt is the target audience here. Be a libertarian, I’m quite sympathetic to that, but please try to be realistic.