There were some who thought I was cruel in my post comparing French President Sarkozy to people in the Republican Party. Chronicles has a wonderful article dealing with divorce and the Republicans. It deals more generally with the failure of family policy. A brief excerpt.
While the left was revolutionizing the legal structure of marriage, the conservative response was to lament and bemoan. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce,” writes Barbara Whitehead in The Divorce Culture, “nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.” When Vice President Dan Quayle famously denounced unwed motherhood, he was careful to add, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” Maggie Gallagher’s complaint has become a prophecy for today’s politics: “Opposing gay marriage . . . is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue. . . . The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”
The divorce revolution weakened marriage and fatherhood among members of the middle class in striking parallel to what welfare inflicted on the poor. In addition, the surge in divorce has expanded the welfare state itself to include the middle class, turning programs conceived to address the problems of low-income, single-parent homes into financial incentives for middle-class divorce.
– Stephen Baskerville, Chronicles
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