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Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, took conservatives to task for offering legislation to promote marriage, in his July 29, 2003 New York Times op-ed, "Wedded to Poverty." Tanner may well be correct in claiming that conservative do-gooders are going astray in promoting marriage through the "welfare reauthorization bill passed by the House and awaiting action by the Senate: a proposal to spend nearly $2 billion over the next six years to encourage people to marry." Countless governmental and nongovernmental undertakings have foundered on the fallacy bearing the Latin name post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which means believing that if two events regularly occur in temporal or spatial proximity, one is the cause of the other. (For example, a patient recovers from influenza shortly after taking antibiotics, and concludes that the antibiotics cured the flu.)

Tanner warns that we shouldn’t assume, from the mere fact that marriage is statistically correlated with financial, social, and other forms of familial success, that we can solve all the problems of "poor single mothers on welfare" merely by hitching them up to anyone, regardless of who that anyone might be. He is wrong, however, in failing to acknowledge the real point of the legislation: not to create a big-government social experiment, as he asserts, but to remedy problems that were largely caused, or at least greatly exacerbated, by government policies in the first place.

In making his case, Tanner has failed to follow his own implied caution against manipulating statistics in order to affirm or deny causal claims. How relevant, for instance, is his observation that "90 percent of women by the time they reach age 45, still choose to marry"? The real question at hand is not whether to promote marriage to women in general but whether to do so for the much narrower classes of poor single mothers on welfare and poor unwed mothers, far smaller percentages of whom are married when they are impoverished or on welfare.

Furthermore, the pro-marriage proposal is largely aimed at improving the lot of the children of impoverished, unwed women—kids whose lives would have been vastly improved if, within the context of a marriage, their own fathers had, as President Bush put it, "lived up to their responsibilities" (see the CNN story, “Bush welfare plan promotes marriage, work”). The welfare reauthorization bill is most certainly not aimed at promoting marriage among the wealthy actresses who do their adopting and shopping in Beverly Hills, or even for the average American woman, as Mr. Tanner appears to imply.

Regardless of the overall percentage of women who "choose to marry" at some point in their lives, one out of three American children is indeed born out of wedlock, and more than two out of three African American children are born to unwed mothers. It is critically important to keep the focus on the children, because school drop-out rates, poverty rates, and incarceration rates (when the child reaches adulthood) are several times as high for children of unwed mothers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services now reports that in more than three out of four cases of teenage pregnancy the teens are unwed, with the proportion even higher still among blacks and Hispanics.

Condemning children to such lives is neither compassionate nor logical. (For more information on effects of marriage on children’s prospects, see The Positive Effects of Marriage: A Book of Charts, by Patrick F. Fagan, Robert E. Rector, Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D. and America Peterson.)

People concerned about the deleterious effects of welfare and unwed motherhood on America’s children have been right to point out that whenever the government subsidizes something, we get more of it. President Bush and congressional Republicans behind the present marriage-supporting welfare legislation are operating on the clearly sensible premise that children benefit from having fathers who are committed to the kid’s mothers through marriage. The present legislation is an attempt to roll back government policies that implemented a great, failed social experiment which denied that premise.

Thanks to the great social experiment of the past three decades, in which the welfare system treated unwed mothers just like their married counterparts, the cause and effect relationship between marriage and children’s prospects in life has much science behind it. We now know conclusively that a welfare system that promotes the opportunity for poor women to forgo marriage but still have children is harmful to both the children and their parents, and to the society at large.

It is time to incorporate that wisdom into our welfare system. Both science and compassion suggest that we should support changes based on the idea that marriage is a powerful cause of reductions in intergenerational poverty, educational failure, and social pathology—not a mere correlation.

Opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute.