Marriage promotion

Marriage promotion is a policy aiming to produce “strong families” for the purposes of social security; as found in 21st-century American maternalism.

The George W. Bush Administration had focused on government marriage promotion as the solution to the high poverty rates experienced by single-parent families, diverting to marriage promotion tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress for other purposes, and successfully lobbying Congress to establish a federal marriage promotion program. These programs seek to get unmarried parents to marry and to deter separation or divorce.

One of the earliest known marriage promotion laws, the Lex Papia Poppaea, imposed penalties on those who refused to get married before a certain age. Provisions against adultery were also made in this law. Caelibes could not take an hereditas or a legacy (legatum); but if a person was caelebs at the time of the testator's death, and was not otherwise disqualified (jure civili), he might take the hereditas or legatum, if he obeyed the law within one hundred days, that is, if he married within that time (Ulp. Frag. xvii.1). If he did not comply with the law, the gift became caducum (subject to escheat).

Margaret Talbot, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote:

More than half of all births to American women under the age of thirty now take place outside of marriage, and children who grow up without married parents are less likely to go to college and to find employment, and are more likely to live in poverty, to become pregnant as teen-agers, and to go to prison than children with married parents.

The late James Q. Wilson wrote:

Almost everyone agrees that children in mother-only homes suffer harmful consequences: these youngsters are more likely than those in two-parent families to be suspended from school, have emotional problems, become delinquent, suffer from abuse, and take drugs. - February 17, 2002

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