Big Government Marriage Czars Proposed By Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation likes to take the pose of being against big government when it opposes health and safety violations to protect the American people. For example, the Heritage Foundation is fighting against the protection of a temporary moratorium on the expansion of offshore drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Heritage Foundation writers worry about the impact on the oil industry.

When corporate interests aren’t at stake, on the other hand, the Heritage Foundation loves the idea of big government. The right wing organization promotes policies to have the federal government intervene in the most personal decisions in life there are, like when and how to get married.

Robert Rector, a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argues in favor of big federal government programs to direct Americans’ decisions about who to marry and when to get married. He writes, “Government could provide factual information on the role of healthy marriages in reducing poverty and improving child well-being. It could explain why it is important to develop a stable marital relationship before bringing children into the world. It could teach skills for selecting potential life partners and building stable relationships.”

Yes, the Heritage Foundation wants to create a big government bureaucracy that would go out into American communities in order to teach people how to select their wives and husbands. How are they going to do it – with a corps of government marriage agents, charged with telling people who they ought to marry and who they ought to dump? Who’s going to be in charge of this new bureaucracy? A Marriage Czar?

Note to the Heritage Foundation: Having the federal government create dating re-education camps doesn’t sound like a very direct way to reduce poverty. Why don’t you support the extension of unemployment benefits instead?