Over at The New York Times Ross Douthat wants to argue that Republicans can fight poverty by fighting single parenthood, which means promoting marriage on the argument that two parent families are more economically and socially successful.  Matt Yglesias at Slate wants to know how small-government Douthat is going to accomplish using the government, of all things, to get people to marry and stay marry. Douthat's plan involves:

• A little public shame and censure
• Tax incentives (married people get a child tax credit, single people don't, for example)

Douthat doesn't exactly want divorcees to wear Scarlet Ds, but he wants them to know that other people look down on them and that the government looks down on them as well, which is how we get to the tax proposal.

The tax proposal makes no economic sense.  Douthat believes that single parents are financially ill-equipped to raise children so he robs them of a tax incentive and gives it to couples who he argues have less need for the incentive.  This is typical Republican thinking.  The tax incentive isn't given out based on need.  It's given out based on what the government wants the citizen to do.  This is how the IRS wags the finger at unmarried parents.  Find a nice partner and we'll give you a tax break says the tax man, who is now involved in your social life because freedom.

Single parents were either never married in the first place or are divorced parents.  Either way, I tend to assume that people have their reasons for deciding who to marry and when.  If a couple has a child but never marries and chooses to live apart, we might surmise that the couple is not in love.  We might surmise that they are not suited to living together or sharing a life.  If a couple with a child divorces, they have clearly tried to live together and have tried to share a life but could not.

The big change, starting in the 1960s, was that states started to allow one party to initiate divorce proceedings and many states began to grant divorces somewhat at will (you don't have to accuse the partner of something like emotional cruelty to get out like you would in New York which does not allow for "no fault" divorce.)  Divorce rates increased for decades, peaking in the 90s and then ebbing at higher levels than we saw fifty years ago.  So, this is part of the problem, as Douthat sees it. But Douthat is looking at things in a vacuum.

The St. Louis Fed tells me that (though no evidence here is perfect) that there is good reason to believe that the period of more liberal divorce procedures also coincided with a substantial drop in domestic violence and a drop in husband on wife murders.

Domestic violence and spousal murder are extreme cases.  Leo Tolstoy, Edward Albee or Woody Allen will tell you that there are many more ways for unhappy couples to make each other and their children miserable and no person need be physically damaged to be damaged.

If people do not get married for a reason or if people get divorced for a reason, the government should probably be morally neutral.  For the safety and mental well being of all involved, we might agree that when there are children, loving marriage is best but that coerced marriage is not better than single parenthood.  Going through the motions doesn't work.  It is, in fact, dangerous.  Actually, I'd expect conservative men's rights groups to be all for liberal divorce laws because they are exactly the kind of people who, if they feel trapped in a marriage, will do something stupid and wind up in prison or worse.

Republicans who are pushing the traditional family as an antipoverty program simply lack an antipoverty program.  It's that simple.