The implication seems to be, �if they could just get married like the rest of us, incomes would increase, lifestyles would improve, and we could all live happily ever after.� Unfortunately, this fairytale-like scenario is based on inaccurate assumptions that have little basis in fact.

She also writes:

"The message here is simple. Any disadvantages associated with growing up in a single mother family are linked to economic insecurity, not marital status."

First, economic insecurity is often a consequence of marital status. Therefore, even if poverty is the more proximate cause of disadvantage, it is inaccurate to say that family structure has no effect. Poverty is often a mediating variable between the family structure and the child outcomes.

Second, even granting her faulty premise, she�s still wrong. Many studies control for economic status and find that, in general, children from father-absent families still have worse outcomes. To quote Sara McLanahan, whose work Jones-DeWeever selectively cites:

Income cannot account for all of the disadvantages of children without fathers, however. The fact that children in stepfamilies do just as poorly as children in single-mother families tells us that something other than financial deprivation is at work.

SLAY THE STRAWMAN: Did you know that �a balanced anti-poverty program requires more than marriage education�? If not, you need to read this op-ed by Pamela Smock and Stephanie Coontz, which is based on a longer briefing paper they prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families. Smock and Coontz accuse a Heritage Foundation report of misusing evidence on marriage preparation programs to support exaggerated claims about their probable success for welfare recipients. Many of their criticisms are valid, and worth pondering. They avoid silly rhetoric about Ozzie and Harriet. Moreover, they convincingly argue that �marriage preparation programs offer no quick fix to welfare families� dilemmas.�

But who argues that marriage promotion will be a �quick fix�? Who asserts that anti-poverty policy should focus only on promoting marriage? Everyone concedes that marriage is not a panacea (well, almost everyone).

EITHER-OR FALLACY: After presenting the �marriage is a cure-all� strawman, Smock and Coontz call for �proven anti-poverty measures� like job training and education, child care, and access to birth control. The implied choice is between a welfare policy narrowly based on marriage promotion and �a comprehensive jobs and welfare program.� And if that were the choice, most reasonable people would choose the latter.

But Smock and Coontz ignore an obvious third option, put forth by Theodora Ooms, Isabel Sawhill, Roland Warren, and others: that policies designed to promote healthy marriages and reduce unwed childbearing can be incorporated into a comprehensive anti-poverty plan. Indeed, Smock and Coontz even write �there is no substitute for investments in a full spectrum of measures to reduce poverty and improve parenting.� Yet less than 1% of TANF funding has been spent on reducing unwed childbearing and promoting marriage.

Why exclude family formation initiatives from that full spectrum of measures? Yes, a dollar spent on marriage is a dollar not spent on job training. But a dollar spent on job training is not a dollar spent on child care, and so on. Yes, there is little evidence on what might work, but that�s because so little has been tried. And there is compelling evidence that unwed childbearing is a significant cause of child poverty.

I wish Smock and Coontz would have been more forthright and said what they really think: �Marriage has no place in a balanced anti-poverty program.�

"The greater poignancy comes as social science increasingly ratifies a conservative clich�: for children a two-parent household is the most effective anti-poverty program we know. Three out of four white children are born to such households. Only one in three black children is.

The children of single parents are more likely to be abused, become sick, use drugs, commit crimes, be imprisoned, and have out-of-wedlock children�the litany, from decades of longitudinal study, is familiar. Clearly, two-parent households have the potential to create the continuity-rich context in which children's intellectual and emotional qualities may take wing. Yet the grave predicament of the contemporary black male, and its fundamental connection to the fate of black children, has managed to slip quietly through two distinct cracks: the one between competing special-interest blocs of the poverty industry, and the one between the hardened ideological categories of right and left.

To many contemporary women, however, the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfillment (and the occasional bit of carefully scheduled baby making) is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters. Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

"Only a small fraction of young Americans believe that a good marriage and family life is not important," Thornton says, "or that it's unlikely they will stay married to the same person for a lifetime." In fact, he points out, young Americans were slightly more committed to the importance of a good marriage and family life in the 1990s than they were in the mid-1970s.

"We found that men who were cohabiting with their child's mother were more than twice as likely as men who were married to live apart from their children," says University of Massachusetts sociologist Sanjiv Gupta�. In addition, the researchers found that every additional $1,000 of income reduces the risk of paternal non-residence by 2 percent, providing support for the contention that family stability is undermined by economic hardship. They further found that the mother's income as well as the father's is an important predictor of paternal presence. "Fathers are less likely to leave their children when the mothers earn higher incomes and work a greater number of hours," says Smock,"a finding that adds to the growing body of evidence that women's income may have a stabilizing rather than disruptive effect on family patterns."

Also, a new legal code in Brazil gives more rights to women, along with other positive changes. Yet, �Reflecting changes in society, the family is defined as members of any stable union, and no longer has to be sealed by marriage.�

My concern, of course, is that when unions are increasingly �unsealed,� they become increasingly unstable.

Given the very real difficulties of linking the cloning debate to our culture war over the family, I cannot deny that the commission may be right to avoid the single-parent issue. Yet in the years since the Murphy Brown flap, things have changed. Ever since Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's famous "Dan Quayle Was Right" article, a rough consensus has emerged, on both sides of the political aisle, that marriage really does have advantages over single parenthood. Reproductive cloning, by actually encouraging single parenthood on a mass scale, flies directly in the face of that consensus. I cannot think of a greater threat to all that the public still values in the traditional ethos of marriage and family than reproductive cloning.