OCPA: Marriage Helps Fight Poverty
Oklahoma House votes to fight child poverty, promote marriage
BY TINA KORBE DZURISIN · TUE, MAR 12, 2013
Last week, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a bill to promote marriage as an indispensable weapon in the now decades-old “War on Poverty.” Authored by House Speaker T.W. Shannon, House Bill 1908 would direct federal dollars — which the state receives as a part of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program — to a statewide public service campaign to advertise marriage as an unparalleled protection against child poverty.
One statistic says it all: A child with married parents in Oklahoma is 80 percent less likely to live in poverty than a child with unmarried parents, according to the Washington D.C.-based Heritage Foundation. As of 2009, 44.7 percent of single-parent families with children in Oklahoma were poor. In the same year, just 8.8 percent of married couples with children in the state lived at or beneath the poverty line. In other words, single-parent families in Oklahoma are five times more likely to be poor than married families.
As long as the state is in the business of funding public service campaigns, it’s hard to see why anyone would object to the publicly funded advertisement of such statistics. What better assistance could the state provide to needy families than to educate them — at the relatively low cost of a radio or TV ad — about the importance of marital commitment to economic prospects?