Back to the topic...
Shouldn't we stop doing this? Is anyone out there in TulsaNow world disagree?
We are giving millions of public dollars to a partisan PR group to hold seminars about marriage. I don't know anyone who has attended one and I have never heard of them being held in Tulsa.
The results say that we are failing miserably. Why don't we stop?
Okay, I’ll bite. This falls into an area that government really has no business getting into and, as a social matter, really cannot affect without banning divorce outright which would be ludicrous. The issues of teen pregnancy, out of wedlock marriages, divorce, and poor attitudes in families toward educating their young are moral issues, not failures of government. No matter what sort of intervention you try and put into it, it’s simply not going to have an affect in people who have no self-respect, no sense of family, and no respect for others in their lives.
One of the incentives of the program was to give a discount on marriage licenses. If two people are really committed to staying married, many churches provide pre-marital counseling to their parishioners. I took a course with my second wife at Tulsa’s Family & Children’s Services. I’m not sure if this is the same program or not, but it qualified for the discount for our marriage license:
http://www.fcsok.org/services/tulsa-adult-family-counseling/premarital-counseling-tulsa/The course apparently didn’t work because that marriage was an epic FAIL.
MC and I didn’t take a course and I can never envision a day without her. She will tell you the same thing. Both partners have to be in it for the long haul and no amount of government intervention or education on the matter can drive that.
It’s much like throwing more money at education believing that it will improve outcomes when most problems with education come from within a child’s home, not the schoolhouse. The same holds true for marriage. If the family isn’t strong, the government cannot do one thing to make it stronger.
So, yes, I agree this is a waste of money and needs to end. I wasn’t aware there had been so much spent on this and somehow, I’m thinking there was a small fee to take the class so it doesn’t make sense why $70 million of federal funds would have wound up in this program.