House Votes to Boost Poor by Teaching Fatherhood

The House of Representatives, seeking to reverse decades of surging out-of-wedlock births, on Wednesday approved a $160-million effort aimed at boosting marriage among the nation’s poor by teaching fathers who are absent from their children’s homes to uphold their parental responsibilities.

Urged to “make dads count,” lawmakers swept aside objections from the National Organization for Women and civil libertarians and passed the measure on a broadly bipartisan vote of 328 to 93.

Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R-Conn.), the measure’s chief sponsor, called the legislation “a giant step forward” for poor children and their fathers. For the first time, she said, welfare-related legislation “is going to recognize that dads do count and that we can help dads to be better fathers and better providers.”

Indeed, the measure marks a significant first step toward achieving a key social goal of the welfare reform law of 1996. Many of that law’s chief architects hoped that it would help reestablish the tradition of marriage and two-parent families in the nation’s poorest communities, where more than two-thirds of children now are born to single mothers.

But the 1996 law avoided language that enshrined marriage as an explicit objective of programs for the nation’s poor. And until recently, virtually all welfare reform programs and money have been used to help wean mothers with dependent children from public assistance. Except for initiatives cracking down on fathers who failed to pay child support, few welfare reform resources or services have gone to fathers who are absent from the home.

The House measure would begin to change that. It would establish an organization to make five-year grants to groups that commit to “promote marriage” as well as “good parenting practices, including the payment of child support” through counseling, mentoring and job training of noncustodial fathers. The grant-making body envisioned by lawmakers would operate separately from the government’s welfare system, which many believe has done much to discourage marriage among the poor.

Passage of the “Fathers Count Act” comes at a time of broad political attention to the challenge of drawing absent fathers into their children’s lives. Backers of the bill estimate that 23 million children live in homes without fathers, a tripling over the last 40 years. Recent federal figures show that unwed birth rates have dropped in 12 states, including California, although they have gone up elsewhere.

Vice President Al Gore, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, has proposed his own package of aid to encourage marriage, support fathers’ involvement with their children and shore up two-parent families working for low wages. President Clinton is expected to sign a version of the House measure into law, although Senate action on similar legislation is not expected until next year.

The fine print of the House measure also contains a provision that could spare California as much as $300 million in future federal penalties. Echoing legislation passed earlier this year by the Senate, the House bill would waive further federal penalties on states that fail to meet targets set out by the 1996 welfare reform bill for establishing central systems to handle child support enforcement.

In October 1998, California failed to meet a key target laid out in the law: to establish a single statewide office for the disbursement of child support collections to custodial parents and their children. By the letter of the 1996 law, that failure should mean that stiff federal penalties already incurred by the state would be doubled. By waiving the double-penalty provision of the 1996 law, the House and Senate measures would spare California many hundreds of millions of dollars.

The “Fathers Count” grants would go to state agencies as well as religious and independent social service organizations. The likelihood that many of the grants would be made to “faith-based” organizations drew considerable criticism in Wednesday’s floor debate. Several lawmakers warned that, as churches and religious missions use federal funds to do their work, there would be an unconstitutional breach of the firewall between church and state.

But House lawmakers rejected two amendments that would have placed significant restrictions on which religious organizations would be eligible for funds and how a religious group could use them.

“To claim that our Founding Fathers were for separation of church and state is either rewriting history or being very ignorant of history,” said House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas). “It is simply impossible and it’s unwise to try to separate people and their government from religion.”

Wednesday’s measure had the backing of groups across a wide range of the political spectrum. Along with the broad backing of the House Republican leadership, it won endorsements from such liberal-leaning groups as the Children’s Defense Fund and the Center for Policy and Budget Priorities in Washington.

But one notable voice of dissent came from the National Organization for Women, which argued that giving money to programs for noncustodial fathers would undermine support for custodial parents, mainly women. The measure’s requirement that the promotion of marriage be an explicit goal of funded programs also irked leaders of the prominent women’s group.

“Pressuring a poor woman to marry the father of her children--without regard to his character--could do great harm,” said Patricia Ireland, president of NOW. “Congress is telling women that the way to get out of poverty is to find a husband.”