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New Report! Marriage as a Cure for Poverty?
Social Science Through a “Family Values” Lens
By Jean V. Hardisty

Dr. Jean V. Hardisty, founding director of Political Research Associates, exposes the questionable social science justifying George W. Bush’s campaign to promote marriage as a cure for poverty. Rightist academics and think tank researchers ignore data showing that pushing low-income women and men to marry might actually diminish a low income woman’s chances of rising out of poverty, and they rely on evidence and reasoning that do not meet scholarly standards.

“Even as the government defunded welfare programs, it diverted funding to experimental programs not supported by sound social science research,” Dr. Hardisty writes.

The report is a companion to Dr. Hardisty’s earlier report Pushed to the Altar: The Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion. Together they provide a blueprint of the Bush legacies that an Obama Administration must dismantle so that poverty fighting tactics are no longer in thrall to right-wing ideologies suggesting that a family is not complete without a father.

Jean V. Hardisty, Ph.D is the founder and president emerita of Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank tracking the U.S. Right. She is senior scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Research on Women at Wellesley College, and the author of Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers.

“Marriage is a groundbreaking expose of the Right’s use of defective social science methodology to mislead the United States public, in this case about the causes of and solutions to poverty. [It] provides a useful insight that progressives can use to analyze much of the Right’s deeply flawed social science literature.” – From the foreward by Lucy A. Williams, Northeastern University School of Law.

PDF of Report

Table of Content

Spotlight On

Civil Liberties & Repression

Christian Right & Theocracy

Understanding the Right