Encouraging marriage, he says, “isn’t a moral argument” per se, it’s a public-policy priority. In his Iowa stump speeches, he liked to cite a Brookings study on how people who graduate from high school, get married, and have kids, in that order, almost never end up in poverty.
“The foundation of a stable civilization is the family. The family breaks down — the economy suffers, the state suffers, the community suffers,” he says. Marriage is a public good, he argues, that ought to be promoted just like any other — staying in school, or quitting smoking. “There isn’t any disagreement about the public benefits of [marriage,]” he says. (He complains, based on this line of questioning, that even National Review reporters now don’t seem to understand how important marriage is.)
Santorum wants to do a lot more than talk up marriage, though. He has a number of policy proposals to create an economy that can support working families — some unique to him, and some that other reform-minded conservatives have been pushing.
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