Marriage Would Be Job 1 for Bush Nominee to HHS

WASHINGTON —  It was during a bout with cancer that a psychologist named Wade F. Horn vowed to devote whatever future he had left to being the best father he could be “forever and always.”

That was more than 12 years ago. These days, a vigorous Horn awaits his Senate confirmation for a job that will give him a rare opportunity to turn his personal goals into national priorities.

As an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, Horn will serve as the Bush administration’s architect--and cheerleader--for policies meant to promote lasting marriages and dutiful dads, particularly among the poor. In the process, he will try to prod a wary bureaucracy into a realm it has long avoided, and lead the White House through a minefield of politics and ideology.

“When it comes to promoting marriage, doing nothing doesn’t seem to work,” Horn, 46, recently wrote, adding, “If we are serious about restoring marriage, public policy will have to do more.”

Horn, who has been married for 24 years, would have the government sponsor a broad-based campaign on the benefits of marriage, aimed at the needy. He would push the states to use part of their federal welfare grants to promote marriage. If he had his way, married couples who seek public housing or Head Start for their children would leap to the front of the line.

“He clearly recognizes the linkage between marriage and reducing child poverty and other problems that affect children,” said Robert Rector, a senior scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. “He’ll be the best assistant secretary in that position ever.”

Horn will be no novice at the sprawling bureaucracy of HHS, where he will oversee welfare and other programs that operate on the front lines of family breakdown. From 1989 to 1993, he served as commissioner for children, youth and families in the administration of the current president’s father. It was a very different era in social policy, a time when nonworking, single mothers were still entitled to lifetime welfare benefits, and few politicians focused attention on the responsibilities of fathers.

For Horn, it became a time of sobering self-examination, prompted by a diagnosis of testicular cancer.

The episode prompted Horn in 1994 to help launch the National Fatherhood Initiative, an effort to spark a “broad-based social movement to restore responsible fatherhood as a national priority,” according to its Web site, https://https://www.fatherhood.org.

“It became clear to me in a personal way that, if I were to have died because of that illness, my unfinished business would not have been in my clinical practice or in the federal bureaucracy,” Horn later told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “My unfinished business would have been my two little girls, who every morning when I was recuperating would come and give me a kiss goodbye.”

Horn, who in a book recounted the story of his daughters kissing their “sick daddy” before heading out to school, has declined media interviews while his Senate confirmation is pending. The Senate Finance Committee plans to consider his nomination soon, but a date has not been set.

Those who know Horn describe him as a personable communicator, owing perhaps in part to his clinical experience as a child psychologist. He likes to follow baseball and college basketball (especially Michigan State, where he once taught psychology), and enjoys time at home with his family in the Washington suburb of Gaithersburg.

In the public arena, Horn has been known to blend citations of Scripture, academic analysis and down-to-earth talk in his bid to score debating points.

“He can shift back and forth between broad policy questions and intimate psychological issues of family breakdown,” noted David Popenoe, a sociologist at Rutgers University. “On that level, I find him quite remarkable.”

But if fatherhood and marriage seem as controversial as peace and prosperity, the political realities are not so tidy. Many liberals, including feminists and gay advocates, reject Horn’s presumption that a traditional, legal, heterosexual pairing should be exalted above other arrangements. Libertarians say the government has no business in the domain of family life.

Others fear that a pro-marriage bias, when it comes to allocating federal benefits, could harm millions of needy children whose parents are split up.

“I don’t mind emphasizing marriage, but I don’t want this country to forget about the millions of children of divorced families,” said David L. Levy, president of the Children’s Rights Council, an advocacy group. “We forget them at our peril.”

Gwendolyn Mink, a professor of politics at UC Santa Cruz, fears Horn’s approach could hurt low-income mothers who come under new pressure from the government to get married. “Horn reflects the heavy-handed, Big Brother conservatism of the Bush administration,” she said in a statement. “The idea is not only that fathers should get all sorts of rights and ‘carrots’ . . . it is also that single mothers must forfeit the rights to make intimate decisions that the rest of us hold dear, because they are poor and unmarried.”

Still, the political landscape has shifted in Horn’s direction since his last stint in a Bush administration, and few deny that broken families have contributed to social traumas. A growing cadre of Democrats now favors some sort of federal role in promoting marriage among the poor and encouraging fathers to play a role in the lives of their children. President Bush’s budget proposal includes several ideas to that end, including $200 million in grants for community and faith-based groups to foster fatherhood and marriage.