Galston on WSJ Opinion Page - Wednesday

William Galston was part of Bill Clinton's domestic policy team in the mid 1990s when I was coming of age at Middlebury College. Communitarianism was in vogue, and Amitai Etzioni's Spirit of Community had made a strong impression upon me as a young sociology student who hadn't yet discovered political philosophy. I remember experiencing a strong (if youthful) sense of political hope that Galston was involved in Clinton's administration, having learned how closely tied he was to Etzioni and communitarianism. Later would I find Mary Ann Glendon's particular strain of communitarianism--or as I know it now, Catholic social teaching. 

I felt a bit of that (more aged) hope on Wednesday, as I read Galston's WSJ op-ed touting marriage as the "cure for poverty." If Galston, now at the Brookings Institute, can state together with colleague Isabel Sawhill and eminent scholar Sara McLanahan that “children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide variety of outcomes," we may yet be able to get beyond the impasse created by the last decade of debates over gay marriage. Indeed, Galston did not say much to contradict Rusty Reno or Ross Douthat or even Rick Santorum. Would that thinkers from across the political spectrum could once again speak in one voice on this urgent matter. As all of these writers have noted, governmental policy cannot ultimately restore marriage in America, but policy can be crafted so as not to discourage the same.