
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 24, 1995                   TAG: 9509260022
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ABSENT FATHERS

REMEMBER ``root causes''? It was a phrase that, when used by liberals, used to drive conservatives mad. ``Root causes,'' as the conservatives saw it, was little more than an assertion that people were not responsible for their own illegal, immoral or impecunious behavior. The sooner such exoneration ended, the sooner we would become a civil, safe and productive society.

Guess what: ``Root causes'' are back - this time as a fundamental tenet of the right.

You won't hear many conservatives utter the phrase. Indeed their conversation is as full of the rhetoric of personal responsibility as ever. But watch them at work - as for instance on the welfare-reform legislation that has occupied them for the past several weeks. The most consistent feature of their legislative efforts has been the search for a way to connect fathers with their children.

Their disconnection, these conservatives believe, is the root cause of the poverty that has pushed welfare costs through the roof. And not just of poverty but also of teen pregnancy, lawlessness, school failure, drug abuse - the whole range of social problems.

It isn't only conservatives, of course, who see deteriorating family structure as the source of so many of our ills. Nor do all conservatives espouse the root cause idea. There are still those who acknowledge only proximate causes. Welfare dependency is caused by the ``refusal'' of poor people to work - or by the refusal of the rest of us to be sufficiently stern with these freeloaders. No need to examine whether there is decently paid work available, or whether those ``refusing'' to accept the work that is available have the requisite skills and attitudes. No point in thinking about where attitudes are generated or skills developed. No need, even, to wonder at the dilemma involved in being both hard-working and poor. People are on welfare because they don't work, and the way to get them off is to make them work - or else.

Or else what?

Lose their benefits - which is to say, lose the wherewithal to feed, clothe and house their children? Be forced to put their children in the already overtaxed and frequently abusive foster-care system?

Some lawmakers, recognizing the difficulties involved in enforcing such rules as the two-years-and-off proposal of President Clinton, offered instead a ``family cap'' on welfare benefits - you can have another child while you're on welfare, but you won't get a bigger check.

But even the harshest of the proposals stem ultimately from the belief that family deterioration - father desertion - is the root cause of the problem. Two-years-and-out is designed to force women to rely less on the government for financial support and more on the fathers of their children. Family caps are designed to do the same thing. Even Charles Murray's harshest-of-all recommendation - to simply end welfare assistance - had as its premise that forcing women to rely on their lovers would make them more careful in choosing as lovers men who had an interest in a long-term, supportive role. It would, that is, both encourage marriage and reduce the out-of-wedlock birth rate.

That's the idea behind a good deal of the welfare-reform legislation Congress has been wrestling with. And it's not at all a bad idea - no matter what you might think of the specifics of some of the proposals.

It is possible to doubt, for instance, the efficacy of coercing women - and particularly teen-agers - into prudent behavior, or men into responsibility. Family caps may simply increase the number of hungry babies. Kicking families off welfare could have the perverse effect of exacerbating the problem of homelessness, or pushing America into the orphanage business, where it really doesn't want to go. The two-year limit on welfare is like stiffer, mandatory sentences as a crime-fighting tool - a threat. The threat didn't work on the criminal justice side, and the result is absurdly overcrowded prisons and not much less crime.

Still, it makes sense to do what we can to halt the growth of father-absent families - even while acknowledging the limits on what government can do.

Perhaps the best model is the case of cigarette smoking. The government acted at the margin: with warning labels, education campaigns, advertising bans. But the real impetus for reduced smoking came when the people changed their minds and stopped condoning cigarette smoking. Something similar happened on the issue of drinking and driving.

What will it take to get America to change its mind about family?

\ Washington Post Writers Group

by CNB