Covenant Marriage: The Movement to Reclaim Tradition in America

Chapter 3: The Implementation of Covenant Marriage in Louisiana

40 Chapter 3 The Implementation of Covenant Marriage in Louisiana Y It is pretty obvious what covenant marriage supporters wanted to happen as the innovation made its way from a relatively high-profile piece of legislation to the daily humdrum of office routine in parish clerks of court offices across the state. Although a choice, it was a choice that the policy’s sponsor and author hoped every marrying couple would make. When approaching marriage, which form would the couple select? Indeed, it was clear even in the early going that one of the hoped-for effects of covenant marriage was to deter otherwise doomed marriages. The intent, or perhaps we should say the hope, was that having to decide on a covenant or standard marriage would force couples to discuss their respective intentions and understanding of such matters as fidelity, monogamy, and commitment, and that the outcome of these discussions would be to expose incompatibilities and thus prevent divorce-prone marriages. It was also assumed that parish clerks of court and their staff would become educators about the covenant marriage option, perhaps even proselytizers on its behalf. In the ideal case, staff in these offices would explain to every couple seeking a marriage license the need to choose a type of marriage, offer them brochures and informational materials, answer questions , and send them on their way to make a decision. No one associated with the covenant marriage effort in Louisiana ever gave a prediction or even expressed (at least in public) a hope about the precise percentage of marriages that would ultimately be covenants, but there was clearly a hope among many and an expectation among some that the percentage would be appreciable. Some activists also expected the state’s religious leaders to jump quickly on the covenant marriage bandwagon, talk up the option from their Implementation in Louisiana 41 pulpits, counsel their young parishioners on the new law’s provisions, and otherwise promote this more-serious, more-committed marital option. The public support for the law expressed by many of the state’s prominent conservative Protestant leaders did nothing to dampen this expectation. Finally, advocates fully intended that the covenant marriage option would change the terms of public discourse about marriage and divorce, not just in Louisiana but throughout the nation. In their campaign against the problems of divorce, and unwed births, many marriage-movement advocates seized on covenant marriage as a beleaguered army would seize the high ground. Here, at last, was a pro-marriage, anti-divorce measure that could be defended. Those, then, were the principal expectations. The actual experience, as one might anticipate, was rather different. Experienced program evaluators know that a program or policy innovation as delivered is rarely identical to the program as envisioned by policy makers or as designed in the legislative process. Because “slippage” between program design and implementation provides one plausible explanation for the failure of the innovation to achieve its intended outcomes, analysis of how a program was implemented is an essential component of a comprehensive evaluation. There are many reasons why programs-as-delivered differ from programs -as-designed; technical impossibility, bureaucratic inertia, unanticipated conditions, inadequate resources, and the influence of other, unexpected variables are but a few. Many policy initiatives are subverted because public bureaucrats persist in their same old ways despite the program ’s admonition to do things differently. This, as we shall see, was a particular problem in implementing covenant marriage in Louisiana, one exacerbated by widespread skepticism among the presumed implementers about the intent of the legislation and its likely outcomes. In this chapter, we present results from several studies designed to assess the implementation of covenant marriage. We rely on a statewide survey of opinions, a series of interviews with court clerks and their staff, and telephone interviews with officials who performed wedding ceremonies . Appendix A includes a thorough presentation of the research methods used for this and all chapters of the book. The General Public’s Knowledge of Covenant Marriage Shortly after the legislation was enacted, we designed and fielded a statewide telephone survey to assess attitudes about marriage and divorce 42 Covenant Marriage in contemporary America and to see what people knew and thought about the new covenant marriage option. Fieldwork was done by the Gallup Organization and the survey response rate was 59 percent after nine attempts were made to contact selected...