The administration’s announced plans to tax major givers could deal a crippling blow to religious institutions. These are the primary beneficiaries of larger donations. The administration’s pre-K proposals may not be designed to pry children away from church-based child care, but they will necessarily have that affect. Churches, especially those in inner-city neighborhoods, play a crucial role in helping many fatherless children to escape the snares of a host of social pathologies. Let’s not fire on these ambulances of the poor.

Finally, let’s sustain marriage as a social institution. Too many spokesmen on the left and the right have made marriage a political football. When a libertarian radio talker calls for the state to “get out of marriage,” he is encouraging the further breakdown of the family, the only institution that can supply the needs of children. As Prof. Michael Novak memorably put it: The family is the original department of health, education, and welfare.

For libertarians to call for a laissez-faire policy on marriage is to guarantee a greater role for the federal government in a futile attempt to stave off the disaster of family breakdown and to deal with the predictable consequences.

Family Research Council’s Mapping America project provides the hard social science evidence of the importance of family structure and religious attendance to the national well-being. There is virtually no area of public concern—education, health, avoidance of criminal behavior, abstinence from drugs, even bullying in schools—that has not been studied and reported on by Dr. Patrick Fagan’s project. I urge all concerned Americans to read the study on the Mapping America website.

By taking timely action now, we can reverse these dangerous trends. That, more than anything else government could do, will be the kind of change that will bring hope.