On the first day of class, according to Matt, Professor Fineman stood up and said, "I defy anyone in this room to assert the absence of men from the lives of children and families is a bad thing."
What did you do? I wondered. "Kept my head down, parroted back her ideology on her exams and got an 'A,'" he tells me. But a few years later, here he is spearheading a new effort to find ways that civil society and public policy can work together to promote and strengthen marriage as an institution.
"Our benchmark is (Sen. Daniel Patrick) Moynihan's famous comment: 'The main objective of American government at every level should be to see to it that every child is born into intact families and remains so.' This is priority one for us," says Matt.
Among the proposals championed by the alliance? Tax relief for married families, increased tax incentives for adoption, pre-divorce counseling requirements, improving federal research on marriage and divorce, eliminating welfare policies that punish marriage, funding public information campaigns to highlight the importance of marriage and family, working with fathers to commit to children and wives.
My husband is a teacher, and I always tell him: You do more good than you know.