Sex is for marriage.

Marriage is between one man and one woman.

That’s it.

All public policy on sexuality, marriage, and the family should be rooted and grounded in those three truth statements. Period. Public policies that support those three principles should be supported. Public policies that undermine them should be resisted and resisted strenuously.

The only domestic relationship that should be recognized in law and be the basis for benefits, especially tax considerations, is marriage between one man and one woman.

No other domestic arrangement, no other form of sexual expression whether of the heterosexual or homosexual variety, should receive society’s endorsement, approval, or subsidy. Period.

Marriage between a man and a woman should be the only domestic relationship specially protected in law and the only domestic relationship which should be the object of favoritism in tax policy. Marriage, because it is the cornerstone of any health society, should have a favored status in tax policy, which means all marriage tax penalties should be eliminated and domestic tax benefits should be afforded only to married couples, benefits which aren’t available to people who are just shacking up.

There are still penalties in our tax code when each spouse makes over $68,000 a year, and the monstrous Obama tax hikes, scheduled to go into effect January 1, will lower that threshold and punish even more middle income marriages.

Child tax credits should be extended only to married couples with children, but not to children in any other domestic arrangement. Nobody is going to force anybody to get married, but cohabiting couples will quickly learn that there are financial costs as well as emotional and relational costs to shacking up. If they want to bear those costs on their own, fine. Just don’t expect taxpayers to reward your irresponsibility.

You get more of whatever you subsidize. Want more sexual immorality, subsidize it through taxpayer-funded sex education classes that teach kids a value-free approach to fooling around. Subsidize it through taxpayer-funded clinics that offer taxpayer-funded drugs to combat STDs and hand out condoms like candy.

Want more illegitimate children? Subsidize illegitimacy by providing taxpayer-funded medical services to the sexually promiscuous while making married couples pay for their own childbirth expenses.

Want more illegitimate children? Subsidize illegitimacy by giving single mothers more in taxpayer funds for every child they bring into the world outside marriage. Penalize them by withdrawing taxpayer-funded help the moment they decide to marry the father.

Subsidizing illegitimacy at first glance sounds compassionate, but it’s not. You get more of whatever you subsidize, and if you subsidize sexual immorality and out-of-wedlock births you will get more of both. You are at the same time subsidizing misery, disease, and poverty since those are all consequences of sex outside marriage.

So the approach to sound public policy is quite simple. We should ask one question about any and every taxpayer funded social program: does this program offer some kind of financial reward, some kind of financial benefit, some kind of taxpayer-funded goody that incentivizes sexual activity outside marriage? Does it put taxpayers in the position of absorbing lifestyle consequences that ought to be born by the individuals themselves? If it does, let’s scrap it.

Welfare has virtually destroyed the black family by making husbands and fathers irrelevant. Government says to a young black woman, if your man ain’t around to be a father to the kid you bore him, don’t worry about it. Big government will be his daddy. If your man ain’t around to be a provider for you and the kids you have borne him, don’t worry about a thing. Big government will be your man. This is an utter, total recipe for disaster and social chaos and we are now reaping the whirlwind. Kids need fathers, not welfare checks.

Before the infamous “War on Poverty” was launched, about seven percent of black children were born out of wedlock. Now, a generation later, about 70% of all black children are born out of wedlock, with no father in the home to provide for them, train them, love them, and protect them. This is a horrible, horrible disservice to these vulnerable children, and the last thing we should be about as a society is making the creation of such dysfunctional households easier by subsidizing the choices that lead to their formation.

We can’t stop people from making foolish and self-destructive choices. We can, however, stop fleecing taxpayers to subsidize those choices.

If we begin to withdraw taxpayer-funded subsidies for sexually immoral choices, it will not be long before young men and young women learn that they’d better start making better lifestyle choices because society is now expecting them to be responsible to absorb the full consequences of their own decisions.

They will then be dependent upon themselves and God, rather than government. They will be dependent upon on their families, who will soon help them get their minds right by setting conditions on the help they get. They will be dependent upon their faith communities, which likewise will reinforce healthy lifestyle values and choices and make help conditioned on assuming greater and greater personal responsibility.

They will be dependent upon charities funded by personal generosity rather than by government theft, and donors will want to see evidence that the charity in question is actually helping people get out of the death spiral they’re in. In other words, genuine compassion offers a way out through personal responsibility and individual accountability.

Government compassion, on the other hand, mires people in a helpless morass of abject dependency. Government welfare programs weaken character, a terrible thing to do to human beings created in the image of God.

We have destroyed virtually an entire generation of black families in America through foolish and grossly destructive welfare policies. We have no time left to reverse this trend, if for no other reason than for the sake of young, vulnerable black children who increasingly are growing up in poverty and dysfunction and are headed for a lifetime of self-destructive choices in sex, education, behavior, and career, all aided and abetted by public policies which are destroying them in the name of compassion. That kind of compassion kills.

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)