Who Cashes the Check

Two things happened on the same news day that have nothing to do with each other administratively and everything to do with each other culturally. The Department of Health and Human Services canceled federal grants to teen pregnancy prevention groups nationwide and rewrote the funding criteria. Programs now get money for stressing abstinence, and specifically marriage and family formation, instead of just teaching kids to avoid pregnancy. That same morning, the Times ran a profile of Laura Doyle, the bestselling “surrendered wife” author, whose whole thesis is that women often wreck their own marriages by being too controlling and would do better to yield.

Nobody coordinated this. A cabinet agency’s grant office and a self-help publishing phenomenon do not sit in on the same meetings. But they landed on the identical instruction within the same 24 hours: marriage is the answer, and someone (a teenager, a wife) should adjust their own behavior to make more of it happen. That’s either a real cultural undertow finally surfacing in two unrelated places at once, or proof that deciding which nonprofits get funded is a surprisingly cheap lever for steering national behavior. You don’t need to pass a law about premarital sex. You just need to decide who cashes the check.

Meanwhile Arizona quietly handed its top elections job to an actual election denier in Tuesday’s primary. Alexander Kolodin will face the sitting secretary of state this fall for the office that certifies who won. Grant criteria can be rewritten by memo and rewritten back just as easily. The office that counts your vote is a much heavier lever, and it just moved.