Ralph Reed: Making divorce harder for women is a 'better solution' than food stamps

Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed on Tuesday said that it was becoming too easy for women with children to get a divorce from their husbands.

In an interview with MSNBC's Morning Joe to push his latest book, Reed asserted that the national debt was connected to the decline in the nation's morality.

Host Mika Brzezinski wondered why Reed had compared divorce to drug use, human trafficking and legalized gambling to prove the country was in decline.

"I personally think the no-fault divorce revolution in the 60s and 70s has not been good for society," Reed explained. "Certainly, I recognize that couples are not going to be able to stay together. That's been true throughout society, but do we really want to make it easier for a man to discard the wife of his youth than it is for him to fire his secretary, for him to basically go in and say goodbye when 40 percent of all child support is never paid?"

"And when we know, 40 percent of the women and children that are thus cast aside end up in poverty," he added. "A woman is far more likely to end up in poverty. A man's income goes up. So, a lot of the poverty problem in America is a problem of women and children abandoned by the husbands and fathers."

MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle pointed out that Reed should support more federal programs like food stamps if he was concerned about poor women and children.

Reed, however, argued that making divorce more difficult was a "better solution" than food stamps.

"Set aside the partisan politics, that if you have a society where children are born out of wedlock, end up in poverty, and end up as agents and wards of the state, that's not a healthy society," he opined.

Watch the video below from MSNBC's Morning Joe, broadcast March 18, 2014.