Who Wants to Marry a Marriage Initiative?

The Bush administration's $1.5 billion drive to promote marriage among poor people is being received with joy on the religious right as a sign that George W. Bush is still their man. But the news is meeting a cooler reception everywhere else on the political spectrum. To most on the left and even some on the right, the marriage initiative sounds now just like it did when it emerged three years ago as a component of a new Republican welfare system: patronizing and wrongheaded.

First aired by President Bush in early 2001 as a cure for the poverty among many single mothers, the marriage initiative is included as a rider in the welfare reauthorization bill, which renews welfare programs for another five years. That means it's almost certainly going to become law. When it does, it will for five years mandate $200 million a year in federal money as well as $100 million a year in state funds to be spent on programs teaching low-income people the skills to enter and sustain "healthy marriages."

Half the federal money will go to state agencies. The other half, or $100 million each year, will be up for grabs by religious groups and nonprofits. Grant applicants have considerable leeway in both the form and content of their projects, and the programs may target high school students, single mothers, engaged couples, unmarried couples with children or married couples on the rocks. The only criterion is that the participants be heterosexual.

Politically Driven

The timing and nature of the announcement are clearly driven by politics. Offered up to the religious right as the Bush reelection campaign starts in earnest, the proposal shores up the president's conservative credentials after a year in which Texas and Massachusetts courts handed down significant rulings in favor of gay rights. Outraged religious conservatives want presidential support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, but Bush has waffled on giving it. This vanilla endorsement of "healthy marriage" could spare his having to venture into those waters while mollifying a key constituency.

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign gets to offer socially conservative Democrats an alternative to Howard Dean, who as governor of Vermont signed the country's first civil union law in 2000 granting most of the rights of marriage to same-sex couples.

The contradictions at work are not lost on the people at the Human Rights Campaign, a bipartisan gay rights group.

"We think it's ironic that the administration is spending $1.5 billion to support this [marriage initiative] while at the same time considering a constitutional amendment that would deny the security and stability and protection of marriage to literally millions of same-sex couples who are in lifelong devoted, committed relationships and want to embrace those rights," said HRC spokesman Mark Shields.

That's a pretty good sound bite, all too rare where this initiative is concerned, according to Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit that advocates for the recognition and rights of nontraditional family structures.

"It's a very slippery kind of proposal to condemn," said Coontz, an Evergreen State College history professor. "The general for-public-consumption approach is it's apple pie: 'Of course we don't want to force people into marriage -- we just want to give extra money to programs that help people who do want to get married.'"

Nevertheless, progressives and libertarians alike see nightmarish figures when they look at the marriage initiative: Big Brother, the Bourgeois Moralizer, the Great Society-Attacker, the Stingy Darwinian Social Engineer, the Politically Pandering Money-Waster and the Crusader for the Inappropriate Introduction of Religion into State Affairs.

Yet the silence from Congressional Democrats has been deafening. Who wants to go on the record as "anti-marriage," especially during an election year, especially this one?