Pushed to the Altar: The Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion

[G_j]

http://www.publiceye.org/pushedtothealtar/index.html

Pushed to the Altar: The Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion

by Dr. Jean V. Hardisty

Executive Summary

January, 2008

This report is the result of a two-year investigation by political scientist Jean Hardisty into the George W. Bush Administration's marriage promotion and fatherhood initiatives. Dr. Hardisty locates these initiatives within the context of the Right's family values ideology and investigates their scope, scale, intellectual and operational origins, merits, and outcomes. Pushed to the Altar: The Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion is the most comprehensive examination to date of the ideological roots of these programs.*

In 2001 the newly installed Administration of George W. Bush appointed Wade Horn as Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The appointment presaged a substantial shift in federal social welfare policy. Horn had served as the titular head of the rightist fatherhood movement during the 1990s. At HHS, he was to use the Administration's redefined and expanded faith-based initiatives (among other means) to support organizations that encourage women - especially welfare recipients - to marry their way out of poverty.

The Administration's success in promoting this agenda can be seen in Congress' allocation of $100 million annually for marriage promotion programs over fiscal years 2006–2010 (a total of $500 million) as part of welfare reauthorization in the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. Such Congressional funding for marriage promotion was preceded, and continues to be supplemented, by a variety of Executive Branch and state government grant programs.

Wade Horn's appointment to HHS illustrates the close ties between the Bush Administration and various right-wing opinion makers, intellectuals, advocacy groups, and mass-based organizations. Since 2001, Horn and The Heritage Foundation have been leading strategists of the Right's agenda for "welfare reform." For the fatherhood movement, conservative opponents of liberal antipoverty programs, and the Christian Right, the Bush Administration has provided a golden opportunity to promote marriage as a cure for poverty, and "responsible fatherhood" as a means to restore community health as they envision it.

What follows is a summary of the findings in Pushed to the Altar: The Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion.

-The arguments in favor of marriage and fatherhood promotion as a cure for poverty are ultimately ideological in nature. There is no solid evidence from the social sciences that marriage results in a higher income for poor women.

-Government marriage promotion experiments are funded at the expense of proven poverty relief programs.

-Government funding for marriage promotion projects exceeds $100 million annually.
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[G_j]

1. k

[bluedawg12]

2. I thought repugs hated "social engineering"

they should- they suck at it.

[Karenina]

3. At the expense of...

PROGRAMS THAT ACTUALLY WORK??? Na. logo.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Totally ignores the CONTEXT for the decline of marriage among the poor:

No jobs for working-class men, plus 1960s welfare laws, pushed by conservatives, that cut off a family's welfare benefits if there was an able-bodied man living in the household (never mind that he couldn't find a job). The idea was that a husband who lived with a wife who was receiving AFDC was just a parasite and needed either to support the family or get out.