Pacific Views

Protecting the endangered heterosexual marriage.

Dubya is set to pander to right-wing opponents of lesbian and gay marriages by announcing a plan to spend more than US $1.5 billion to promote heterosexual marriage, especially among low-income couples. According to the NY Times, the administration has been working for months with right-wing groups to develop a program that would teach couples the skills needed to manage marital conflicts. (Needless to say, homosexual couples will not be eligible for any of this assistance.) All of this will be delivered in an extensive election-year campaign designed to head off criticisms that Dubya hasn't done enough to protect heterosexual marriage from threats such as legal recognition of same-sex unions.

It's hard to begin to list the ways that we find this proposal objectionable. The obvious one is that the administration seems to think that marriages among low-income people are the ones with the most trouble. This strikes us as a reformulation of the old (and dangerously mistaken) notion that domestic violence is almost exclusively a problem of the 'lower classes.'

But just as bad is this rationale:

Wade F. Horn, the assistant secretary of health and human services for children and families, said: "Marriage programs do work. On average, children raised by their own parents in healthy, stable married families enjoy better physical and mental health and are less likely to be poor."

Despite what Horn says, research has failed to show that children in two-parent heterosexual families enjoy better mental health than children in single-parent families or children of same-sex couples. We'd suggest that Horn's statement borders on lying.

The other thing that really galls us here is that Horn asserts that failed marriages in and of themselves cause poverty and poor physical health among children of children who aren't in 'stable married families.' Excuse us, but isn't a more likely cause the wage gap between men and women, and the fact that even in contested divorces, women are overwhelmingly given custody of the children? Isn't it relevant that the incomes of men go up after a divorce, while the incomes of women drop dramatically?

We'd suggest that ensuring that women have the same access as men to decent jobs and equal pay would do far more to guarantee the health and well-being of children after divorce than any amount of government spending on promoting marriage. Furthermore, we'd suggest that ensuring that every citizen has access to affordable health care, and the parents have access to affordable day care would do wonders for all children, no matter what kind of family they're part of.

But obviously pandering to right-wing constituencies is the real aim of the 'healthy marriage' initiative, not solving any real problems that face families in the US.