My big fat GOP wedding: Bush administration marriage grants seek to wed church and state in unholy matrimony

Church & State, Feb 2003 by Boston, Rob

Bush Administration Marriage Grants Seek

To Wed Church And State In Unholy Matrimony

Gov. Jeb Bush is worried that too many couples in Florida are getting divorced. He sees religious leaders as crucial players in reversing that trend and would like to help them tackle the problem with a generous helping of taxpayer funds.

Involvement of the religious community is essential, Bush told reporters during a December conference call.

"Seventy-five percent of all the marriages in this state are in churches and synagogues and mosques," Bush said. `"There is a higher responsibility for all of us to recognize that every institution that values family life has to play a role in this."

Bush shrugged off objections that the initiative would constitute an unwanted government intrusion into what has traditionally been a private matter.

"Government," he remarked, "is already involved in every aspect of people's lives."

Hundreds of miles to the north in Washington, D.C., Gov. Bush's brother, President George W. Bush, is also eager to enlist religious groups to promote marriage. In early January, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), acting through its Administration for Children and Families, announced that it would give $2.2 million in federal funds to a variety of religious and other non-profit groups to sponsor programs that will purportedly strengthen marriage. Bush, who last year tried unsuccessfully to give $300 million for programs to promote marriage, is expected to push for hundreds of millions more for similar projects across the country this year. Political observers say the Republican-dominated Congress will likely be receptive to the plan.

The Bush brothers' promotion of marriage is part of a new trend among the allies of the Religious Right. Long wary of anything that smacks of governmentsponsored social engineering, ultra-conservative politicians and fundamentalist activists are suddenly eager to see church and state forming partnerships to encourage marriage and discourage divorce. The HHS grants are the leading edge of what could be a fast-growing trend.

In Florida, state Christian Coalition head Carolyn Kunkle applauded Jeb Bush's move, telling the St. Petersburg Times, "There are times when the family is in a stressful situation, and they think the only way out is divorce. Well, our grandparents were married for 75 or 80 years. They went through some stressful times, yet they were able to keep their families together."

Jeb Bush said he would like to kick off his initiative by surveying Floridians to determine their attitudes about marriage and family issues. Although Religious Right groups have opposed surveys about personal issues like marriage, sexual relations and child rearing in the past, Kunkle was solidly behind the Bush plan. She urged Bush to go even farther and called for adjusting the state's no-fault divorce law, which Kunkle claims makes it too easy for couples to split.

Taxpayer funding of religion is key to the new strategy. In Washington, a certain portion of the HHS money is earmarked for "faith-based" approaches. One grant went to an Allentown, Pa., group called Community Services for Children, Inc. The organization received $177,374 in tax funds to offer classes in "family formation and development." The classes must include a religious component.

Paula Margraf, who

runs Head Start programs for the group, told the Allentown Morning Call that the agency is not interested in "forcing religion on anyone" but said additional counseling through houses of worship would be available for those who want it.

Advocates of churchstate separation are watching the new developments with unease. While they don't dispute the importance of strong marriages and families to society, proponents of church-state separation worry that the marriage initiative could become just another ploy to plow tax money into religious organizations under the guise of addressing a thorny social problem.

Efforts to link government policy to the promotion of marriage actually stretch back to the welfare reform bill of 1996. At the behest of social conservatives, the law included a provision allowing states to use some welfare funds to pay for marriagepromotion programs. Utah, Arizona, Louisiana, Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have already created such initiatives.

Although funding for the programs existed during the presidency of Bill Clinton, there was little enthusiasm from that administration for a full-court press on marriage initiatives. President Bush, however, seems eager to rev up the program, seeing it as a vital component of his "faith-based" initiative.

Bush is so enthusiastic about pushing marriage that he hired a so-called "marriage czar" to work as assistant secretary of health and human services for children and families. The staffer, Wade F. Horn, worked in the administration of the first George Bush and then ran a group called the National Fatherhood Initiative. Horn has attacked no-fault divorce laws and once suggested in an article that the government should give preferential treatment to married welfare recipients, such as putting them at the top of the list for subsidized housing. (Horn now says he no longer supports that idea.)