Just when you thought Bush couldn't get more ridiculous

Did someone hear suggest that Bush (and/or those who wind him up) isn't a conniving, opportunistic waster of tax money? This latest election scheme really takes the cake and underlines the importance of kicking Bush's white ass out this year.


January 14, 2004

• Bush Plans $1.5 Billion Drive for Promotion of Marriage
  By ROBERT PEAR
  and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
  
  WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — Administration officials say they are planning an extensive election-year initiative to promote marriage, especially among low-income couples, and they are weighing whether President Bush should promote the plan next week in his State of the Union address.
  
  For months, administration officials have worked with conservative groups on the proposal, which would provide at least $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain "healthy marriages."
  
  The officials said they believed that the measure was especially timely because they were facing pressure from conservatives eager to see the federal government defend traditional marriage, after a decision by the highest court in Massachusetts. The court ruled in November that gay couples had a right to marry under the state's Constitution.
  
  "This is a way for the president to address the concerns of conservatives and to solidify his conservative base," a presidential adviser said.
  
  Several conservative Christian advocacy groups are pressing Mr. Bush to go further and use the State of the Union address to champion a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage. Leaders of these groups said they were confused by what they saw as the administration's hedging and hesitation concerning an amendment.
  
  Administration officials said they did not know if Mr. Bush would mention the amendment, but they expressed confidence that his marriage promotion plan would please conservatives.
  
  Ronald T. Haskins, a Republican who has previously worked on Capitol Hill and at the White House under Mr. Bush, said, "A lot of conservatives are very pleased with the healthy marriage initiative."
  
  The proposal is the type of relatively inexpensive but politically potent initiative that appeals to White House officials at a time when they are squeezed by growing federal budget deficits.
  
  It also plays to Mr. Bush's desire to be viewed as a "compassionate conservative," an image he sought to cultivate in his 2000 campaign. This year, administration officials said, Mr. Bush will probably visit programs trying to raise marriage rates in poor neighborhoods.
  
  "The president loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city with black churches, and he's very good at it," a White House aide said.
  
  In the last few years, some liberals have also expressed interest in marriage-education programs. They say a growing body of statistical evidence suggests that children fare best, financially and emotionally, in married two-parent families.
  
  The president's proposal may not be enough, though, for some conservative groups that are pushing for a more emphatic statement from him opposing gay marriage.
  
  "We have a hard time understanding why the reserve," said Glenn T. Stanton, a policy analyst at Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian organization. "You see him inching in the right direction. But the question for us is, why this inching? Why not just get there?"
  
  The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of a national group called the Traditional Values Coalition, has started an e-mail campaign urging Mr. Bush to push for an amendment opposing the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.
  
  Other groups, like the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family, are pushing more quietly for the same thing, through contacts with White House officials, especially Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide, who has taken a personal interest in maintaining contacts with evangelical groups.
  
  In an interview with ABC News last month, Mr. Bush was asked if he would support a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and gay civil unions.
  
  "If necessary," he said, "I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that, and will — the position of this administration is that whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they're allowed to make, so long as it's embraced by the state, or does start at the state level."
  
  Asked to cite the circumstances in which a constitutional amendment might be needed, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said on Tuesday, "That is a decision the president has to make in due time."
  
  The House of Representatives has approved a proposal to promote marriage as part of a bill to reauthorize the 1996 welfare law, but the bill is bogged down in the Senate.
  
  
  Without waiting for Congress to act, the administration has retained consultants to help state and local government agencies, community organizations and religious groups develop marriage-promotion programs.
  
  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."
  
  Prof. Linda J. Waite, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Chicago, compiled an abundance of evidence to support such assertions in the book "The Case for Marriage" (Doubleday, 2000). Ms. Waite, a former president of the Population Association of America, said she was a liberal Democrat, but not active in politics.
  
  Some women's groups like the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund oppose government programs that promote marriage. "Such programs intrude on personal privacy, may ignore the risk of domestic violence and may coerce women to marry," said Timothy J. Casey, a lawyer at the fund.
  
  Administration officials said their goal was "healthy marriage," not marriage for its own sake.
  
  "We know this is a sensitive area," Dr. Horn said. "We don't want to come in with a heavy hand. All services will be voluntary. We want to help couples, especially low-income couples, manage conflict in healthy ways. We know how to teach problem-solving, negotiation and listening skills. This initiative will not force anyone to get or stay married. The last thing we'd want is to increase the rate of domestic violence against women."
  
  Under the president's proposal, federal money could be used for specific activities like advertising campaigns to publicize the value of marriage, instruction in marriage skills and mentoring programs that use married couples as role models.
  
  Federal officials said they favored premarital education programs that focus on high school students; young adults interested in marriage; engaged couples; and unmarried couples at the moment of a child's birth, when the parents are thought to have the greatest commitment to each other.
  
  Alan M. Hershey, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, N.J., said his company had a $19.8 million federal contract to measure the effectiveness of such programs for unwed parents. Already, Mr. Hershey said, he is providing technical assistance to marriage-education projects in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas.
  
  A major purpose, he said, is to help people "communicate about money, sex, child-raising and other difficult issues that come up in their relationships."
  
  Dr. Horn said that federal money for marriage promotion would be available only to heterosexual couples. As a federal official, he said, he is bound by a 1996 statute, the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage for any program established by Congress. The law states, "The word `marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife."
  
  But Dr. Horn said: "I don't have any problem with the government providing support services to gay couples under other programs. If a gay couple had a child and they were poor, they might be eligible for food stamps or cash assistance."
  
  Sheri E. Steisel, a policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said, "The Bush administration has raised this issue to the national level, but state legislators of both parties are interested in offering marriage education and premarital counseling to low-income couples."

[Ron Thorne]

When I heard this news story being discussed this morning, I thought it was an election year joke. This truly takes the cake for a preposterous governmental morality decree at tax payer's expense.

Unfu**ing believable!

[Uli]

What Ron sed.

[BFrank]

You tell 'em, Ron!!

Bush is a lingering election year joke, Ron, and this conservative-stroking scheme really hammers that home.

[GoodSpeak]

Yeah...butcha know what the sad part is?

You can certainly count on the weak-ass Democrat sons-of-bitches in the House and Senate not do a damn thing to stop it.

They spend SO much time worrying about getting re-elected that they've just become patsies for the republicans. Who gives a shit if people don't like what they stand for? Geez. Stand for SOMEthing at least. We're losing election after election because the Democrats want to be seen as playing nice. OK...why aren't they getting elected then? The strategy has failed and failed miserably.


The Democrats need to grow some huevos, guys....I mean, they need to stand up and fight once.





Crimony.

[Monte Smith]

I have to say that $1.5 billion dollars to help couples develop interpersonal skills smacks of liberal bullshit. Tell them to go to church and develop intepersonal skills. I'm against this.

Originally posted by Monte Smith
I have to say that $1.5 billion dollars to help couples develop interpersonal skills smacks of liberal bullshit. Tell them to go to church and develop intepersonal skills. I'm against this.

Glad to hear that you are against it, but you got one thing wrong: this is decidedly conservative bullshit.

[Monte Smith]

Well, if marriage is conservative--and maybe it is these days--then this is conservative. But spending a billion and a half on teaching people to love each other? God damn! That's a liberal proposition.

[john williams]

Originally posted by Monte Smith
I have to say that $1.5 billion dollars to help couples develop interpersonal skills smacks of liberal bullshit. Tell them to go to church and develop intepersonal skills. I'm against this.

Oh yes this stuff reeks of repressive conservatism. Desperate conservative regimes tend to drag this old chesnut out.

I doubt church is the place to learn interpersonal skills either.

[las.vegas.lynn]

Chris, I think you mean "Cracker Ass".

I stand corrected, Lynn.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by Monte Smith
I have to say that $1.5 billion dollars to help couples develop interpersonal skills smacks of liberal bullshit. Tell them to go to church and develop intepersonal skills. I'm against this.

Liberal bullshit?


Buddy, your conservative Family First and Christian Coalition are just having an accident over this one.



Wow.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by las.vegas.lynn
Chris, I think you mean "Cracker Ass".

Personally, I would have used "smug lily white ass" but I guess it all means basically the same thing ;-)

[Ron Thorne]

Originally posted by Monte Smith
I have to say that $1.5 billion dollars to help couples develop interpersonal skills smacks of liberal bullshit. Tell them to go to church and develop intepersonal skills. I'm against this.

Monte, why you seem to need to neatly tuck everything into pigeonholes with "liberal" or "conservative" labels attached is truly amazing to me. Not surprising ... amazing. You've done it twice on this one thread alone, and it's a relatively young thread.

The bottom line is that this entire proposal is absurd, ludicrous, preposterous, laughable, idiotic and wasteful ... period. It doesn't require any other characterization or attribution.

I repeat, it's unfu**ing believable!

[GoodSpeak]

What Ron said.

[crawjo]

This is Andrew Sullivan's take:

"I have no objection to and much support for the president's proposal to encourage marriage, especially for low income people. As long as the government isn't indoctrinating or imposing itself, helping marriages prosper and last helps all of us: the couples, the potential or actual kids, and society itself, because such families are more able to take care of themselves. Marriage matters. And government has some responsibility to help foster it. But, of course, it begs the question. If marriage is so good for straights, why is the government so intent on preventing it for gays? Don't gay men, in particular, face all sorts of problems and issues that the responsibility of marriage helps ameliorate? And then you realize: for this administration, gay and lesbian citizens are regarded as beneath responsibility. There is no need for a social policy toward them, since they have no human needs or aspirations. If gays try to build responsible lives, and families, the important thing is not to help or encourage or reach out to them, but to prevent their relationships at all costs and in any way possible - even if we have to amend the constitution to keep them excluded from families and society. Above all: don't ever mention them in public. It might lead to some sort of social policy that could help them. They can pay taxes, but the government has no interest in helping them construct relationships that last. That's roughly it, isn't it?"

[Jason Bivins]

Sullivan is a moron, as is evidenced in his first extraordinarily condescending sentence: "especially for low income people." Ah, Andrew, how silly of me to have forgotten that the lingering problems of economic blight, decaying infrastructure, institutional racism, and post-industrialism can be adduced to the insufficient frequency of marriage among the poor!

Monte, the liberalism = social engineering trope is pretty tired (not to mention historically inaccurate). Why not just say you don't like the program under discussion; that should be sufficient.

And with regards to said program, welcome to Singapore!

If these clowns want to promote marriage and help maintain existing unions, they should stop enriching the rich and do something about poverty and unemployment. I bet the Bush policies have broken up countless marriages, but neither he nor any of his partners in crime (and that's really what they are) can see the light through their dense ideological fog.

[BFrank]

Too bad Bush couldn't have saved Ronald Reagan's marriage to Jane Wyman. Things may have turned out much differently..........for all of us.

[jesus marion joseph]

Why can't you guys discuss politics without dragging Reagan's name into it? Next you'll be talking about what's-his-name.

[Ron Thorne]

If Dubya would like to reward Americans for each year of marriage ... say at a level of $1000.00 per year (tax free), and grant retroactive payments, put Patti and me on the list.

And we won't have to spend a penny of it on any stinkin' relationship workshop scam, either.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by jesus marion joseph
Why can't you guys discuss politics without dragging Reagan's name into it? Next you'll be talking about what's-his-name.

Kenny Whatshisname?

[bostontricky]

Originally posted by jesus marion joseph
Why can't you guys discuss politics without dragging Reagan's name into it? Next you'll be talking about what's-his-name.

What does Rod Stewart have to do with this thread?