Pro-Family Advocates: Bush's Marriage Initiative Just a Step, Not a Solution
by Jody Brown and Fred Jackson
January 15, 2004
(AgapePress) - Pro-family groups are applauding the news that President Bush is planning a "Healthy Marriages" Initiative. But they also hope he will take that initiative even further.
President Bush is expected to use his State of the Union speech next week to call for a $1.5 billion plan aimed at strengthening marriages. The New York Times reports that it would fund programs encouraging low-income couples to get married and stay married. Wade Horn with the Department of Health and Human Services points out some of the benefits of healthy marriages, saying "children raised by their own parents in healthy, stable married families enjoy better physical and mental health and are less likely to be poor."
Tony Perkins | |
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, says that's all well and good. "We need to promote marriage," he tells Associated Press. "Public policy for the last 30 years has discouraged marriage."But the FRC leader says the Administration needs to recognize that cohabitation and divorce are not the only threats to the institution of marriage. He is hopeful the president will go even further in supporting the institution by calling for a constitutional amendment banning homosexual "marriage."
"There's a growing majority of Americans who say the protection of marriage is a priority," he says, "so we're hoping that the president will very clearly state his position in protecting marriage in support of a constitutional amendment in his State of the Union address."
Perkins says the recent ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in favor of homosexual marriage points to an urgent need for the president to show leadership and resolve "this public policy crisis." He says because of that ruling, this is no longer a "theoretical debate."
Pro-family leader Gary Bauer agrees, saying the White House should "complement" the Healthy Marriages Initiative by putting its full resources, as well as the stature of the president, behind preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
"Not only is it good policy, but it is also good politics," Bauer says. "Few issues dominating the news today enjoy the kind of broad public support that the preservation of traditional marriage has attracted."
The president of Concerned Women for America also applauds the pro-marriage initiative, but says it is no substitute for a "principled defense" of marriage in the face of a "relentless" attack led by pro-homosexual forces.
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Sandy Rios |
"We support the president in any efforts to promote marriage," Sandy Rios says, "but if he does not address the legal attacks by homosexual activists, he has squandered his God-given opportunities and responsibility to stand firm and lead us boldly through these dangerous, immoral times."A presidential advisor tells the Times that the marriage initiative "is a way for the president to address the concerns of conservatives and to solidify his conservative base." But Rios says instead of addressing the issue head-on, the Administration is "dancing dangerously" around the issue of homosexual marriage.
"What they view here as a way of addressing the marriage issue and pacifying conservatives is an insult to all who really understand the issue," she says. And those who are trying to convince the president this initiative will stem the tide against the push for same-sex unions, she says, are "political fools who will destroy the nation in an effort to mainstream perversion."
According to the HHS's Wade Horn, the federal funds under the Healthy Marriage Initiative would not be available to homosexual couples because the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as the legal union of a man and a woman.
Mohler Debate
Meanwhile, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says that if homosexual marriage is legalized, "marriage would not be redefined, it would be destroyed."
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., debated the issue yesterday with University of Louisville law professor Samuel Marcosson, who said banning same-sex marriage is discriminatory and harms the children of homosexual couples.
But Mohler said marriage is an "irreducible union" between a man and a woman that provides "the basic unit of kinship, the basic location of sexual activity, of procreation, of reproduction and the raising of children."
Associated Press contributed to this story.
