Bush seeks $1.5b to back marriages

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's election-year proposal to promote "healthy marriages" is aimed at pleasing social conservatives, who want the White House to take an unequivocal stand against gay unions, and is also aimed at married voters, who by wide margins favor Republicans and tend to support traditional values, political analysts say.

The White House said yesterday the president's 2005 budget would raise the amount earmarked for marriage promotion to $1.5 billion over five years in the pending legislation to renew the 1996 welfare law. In 2002, the president proposed $1 billion in federal funds over five years for state programs to encourage marriage and discourage out-of-wedlock births among the poor.

The US House passed that measure, including the funds for marriage promotion, last year, but the full Senate has not yet acted on the welfare bill. Conservatives said they expect the president to highlight the marriage initiative in his State of the Union message Tuesday, and they hope he also will endorse a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

One of the president's goals in the speech, as he points to past achievements and lays out his 2004 agenda, will be to energize key constituencies.

" `Healthy marriages' sounds like a traditional value, which is red meat to married voters," said John Zogby, a pollster who is finding a wide "marriage gap" of about 25 percentage points between married people who say they will vote to reelect Bush and single voters who support a Democratic candidate for president.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group, praised the president's commitment to strengthen marriage and interpreted it as protecting the traditional institution of marriage.

"The Bush administration must recognize that cohabitation and divorce are not the only threats to the institution of marriage," Perkins said. "Efforts to redefine marriage out of existence must be stopped, and the president's support of a federal marriage amendment would go a long way in making sure that marriage is not only promoted, but also protected."

Groups that fought the welfare proposals from the start said the administration is trying to generate new political support for its controversial marriage initiative from social conservatives, who are upset by the Nov. 18 ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that declared gays have a right to marry in that state.

"This is a ruse by the White House to make the social experiment of getting poor people married more palatable," said Jennifer Brown, legal director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. "You link it to gay marriage and say the initiative is about protecting and elevating the institution of marriage." Cheryl Jacques, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, said: "I find it highly ironic that on the one hand Bush is talking about $1.5 billion to promote and salvage marriage, while at the same time his administration is considering denying marriage to loving couples that are clamoring for the rights that come with marriage and to raise families."

Last month, in an ABC News interview, Bush said "if necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman . . . 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 . . . unless judicial rulings undermine the sanctity of marriage, in which case we may need a constitutional amendment."

Wade Horn, assistant secretary of health and human services for children and families, said the administration is already spending about $7 million a year on pilot programs to promote marriage but wants to expand it greatly through advertising, education, and mentoring so low-income couples can access the resources and services to form and sustain marriages. "This is not about the government interfering with the private decision of an individual couple to get married," Horn said.

In 2002, the Pew Research Center said 74 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Democrats it surveyed opposed government programs to encourage people to get and stay married.

Horn said the SJC decision could be changing public attitudes, but he said the administration marriage proposal is not linked to the gay marriage issue. Because the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as the legal union of a man and a woman, the federal funds under the Healthy Marriage Initiative would not be available to gay couples, Horn said.

John Green, a University of Akron political scientist who studies voting behavior, said the marriage initiative could have symbolic and real results. "It may be that this White House perceives married people as a key GOP constituency," he said. "To that end, it pays both to have more people married and to affirm the values and commitment of people who already are married."

Mary Leonard can be reached at mleonard@globe.com.