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| 23 1 Unite! Marriage and American Identity We’re the first state in the union to propose to use some of our TANF funds for the purpose of strengthening marriage. . . . Welfare reform, which I think, as a governor, was one of the wisest things the Republican Congress has done, has permitted us to say, forcefully, but not in a mean-spirited way, you need to take individual responsibility, you are a human being, you are a special asset, you are a citizen. We together, you and I, should help each other to be independent and responsible. —Frank Keating, former governor of Oklahoma1 This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. This is between right and wrong, and marriage between one man and one woman is right. Marriage between two men or two women is wrong in America. You’re standing for what’s right here today. Right now in America and in Oklahoma, we’re under siege. —U.S. Representative John Sullivan (R-OK)2 Former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating gave the quote above at a lecture for the conservative Heritage Foundation, an influential public policy research institute that promotes the principles of “free enterprise, limited government , individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”3 He describes how he was surprised by an economic report stressing that, along with the standard “recommendations on the economic ledger side,” Oklahoma needed to combat divorce among families with children and its out-of-wedlock births to improve the state’s prospects for economic growth. Keating decided to address these social issues by forming the marriage initiative . Its initial goals were to promote government intervention “to reduce the high number of divorces in Oklahoma by one-third, by the year 2010; to teach citizens about the many personal and societal benefits of marriage; and 24 | Unite! to encourage currently-cohabiting Oklahoma couples to marry.”4 Accordingly, he states, “It is in the interest of good citizenship to abate this high incidence of divorce, out-of-wedlock births, violence, and drug abuse.”5 In March 2000, the former governor announced that he would finance his marriage initiative with 10 percent of the state’s Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) reserve fund, which worked out to $10 million, and Public Strategies, a public relations/public affairs firm, was awarded a contract to manage it.6 In his lecture to the Heritage Foundation, Keating states that his reason for instituting the marriage initiative is a way to “make our state rich. That simple. To try to do what we can to have people prepared for marriage, to survive a marriage relationship, and to be able to provide a strong economic base for that family unit.”7 With these words, he draws together family, market, and patriotic ideologies that have had appeal to conservatives , and particularly to conservative Christians and their embrace of capitalism as an essential component of God’s plan for America.8 The sociologist Andrew Cherlin points to two ideologies that motivate marriage advocates like Keating. Some take a moral position that marriage provides the best kind of family, while others favor it because, according to them, research proves that children do better when their parents are married .9 For those motivated more by moral justification, many also support and are active in efforts to ban the legalization of same-sex marriage. Political scientists have found that this issue is particularly amenable to a framework of a religiously based morality that defines it in an inflexible and polarizing fashion.10 Members of the religious right perform some of the most explicit boundary work in seeking to ensure that marriage remains heterosexual. Their efforts also harmonize with the tenets of marriage promotion in the assertion that marriage is central to social order and a bedrock of civilization . In his book The Future of Marriage, David Blankenhorn cites marriage promotion to be the “most important domestic initiative of our time,” and he describes the importance of renewing marriage as “our primary social institution .”11 Tying together the moral and research-based secular trends of marriage promotion, he argues that marriage must remain heterosexual because kids need both a mother and a father. Same-sex marriage doesn’t offer this normative configuration, and is thus detrimental to society. James Dobson , a prominent religious right leader, articulates a more extreme position against same-sex marriage: “Marriage, when it functions as intended, is good for everyone—for men, for women, for children, for the community, for...

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