One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America

Introduction: Marriage Promotion, Heterosexuality, and “Being American”

| 1 Introduction Marriage Promotion, Heterosexuality, and “Being American” What can be done to nourish the cultural ideal that must be restored if we are to revive the nuclear family: voluntary lifelong monogamy? [We must] spread the word about the emotional, economic, and health benefits of lifelong monogamy, and about how it is superior to other family forms, and continue to privilege marriage through public policy. —David Popenoe, “Can the Nuclear Family Be Revived?”1 We in the United States are currently in the midst of what might be called a marriage moment—a time of unusual, perhaps unprecedented, national preoccupation with the status and future of marriage. One reason for this is the growing public and scholarly concern over the weakness of the institution. . . . A second reason, closely connected to the first, is the emergence of the marriage movement. A third reason, currently dominant, is the controversy over same-sex marriage, which erupted in full force in the United States in mid 2003, making the marriage debate much hotter and more political. —David Blankenhorn, The Future of Marriage2 It was a sunny but chilly February day in Oklahoma City as I gathered at the state capitol with approximately four hundred people to rally for an issue that David Blankenhorn—the founder and president of the Institute for American Values, a pro-marriage organization—has characterized as a “national preoccupation.”3 The Protect Marriage and the Traditional Family rally drew a mostly white crowd, along with approximately forty-five elected local, state, and federal officials, radio personalities, and religious leaders. Adults and children held handmade signs with phrases like, “Kids need both a mom 2 | Introduction and a dad”; “God made us male and female because he loves us”; and “The sacred union between a man and a woman, where would you be without it?” The surge of activism in Oklahoma against same-sex marriage in 2004 represented only a segment of efforts to deal with “the status and future of marriage.” Starting in 1999, Oklahoma became one of the first states at the vanguard of national marriage promotion policies when it instituted an initiative financed with $10 million of its welfare grant. In the United States, a self-identified marriage movement emerged in the late 1990s, uniting a coalition of clergy and religious leaders, family practitioners , welfare officials and employees, politicians, think-tank personnel, and other community activists to promote a “renaissance” for heterosexual marriage to stem its relentless decline.4 Officially set in motion in 2000 with the release of “The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles,” its 113 signatories include prominent family scholars and researchers, such as William Doherty, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, William Galston, Norval Glenn, Steven L. Nock, David Popenoe, Linda J. Waite, Judith Wallerstein, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and James Q. Wilson. The movement has combined grassroots efforts with broader goals to expand the role of government in promoting marriage at the state and national level.5 Diane Sollee, a family therapist, founded the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education (CMFCE) in 1996, a clearinghouse for the movement that sponsors the annual Smart Marriages conference to bring together those interested in rebuilding a marriage culture.6 While “marriage education” is a spinoff of the secular family-therapy movement of the 1970s, a strong component also involves faith-based programs like Marriage Savers, a ministry that works with local congregations to promote Community Marriage Policies and Covenants , which require engaged couples to complete four months of premarital counseling. Nationally, the movement’s growth has been closely tied to state and federal funding of statewide and community marriage initiatives. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the law signed by former President Clinton in 1996 to end over sixty years of federal welfare benefits to poor families, specifically designated marriage promotion in addition to job preparation and work as a sanctioned use of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). In 1999, Oklahoma became the first state to set aside a significant amount of its TANF block grant money to promote marriage, establishing a precedent for other states to follow. Overall, Oklahoma has a punitive welfare system that ranks it among the lowest states in the amount of cash assistance offered to the poor. The fervent Introduction | 3 antiwelfare stance of many policymakers and politicians, as well as the state’s religious conservatism, helped to create a receptive environment for the philosophy of...