Toto

Gov't Award Marriage Promotion Grants

Marriage counseling can be a good thing, although I am not sure either the government or churches should be running the program.

lisarea

This is one of those things I am trying to avoid thinking about, lest my head explode.

I have to admit that I do not UNDERSTAND marriage. Aside from religious motivations, the only other reason to get married is some desire to have the government sanction your personal relationships. Creepy.

So, viscerally, I don't find this all that much creepier than the basic concept of marriage itself. It is taking it into a whole new realm, though, spending my tax dollars to promote this bizarre concept.

Does the Republican party still claim it's for smaller government?

Shake

Well, I've got no problems promoting healthy marriages or making people think if they're getting married for the right reasons. But do I remember correctly that currently married couples pay more in taxes (the "marriage penalty")? If that's true, then of course the gov't wants more of us married! To get more of OUR money!

And if the Republicans are claiming they're for small government, then I guess they're pissed about the newest gov't agency: the Dept. of Homeland Defense!

Remember: actions speak louder than words!

cheetah

This is ridiculous! How dare they promote a certain way of life? In fact, my "husband" and I did not get married in a legal ceremony specifically for this reason (and also partly to take a stand against the fact that only certain people, ie heteros, can marry. How wrong that they would promote marriage, but block certain people from it!)

Shake, I disagree with you about the marriage penalty. I am not a tax expert, but our CPA tells us about the tax breaks we could avail ouselves of if we were legally married, but we refuse to do so. Perhaps someone with more tax knowledge could provide details, but I think marriage penalty vs. marriage benefits depends on each couples' unique situation and level of income. Also, one of the biggest reasons we are missing out on a tax break, according to our CPA, is due to the new income properties we are investing in.

oh yeah, I wanted to include this link to the Alternatives to Marriage Project:

http://www.unmarried.org/homepage.html

xstvn

Why do religious groups need money to promote marriage?
How exactly do they go about promoting marriage?

Ad campaigns? Counselling/ pressure sessions with unwed couples?

Sounds to me like it will just promote more unhappy marriages and make the unmarried feel worthless and second rate.

lisarea

OK. See, now, this is why I didn't read the article the first time. I mean, aside even from the basic question of why the hell they think it's OK to 'promote' a bizarre and absurd thing such as marriage with my money, there's just an aura of deception and general idiocy to this whole idea that makes me want to go kick someone's ass right now.

Never mind the fact that many people only see the inside of a church for weddings and funerals. Unless they're actually targeting people IN THE ACT OF GETTING MARRIED, they're barking up the wrong damned tree.

I am starting to think that maybe people should have to have some kind of a permit to even look at statistics.
.
WHAT?

What sort of 'marital skills' are they teaching poor single parents? How to give better blow jobs? How to trick someone into marrying you? And what do they mean teaching them to increase child support payments? Are they actually saying that it's the custodial parent's job to get the non-custodial parent to make payments? Or do they mean ways to get the court to order larger payments in the first place?

And why did they throw 'ethnically diverse' in there? Is that an existential or a universal description? Are they only helping those who are 'ethnically diverse' in themselves, like mixed race; or do they mean that they find it necessary to point out that this is not a 'whites only' service, or WHAT?

I hate it when they just throw out stupid crap like this that makes zero sense. Half of the information in this article consisted, essentially, of 'blah blah blah.' It just makes me think they're making shit up as they go along.

WHICH THEY ARE.

The whole thing is just such a grandly assholian idea, I can't believe--I honestly can't believe--that anyone is really serious about this. They're TAKING MONEY AWAY from child support enforcement to convince people to get and stay married.

I have a friend who just now had to 'fire' local child support enforcement and get her attorney to take over having her ex's wages garnished. He was six months behind, and they hadn't even bothered to do anything but send him a bill in the mail.

I am. I'm doing it. Is Wal-Mart open? I'm going to go kick someone's ass just because there's a 99% chance they deserve it.

Arrowman

I don't have a particular problem with the general idea of governments using tax dollars to encourage what I would call "responsible parenthood" - since there can be a cost ($ and in other terms) to society in family breakdown (and single parenthood), where children are involved, then it would be cool if that could be minimised. Trouble is
a. Such programs are too often based on religious or moral grounds (as this one is) and that is not an appropriate use of taxpayer funds, and
b. Noone really knows a genuinely effective way to do this anyway.
So until someone can solve b., we'll have to settle for divorce and single parenthood as a part of life, and pay the bills as a society. What we have here is a classic case of "something should be done - this is something - let's do it."

Actually, there is some sense in the idea of "encouraging custodial parents to increase child support payments". Courts can't act without an application, and some custodial parents (usually women) don't bother to chase the father, for various reasons such as "I never want to see the bastard again / I want to be independent / I don't want him seeing the children" or out of simple ignorance of their rights. As a non-custodial father paying child support, it pisses me off to see some (in my personal experience) comfortable middle-class men getting away with not paying child support while their ex-wife collects a government benefit (out of my taxes).

(Actually, in Australia at least part of the family benefit for single parents is means-tested on the child support which would be payable, not that which is actually paid. So if you're not collecting for whatever reason, you can't top it off with government benefit. But that requires that at least an assessment has been made in the first place, and that doesn't always happen.)

Jamie_L

I consider myself an odd hybrid of conservative and liberal.

I believe strongly in limited government. "Give the government no power it doesn't need to do it's job." That's my mantra these days. However, that seems to almost always lead me to "liberal" ideas.

The government doesn't need to be in the business of promoting marriage.

The government might need to be involved in encouraging responsible parenthood. However, promoting marriage is a different thing. I've known quite a few people who got screwed up by being raised by married people who didn't like each other. We need more of that like we need more terrorism.

I actually believe the tax effects of marriage vary with relative incomes. If two people have vastly different levels of income, marriage brings good tax benefits. If two people have similar income levels, marriage brings more tax liability. I'm not sure why that is, but that's what I've heard from several sources.

Jamie

lisarea

Responsibility and parenting are well and good, and they should be encouraged, certainly. (Parenting, of course, in the case of parents.)

Marriage, though, is not necessarily a part of that, and I don't see the value in 'promoting' such. I see this as a separate issue from encouraging and supporting two-parent families.

And I have a very fundamental disagreement with the government funding projects that promote any given lifestyle over other, equally legal ones.

Now, I could be off on this, as this is just something I heard somewhere, but I think that, in the US, if a parent receiving child support payments is on public assistance, the child support checks go directly to the appropriate government agency.

In these cases, the responsibility for collecting and establishing child support payments necessarily falls on the government agencies that receive the checks.

In other cases, it's none of their business. Certainly information on establishing child support should be available, but I believe that already exists.

Fr.Andrew

Another problem with Dubya's sleazy executive order is that our Congress, under pressure from Christian homophobes, has defined marriage so as to exclude homosexual unions.
Thus a class of taxpayers is being forced to fund bigotry which specifically targets them.