The Bush Administration's Healthy Marriage Iniative

The Bush administration is promoting marriage to low income women as a solution to poverty. The 2002 Healthy Marriage Initiative seeks to spend 1.5 billion dollars promoting marriage through welfare, by offering marriage "education" classes, targetting low income neighborhood schools, funding faith based organizations to providing counseling, putting up billboards in poorer neighborhoods, and funding research about marriage. This legislation, which has wide bi-partican support, was introduced as part of the Welfare reauthorization legislation which is currently two years overdue, and now extended until after the election. Although there are no laws that fund marriage, the current Health and Human Services department is funding marriage anyway, with money earmarked for other programs.

The government insists on moving forward with these activities in spite of protests from women on welfare, feminist economists, social policy experts, domestic violence counselors, and others who say the government has no business telling low income women to get married. Many are concerned that this behavior is paternalistic, others fear that it will lead to sex stereotyped family structures, and still others fear that it will endanger the lives of women who are survivors of domestic violence.

This half hour radio documentary tells the stories of low income women, and the concerns that they have.