Here's a fact I couldn't find anywhere in George W. Bush's $1.5-billion plan to prop up American marriage.

The pro-Bush red states, especially those in the rural South, have a far higher divorce rate than Al Gore's blue states.

This is the Bible Belt?

Actually, it's more like the Divorce Belt, where the pro-marriage president's staunchest supporters tend to congregate.

For this little nugget, we are indebted to the insightful research of George Barna, who is probably America's leading pollster of religious attitudes. The Barna Research Group of Ventura, Calif., has spent the past 18 years tracking various church and cultural trends.

Trends like Baptists (29 percent) and nondenominational Christians (34 percent) getting divorced more frequently than do atheists/agnostics (21 percent).

Forget all that family-values talk from the Religious Right.

"Divorce rates among conservative Christians were much higher than for other faith groups," Barna says flatly.

And to think: I'd always heard that godless relativists in places like New York were undermining marriage.

Well, not so you'd notice on the marital-political map.

The five states with the highest rates of divorce — 50 percent more divorce than the national average — all went for Bush in 2000. There's the quickie-divorce capital of Nevada, of course. But Nevada is joined as a Bust-Up Champ by pro-Bush Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma.

These people will soon be telling us how to run our marriages?

Twenty-seven percent of adults are divorced across the legendarily devout South, pollster Barna found. As for the liberal Northeast? That's the region with the lowest divorce rate, 19 percent.

Now here's a can't-miss advertising campaign that New York boosters have somehow overlooked.

"Hate your husband in Little Rock?

"Mad at the wife in Birmingham?

"Save your marriage! Move your tattered love to New York!"

All of which casts an unexpected shadow across the president's election-year marriage-rescue plan. Administration officials have been working on the idea for months with conservative religious groups. It's being considered as a centerpiece for next week's State of the Union address.

This big-dollar marriage push comes as Bush's political advisers are trying to figure out how to benefit from the religious opposition to gay marriage — without appearing extremist or cruel. Much of the $1.5 billion would be targeted at "healthy marriage" counseling for the low-income set.

But could it be that the president and his people need a little counseling of their own, perhaps a better understanding of who the enemy is? It certainly isn't gays.

Gays just happen to be only the group in America positively clamoring to get married anymore. That's a whole lot more than you can say for the Baptists or my fellow Catholics.

And given the pathetic absence of sex inside many straight marriages — "No Sex, Please, We're Married," said a Newsweek cover last summer — shouldn't religious conservatives reassess their rigid opposition to Adam and Steve?

Sex and marriage, it seems, are barely acquainted these days. "The Sex-Starved Marriage" was a recent bestseller for therapist Michele Weiner Davis. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich speaks in his lectures about DINS, Double-Income-No-Sex.

The message is clear: If you're against gay sex, you should be for gay marriage. Let 'em all get hitched tomorrow. Don't worry, they'll never get any again.

If there's a mascot for Bush's new marriage bailout, it would have to be Britney Spears.

"Mrs. Pop Tart," we almost started calling her.

But notice that it wasn't Britney's famous TV smooch with Madonna that disrespected marriage. It was the star's brief-as-a-thong, I-do-I-don't marriage to hometown heartthrob Jason Alexander.

"Let's get married just for the hell of it!" they reportedly decided late in the sultry Las Vegas night.

And they did. But not for long.

What happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas — this time.

Fifty-five hours from legal wedding to legal annulment, which was quick even by the standards of the Little White Wedding Chapel.

Britney, despite her impetuousness, discovered what George Bush and his advisers had not: A thoughtless marriage, a wrong marriage, a bad marriage can be worse than no marriage at all.

Does anyone think that Spears-Alexander is really a marriage that should have been saved?

"I do believe in the sanctity of marriage, I totally do," the famous newlywed-and-unwed was last heard telling MTV's "Total Request Live."

"I was in Vegas, and it took over me."

She couldn't help herself.

Really. What could the poor girl do?

She was in a red state of mind.

Email: henican@newsday.com

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