Gay weddings push marriage issue
into election-year
spotlight
By Greg Barrett, USA TODAY, from the Web May 19, 2004
WASHINGTON - Shine Cash is the kind of thoughtful teenager and future voter whose opinions and deliberate manner of speaking elicit quiet.
Peers lean in and hang on his every soft-spoken word.
So when discussion at his Miami-area middle school turned recently to marriage education, two-parent homes, and the political debate over gay weddings, a half dozen students looked toward the head of the table where Shine, 13, had just cleared his throat.
"If you follow our history, you see that America is very nosy," he said, and heads nodded in agreement.
"There are boundaries that our government oversteps and marriage is one of those boundaries.
The government should stay out of it."
Whether it's President Bush's $1.5 billion plan to promote "healthy marriages" in poor communities or the Republicans' push to forever ban same-sex marriages, an institution older than the republic is center stage - and at a critical juncture.
More than 1,000 gay and lesbian couples were in city and town halls in Massachusetts on Monday when the state became the first in the nation to offer statewide same-sex marriage licenses.
The nation's first legal gay marriage was recorded just after 9 a.m., when two fiftysomething lesbians were wed in Cambridge.
A Boston Globe survey found that two-thirds of the couples seeking marriage licenses Monday were lesbians.
The Globe reported that the median age of applicants was 43. The 752 couples surveyed by the paper in 11 cities and towns ranged in age from 19 to 75.
Same-sex couples living in Massachusetts will have the right to marry while lawmakers and voters consider a referendum and a constitutional amendment to ban it.
These legal recourses could take two years to complete.
Meanwhile, one in two heterosexual marriages today ends in divorce, despite a decade of marriage education programs focused solely on reversing the trend.
Meanwhile, one in three children who live with single mothers are five times more likely to be living in poverty, according to an analysis of Census 2000 data by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Figures from the National Center for Health Statistics show that two generations ago, one in 14 American children was born to an unwed woman.
For all the bluster about protecting this personal affair from the long arm of government, marriage is eroding from within.
Shine has not been spared. His Haitian mother, who was 16 when she gave birth to him, has been divorced twice.
"Mom's had a rough time," Shine said quietly.
Ditto for marriage itself. It's no wonder that Bush has pushed it to the political fore in an election year and that Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry doesn't dare blot the Norman Rockwell ideal painted by conservatives.
"A strong America must ... value the institution of marriage," Bush said in his 2004 State of the Union address.
"I believe we should respect individuals as we take a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."
Election-year factor
In interviews conducted recently by 40 Gannett newspapers around the country, 51 of 99 people said the candidates' views on same-sex marriage could influence their vote.
Most of those people - 29 - said they support marriage for same-sex couples, while 22 opposed it.
The newspapers conducted 165 interviews on various marriage-related topics.
Kerry, a twice-married Roman Catholic from Massachusetts, rarely stumps on the issue.
He favors civil unions for same-sex couples but would prefer to leave the thorny matter of gay marriage to state governments.
That reluctance to aggressively defend traditional marriage is enough to make some Democrats consider voting Republican.
The Rev. William Harris, a 56-year-old Democrat from Indianapolis, said he might vote for Bush this year simply because of the president's explicit stand against gay marriage.
"It's against God's moral laws, and if they looked at plant laws and botany, it's against nature," said Harris, an apostolic pastor.
But that's not the only view from the pulpit.
The Rev. George Exley-Stiegler, 87, a retired Episcopal priest from Rochester, N.Y., respects Bush's personal faith, but he said Bush "goes beyond the bounds of his presidential office" by attempting to make his faith part of national policy.
The Rev. Kathy Lancaster, 68, a retired Presbyterian minister from Louisville, exclaimed, "Absolutely yes!" when asked if gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry.
"I'm a heterosexual person who has been allowed to marry. And divorce.
And remarry," she said. "I can't imagine why a gay man or a lesbian woman is not entitled to do the same."
Jessica Wilkinson, a 27-year-old single mother from Honolulu, doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.
"It's about love, and there shouldn't be any boundaries to that," she said.
At a time when Iraq and the U.S. economy weigh heaviest on voters' minds, proposals to protect and strengthen traditional marriage are quietly drawing bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.
But those proposals are a wedge almost everywhere else.
In a USA TODAY-CNN-Gallup Poll in March, half of the 1,005 adults surveyed favored a constitutional amendment defining marriage as strictly between one man and one woman. Answering separate questions, 61% objected to same-sex marriage while 54% favored civil unions, which would grant some of the legal benefits of traditional marriage.
The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
For some Kerry supporters, the separate-but-equal compromise of civil unions evokes school segregation, which was outlawed 50 years ago.
"It sounds good on paper, but it's never going to be that," said Barry Schreier, 39, a gay man and a civil rights advocate from Lafayette, Ind.
"It restricts people from having the type of relationships they want to have."
Eighteen-year-old South Dakotan Armen Memic calls the fight for gay marriage "the last frontier in civil rights."
But the debate also is calling new attention to an institution in decline.
"Politicians have avoided the 'M' word for 10 years. And now, suddenly because of gay marriage, it has picked up so much velocity," said Washington therapist Diane Sollee.
Emphasis on self
Fifty years ago, traditional family homes consisting of a husband, a wife and their children comprised 43% of U.S. households, according to census data. In the 2000 census, those families accounted for just 24% of U.S. homes.
The divorce rate - among the highest in the world - doubled over the same time period, and people today wait about five years longer to marry for the first time.
Salinda Wright, 22, an unmarried housekeeper from Muncie, Ind., said of marriage, "I don't see the value at this moment."
Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe blames that trend on the pursuit of personal happiness.
Somewhere along the nation's journey toward professional success, self-centeredness diluted society's sense of obligation to marriage and raising a family.
"We want individualism. We strive to improve ourselves and to do better," said Popenoe, 71, the married co-founder of the National Marriage Project, a nonpartisan research institution.
"We need to find balance in this pursuit. Maybe we have gone too far."
Robert Brewer, a 41-year-old postal worker from rural Jackson, N.J., said the institution is fractured:
"These days, a little bit of a problem and people run."
Utah State University researcher David Schramm estimated in 2003 that a single divorce costs state and federal governments about $30,000.
That's based on things like higher demand for food stamps and public housing as well as increased bankruptcies and juvenile delinquency.
Schramm didn't count personal expenses like legal fees and the costs of relocation.
The nation's approximately 1.2 million divorces in 2002 are believed to have cost taxpayers more than $30 billion.
Emotional costs are less easily defined.
Two generations ago, psychologists and sociologists said that as long as children were properly cared for, it didn't matter if they were raised in single-parent, stepparent or two-parent homes.
Today, those experts are retracting their statements.
"We were wrong, dead wrong," said Washington's Sollee. "There is not anything you can measure that does not show that kids with their biological parents don't do better."
Sollee considers Bush's five-year $1.5 billion "Healthy Marriage Initiative" a fraction of what's needed to reform the institution.
"Divorce is the No. 1 cause of bankruptcy in America," said Sollee, a 60-year-old divorcee and marriage therapist.
"Most people in prison come from broken homes. School failure, drug abuse and delinquency are all implicated in divorce."
Bush's program would fund relationship and parenting courses and is tied to reauthorization of the federal welfare program.
It's based on the belief that two-parent homes are an antidote for all that ails American society.
Kerry calls the initiative important, but he argues that it doesn't go far enough.
He proposes increasing child-care funding for low-income families and making costly expansions to the Family and Medical Leave Act.
"The reason the government is involved and the reason we license marriage is because society has a great concern for the well-being of children," Popenoe said.
"If you take children out of the equation, it's not clear to me that the government has such a big interest.
We don't license people to have long-term friendships."
At North Miami Beach's John F. Kennedy Middle School, Shine Cash and his friends have joined a 2-year-old communication-skills club.
Its goal is to improve student relations with peers, teachers, family and, eventually, with husbands and wives.
Like other Americans, members of the club are divided on the issue of same-sex marriage.
But when they are asked who expects to have a lasting and successful traditional marriage, hands shoot eagerly into the air.
"Marriage is this huge thing," said 14-year-old Julie Gonzales, as if stating the obvious.
"It's the agreement to spend your life with someone."
Contributing: The (Louisville) Courier-Journal; Asbury Park (N.J.) Press, (Lafayette, Ind.) Journal and Courier; The Honolulu Advertiser; Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle; (Sioux Falls, S.D.) Argus Leader, The Indianapolis Star.
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