President Bush thinks that you don’t know how to run your marriage. He’s even planning to drop at least $1.5 billion for training to help couples develop skills that sustain healthy marriages. This is, of course, aimed at low-income women who obviously have no education or skills in anything – otherwise they wouldn’t be poor how, would they? I tell ya, these chicks just can’t keep their legs shut can they? Does anyone else think that this will end up with people staying in abusive marriages – always holding on for that breakthrough when he/she will change? Or it will end up with un-sexed wives staying with their closeted gay husbands, waiting for that funding for therapy to turn them back to the One True Path?
This is another one of those news items that just seems so fucking ridiculous in a supposedly secular equal-rights nation. Of course people know the value of marriage – but they also know the risks and trials associated with it. And as more and more generations grow up in the shadow of divorce and the stresses it puts on families – younger people are re-considering the value of till death do us part. There is less social stigma in America in being together but not married – for better or for worse. Younger Americans have/see more options before them – more combinations of what makes a well-lived life. It does not diminish the married couples that have gone before them and their dedication to the idea of matrimony.
I think my parents modeled marriage pretty well for my sister and I. Yeah, there were the usual roadblocks and arguments that come from two people trying to negotiate a life trajectory. I don’t vote for couples raising children because of the imperative to acculturate everybody in their appropriate sex-roles – I advocate couples raising kids because it takes up so much time and energy. Single parents, have at it but hopefully have the talent to surround themselves and their kids with a support network of relatives – it does take a village. I will always be grateful that mom and dad decided to have mom stop teaching school for awhile to raise my sister and I. Yes, we had to go without things – but at the same time, we were being raised by parents devoted to raising us, deliberately – we weren’t accesories or in-the-flesh dolls to play with.
My prediction: the money will somehow end up going to faith-based religious groups and somehow end up benefitting only conservative Christian groups.
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