Bonus Blog Against Theocracy: Faith-based marriage counseling in south Florida

Yes, the latest Blog Against Theocracy campaign officially ended last Wednesday. But the federal government's continuing efforts to ignore the separation of church and state keep my outrage-o-meter cranked up to 11.

The Sun-Sentinel yesterday had a pleasant, fluffy little profile of a program in the three-county area designed to keep troubled marriages together. However, the article barely touched on the source of the funding for the program:

The Zoé-Life Christian Center is supposed to be an emergency room, resuscitating troubled marriages and strengthening healthy ones during six-week sessions open to the public. Participants range from newlyweds to couples married for decades.

The church uses nonreligious relationship education material provided by the PAIRS Foundation, a nonprofit group founded decades ago by Lori Gordon, of Weston, a family therapist who says she wanted to give average people tools to work on their own relationships. PAIRS, which has taught classes throughout the United States for years for a fee, applied for and won the government grant for South Florida.

It will receive nearly $1 million a year, for five years, to offer free classes in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties at community centers and faith-based groups, through which PAIRS also advertises.

Anyone can attend, although many of those taking the PAIRS course at the Zoé-Life Christian Center heard about the classes because they go to church there or know someone who does. (For locations and dates of future classes, visit www.pairs.com or call 866-388-5683.)

As part of the course, couples listen to lecturers, make journal entries and practice their listening and speaking skills. At the end, they are asked fill out a questionnaire. Since the classes began this year, participants have reported significant improvements in relationship quality, according to an analysis by the University of Central Florida.

Despite this, government funding of pro-marriage measures has been controversial, particularly among those who question the political motives of Bush, its chief proponent. The timing of Bush's main announcement of the initiative in 2004 – an election year, shortly after a Massachusetts state court upheld gay marriage – concerned many.

"Millions In Federal Funds Handed To Anti-Gay Groups," reported a gay news Web site.

"If liberals had introduced this costly big-government social experiment, conservatives would be outraged," wrote one commentator for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, "and they would be right."

Wade Horn, assistant secretary for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says his agency funds such classes because research shows children from stable, healthy marriages do better. "They are less likely to have emotional, behavioral problems, less likely to have trouble at school, have drug and alcohol problems," he says.

Horn says government intervenes when marriages go sour – for example, with issues of child support or violence – so it makes sense to put money into prevention. He added that marriage can help ease poverty.

Avis Jones-DeWeever, program director with the nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Women's Policy Research, counters that if the government wants to get people out of poverty, research shows the best answer is a college education — not marriage education.

"It's completely irresponsible," she says. "There have been cuts across the board in poverty funding, and yet somehow we've found [millions of dollars] to invest in marriage programs."

This is the crux (no pun intended) of the problem: while conservatism as a philosophy rests on the reduction or shrinking of government, modern neo-conservatives, whose ideology includes a healthy dose of social conservatism (read: intolerance), are all too eager to "intervene" (I would say "interfere") in what ought to be the most private relationship of all: marriage. And if they can route $5 million of taxpayer money to what is nothing more than a religious marriage interference agency, then the neo-cons are killing two birds with one stone: indoctrinating couples with so-called "Christian values" and advancing their mission to turn America into a theocracy, one troubled marriage at a time.

Perhaps I'm straying into tin-foil-hat territory here, but this episode illustrates that even here in purportedly progressive south Florida, the Bush crime syndicate is reaching into our marriages and, indeed, our bedrooms, under the guise of "easing poverty" and "helping children." There's nothing inherently wrong with that ... but there are plenty of ways to achieve those noble objectives without violating one of the central precepts of the Constitution.