{"id":8157,"date":"2004-01-15T23:12:48","date_gmt":"2004-01-15T23:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html"},"modified":"2004-01-15T23:12:48","modified_gmt":"2004-01-15T23:12:48","slug":"marriage_of_convenience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html","title":{"rendered":"Marriage of Convenience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Cottle at TNR on the Bush plan to spend 1.5 billion to encourage marriage. <\/a><\/p>\n

\nPerhaps more important, as the Times (among others) noted, Bush is desperately hoping his efforts to play couples-counselor-in-chief will distract social conservatives fuming over recent assaults on the institution of marriage–such as the Massachusetts court ruling allowing gay marriage and the Supreme Court ruling that gay sex is legally protected behavior. To turn back this attack, conservatives want Bush to come out strongly in favor of an amendment codifying marriage as a one man\/one woman arrangement. So far, the president has dragged his feet, and the base is beginning to grumble. “We have a hard time understanding why the reserve,” Glenn Stanton, a policy analyst for the conservative group Focus on the Family told the Times.<\/p>\n

Mr. Stanton may well be the only person puzzled by the president’s “reserve.” Issues like gay marriage and shifting sexual mores are tricky terrain for a self-described uniter like Bush. By contrast, cheap-ass, feel-good initiatives aimed at promoting strong marriages–all in the name of happier, healthier children, of course–are something only the most amoral neo-Marxist feminazi could object to. Who cares if the programs actually work? Nearly all of us can agree that they should work–that it would, on the whole, be a positive thing if somehow they could work. And, in an election year, that kind of broad consensus is as good as gold. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Cottle at TNR on the Bush plan to spend 1.5 billion to encourage marriage. Perhaps more important, as the Times (among others) noted, Bush is desperately hoping his efforts to play couples-counselor-in-chief will distract social conservatives fuming over recent assaults on the institution of marriage–such as the Massachusetts court ruling allowing gay marriage and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMarriage of Convenience - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Marriage of Convenience - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Michelle Cottle at TNR on the Bush plan to spend 1.5 billion to encourage marriage. 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Perhaps more important, as the Times (among others) noted, Bush is desperately hoping his efforts to play couples-counselor-in-chief will distract social conservatives fuming over recent assaults on the institution of marriage–such as the Massachusetts court ruling allowing gay marriage and…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2004-01-15T23:12:48+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html","name":"Marriage of Convenience - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2004-01-15T23:12:48+00:00","dateModified":"2004-01-15T23:12:48+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/marriage_of_convenience.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Marriage of Convenience"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}