Salon.com > Madeleine Schwartz http://www.salon.com Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:41:52 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 One marriage under god http://www.salon.com/2013/02/02/one_marriage_under_god/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/02/one_marriage_under_god/#comments Sat, 02 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13188973 Marriage, by the numbers: In 2002, the Bush administration diverted over $100 million dollars from existing welfare programs to create the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a national program to disseminate the importance of matrimony. Displaced funds included $14 million from child welfare, $6.1 million from a child support enforcement program, $9 million worth of support for refugees, and $40 million from a development strategies program focusing on Native Americans. Three years later, the US government sanctioned up to $150 million more per year to support “healthy marriage and responsible programs.” A change of political parties has not tempered the flow: in the last fiscal year, Congress approved $75 million in spending on marriage promotion activities and $75 million for responsible fatherhood initiatives. This, of course, does not include the cost of marriage to individuals themselves (the average American wedding costs over $27,000, according to Reuters). That’s a lot to spend on an institution with a known failure rate of about 50 percent.

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