When President Bush announced his intention to promote marriage as an antidote for poverty, he was doing several things intentionally: appealing to social conservatives in the Republican Party; signaling his desire to reduce the costs of welfare reform; making warm and fuzzy sound bites for the 6 o'clock news.
But without realizing it, Bush was also doing something else that will make those same social conservatives apoplectic, as soon as it sinks into their right-brained heads: He was making the case for legalized partnerships for gay and lesbian parents, and for the necessity of allowing them to adopt each other's children.
Not that I expect the president or the Family Research Council to admit it, but this whole marriage initiative has set them on a collision course. Their ideology contains two conflicting imperatives that simply cannot coexist.
Marriage -- or civil union, or whatever name one might choose for the legal relationship that marriage affords -- is either good for children or it's not. It cannot be good for the children of heterosexual couples and bad for those of same-sex partners.
Of course, the president and his supporters have taken pains to say that they're referring only to marriage between a man and a woman. But that distinction contains a fatal flaw. The whole basis of their argument is the statistical evidence that kids in two-parent homes are more likely to do better in life. And children in the homes of lesbian and gay couples have two parents. It's not the grown-ups' chromosomes that are at issue here; it's the children's need for the permanence of an intact family.
Bush is so convinced that kids -- especially poor kids -- do better with two parents, he's willing to gamble $300 million in welfare money on encouraging marriage in poor communities.
That's a pretty strong statement. If two legally joined parents are more important to kids' well-being than all the other services that $300 million could provide -- child care, health care, subsidies for food and a place to live -- then it must be powerful medicine indeed.
For the record, I'm not buying marriage as a cure for poverty as opposed to, say, raising the minimum wage. But I do agree that two parents, for the most part, are better than one.
As it happens, the president's insistence on the benefits of marriage could not have come at a more opportune moment. Courts across the country are grappling with this issue as more and more gays and lesbians seek to provide their children with the same legal protections that others have.
Why, his own brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, is the subject of a furious e-mail campaign urging him to come out in favor of changing the state's adoption laws that have barred a gay couple from giving a permanent home to the sick child they have been fostering for years.
And then came the piece de resistance, the American Academy of Pediatrics' statement in February supporting the right of same-sex couples to adopt each other's children.
The academy, representing 55,000 pediatricians not usually known for their plots to undermine the American way of life, reviewed two decades of studies. Most found that the children of gay or lesbian parents were as well-adjusted socially and psychologically as the children of heterosexual parents. Those kids, the academy concluded, deserve the same rights and protections that other children are routinely accorded.
Kids don't choose the circumstances under which they enter this world. But once they get here, no sane society can say that some deserve the legal, emotional and financial support of two parents while others don't.
If it's good for some kids to have access to health insurance and Social Security survivor benefits from two parents instead of one, then it's good for all kids. And if some benefit from a permanent family where adults and children belong to each other for life, then all children benefit from it.
But don't take my word for it. Take President Bush's.
Sally Kalson's e-mail address is skalson@post-gazette.com.
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