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Author Archives: Fred Yi
Budget Prayer Vigil
“We ought to pray here every day until Congress proves worthy of the calling of the nation to govern,” said Rev. Michael Livingston, director of the National Council of Churches poverty initiative, at a gathering of religious leaders on Capitol Hill. Watch Rev. Grayde Parsons, clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA; Livingston; and Rabbi David Saperstein, executive director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Lambeth Holy Land Conference
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Top Roman Catholic and Anglican leaders from around the world this week launched a new effort to support Christians in the Holy Land who are caught in the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. They also called on politicians to jump-start the stalled Middle East peace process. The new campaign got underway at a high-level meeting in London. Kim Lawton was there.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Christian leaders from Europe, North America, and the Middle East gathered at the historic Lambeth Palace, residence of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The meeting was co-hosted by Williams and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols.
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury: We cannot wait for the politicians to sort it out before we as civil society, as active agents, as people of faith, get on with making the differences we can make.
LAWTON: A main focus was how to shore up the minority Christian community in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Because of emigration and low birth rates, Christians now make up less than two percent of the population there.
WILLIAMS: That’s the very specific and the very practical challenge: Have these people a future in their ancestral home? We hope and pray that they do.
ARCHBISHOP VINCENT NICHOLS, Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales: The Holy Land and the holy sites could become something like the Colosseum, you know, the remnants of something that is of great historical interest and maybe of cultural interest, but not lived in, not living and breathing centers of life and prayer.
LAWTON: The leaders discussed concrete ways to help the predominantly Palestinian Christian community, such as financial support, building more relationships between congregations, and increasing public policy advocacy. As part of that, the group specifically called for an end to security restrictions that prevent local people of faith from visiting their holy sites. Conference organizers denied criticism from some quarters that supporting Palestinian Christians makes one “anti-Israel.”
NICHOLS: What we want to be in being pro-Christian is also being pro-Israeli and pro-peace.
LAWTON: The group heard from a variety of voices, including Jews and Muslims. Participants all agreed that working for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be the biggest help of all.
BISHOP GERALD KICANAS, Catholic Diocese of Tucson: Ultimately, what we need is a two-state solution where these two peoples can live together in peace, each in their own sovereign states, respecting the boundaries and respecting the rights of those states. But we’re not there yet.
LAWTON: The leaders said the conversation was valuable. But, as always, the big challenge will be turning talk into action.
I’m Kim Lawton at Lambeth Palace in London.
ABERNETHY: Kim will have a special report from the Holy Land next week.
Lambeth Conference Extended Excerpts
Participants at a two-day (July 18-19, 2011) conference in London’s historic Lambeth Palace discussed the situation of Christians in the Holy Land and how people of faith in the Middle East and around the world can work for peace. Watch extended excerpts from Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, D.C.; Tal Harris, an Israeli Jew and executive director of the “One Voice Israel” peace group; Harry Hagopian, an international lawyer who works with the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem; and Roman Catholic Bishop Gerald Kicanas, of the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona.
Utah Immigration
LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It was a huge surprise when the legislature of one of the most conservative states passed one of the more liberal immigration laws in the country. That legislation will most likely be preempted by federal law, but the bigger surprise was how it angered so many members of Utah’s predominate faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons or LDS, even though it was the church that pushed through the legislation. This is Utah state senator Curt Bramble, a Republican and Mormon who helped craft the bill.
SENATOR CURT BRAMBLE: Personally I have not seen the LDS church lobby any issue harder than they’re activity on House Bill 116, the immigration legislation.
RON MORTENSEN: I jokingly said, you know, they may as well just pitched a tent in the back halls.
SEVERSON: Ron Mortensen is a career foreign service officer and a former Mormon missionary. He founded the Utah Coalition on Illegal Immigration and he’s not too happy with his church.
MORTENSEN: The church lobbyists had full access where normal people can’t go, in the back halls and through all the back alleyways and they were there full time this session.
SEVERSON: And the result was legislation that would allow undocumented immigrant families to continue living and working in the state, providing, among other things, they have no criminal record and pay a fine for being in the country illegally.
Originally the legislature was only going to pass an enforcement bill similar to the controversial one in Arizona until a compact of churches and the chamber of commerce asked for an additional bill with a more compassionate approach.
Critics like Representative Chris Herrod, a Republican and former missionary, say the bill was forced on the legislature.
REP. CHRIS HERROD: I’ve never in 5 years seen a bill pass in the fashion that that was passed.
SEVERSON: Because of the church?
REP. HERROD: Well, some could argue that but again that doesn’t make it right.
SEVERSON: Tim Chambless is a professor with the Hinkley Institute Of Political Science at the University of Utah.
PROFESSOR TIM CHAMBLESS: We do know that the Utah State Legislature is unique because about 91 percent of the 104 members of the Utah State Legislature self-identify as LDS. And each member, almost each member would say they’re a good church member. They’re a member of the Republican party and their a good church member and they’re very divided on this issue.
SEVERSON: At first is was not widely known how hard the church had lobbied for the guest worker law. So why did it? The church says it was the Christian thing to do, that the bedrock moral issue is how we treat each other as children of God. Quin Monson is a political science professor at Brigham Young University.
PROFESSOR QUIN MONSON: There is an approach that the church has been supporting that allows people to square themselves with the law—it’s allowing people to live without fear, to stay with their families, to pay a fine and come out of the shadows.
SEVERSON: But in the view of the legislation’s opponents, it provides amnesty for law breakers, and goes squarely against one of the church’s 13 Articles of Faith, number 12.
MORTENSEN: It basically says we honor, obey and sustain the law of the land and that’s something that all the children learn when they’re growing up and especially the older generation. It was something that was drummed into you and that was just like one of the Ten Commandments, and so when people see people not complying with the law, that makes them nervous and raises questions.
SEVERSON: Ron Mortensen doesn’t argue with the compassion of his church, but he thinks the bigger reason for the legislation is that the church has grown far beyond U.S. borders.
MORTENSEN: In my opinion, the church has become a worldwide church and its interests now extend far beyond Utah, and it has to meet the expectations of its worldwide audience and a very large audience in Latin America.
SEVERSON: The church has over 14 million members worldwide, with more than half residing outside the United States.
MONSON: The population of Mormons in Mexico is hundreds of thousands if not over a million. There are at least a dozen temples of the church in Mexico and hundreds of chapels, so it’s a big population and it’s big all throughout Latin America.
CHAMBLESS: The church is concerned that anything that hurts its missionary effort is going to be something that maybe the church would not support.
MONSON: Utah is very cleanly connected with the church in a lot of people’s mind, outside of Utah and outside of the United States. And so if Utah is enacting some draconian restrictive immigration law, you can sort of imagine the reaction and then the blame that might be placed on the church for allowing it to happen. I can see that that might have been a motivating factor in getting involved and asking the legislature to dial it back.
MORTENSEN: There’s been pretty credible stories about withholding visas for missionaries in order to bring pressure on the church, so they’re playing in a very international arena. It’s no longer what’s necessarily good for Utah or even the United States, it’s what’s good for us worldwide.
SEVERSON: Mortensen says it might surprise some members to learn that the church sends undocumented members that live in the U.S. on stateside missions.
MORTENSEN: It’s long been the policy of the church to allow undocumented members to have temple recommends and to hold the priesthood, and it’s up to the bishops to decide if they’re worthy of that or not.
SEVERSON: Undocumented missionaries have been deported, and recently two minor church officials and their families were expelled from the country because they were here illegally. The church says it discourages members from entering any country without legal documentation.
For those who argue that a guest worker law violates federal law, others like Senator Curt Bramble, refer to a higher law, and uses the church’s harboring of runaway slaves as an example.
SENATOR BRAMBLE: During the 1860s, before the Civil War, members of the church that harbored slaves because slavery was immoral, was a violation of the law. We can talk throughout the history of mankind where laws that are on the books or laws that someone is demanding you follow result in an outcome that in and of itself is a violation of a higher law.
SEVERSON: Mortensen says the church’s view of the law may be changing because he thinks the church itself is changing.
MORTENSEN: The LDS church seems to be moving towards more of a social justice position and away from conservatism where it’s traditionally been.
SEVERSON: The pushback against the immigration law has been so public, delegates to the state Republican convention narrowly passed a resolution demanding that the law be repealed. Professor Quin Monson has done a study about how influential church endorsements can be with the membership, and he says as more members know how strongly the church feels about a guest worker provision, the tide may turn.
MONSON: When the church comes out and officially endorses a position and it’s united and the membership knows about it, then you see people shifting their position and this is even true when the issue pushes the membership in a direction that they might not otherwise want to go.
MORTENSEN: This is really a very, very divisive issue and I never have—on other issues—I never have heard people say, well, I’m going to stop paying fast offerings or I’m going to withhold some of my contributions or I’m really questioning my testimony, and I’m having people say that to me on this particular issue.
SEVERSON: Opponents say they’ll try to derail the guest worker law during the next legislative session although it seems unlikely they will succeed. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Salt Lake City.
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Religious Leaders and the Budget Debate
BOB ABERNETHY, host: All week, financial experts in and out of Washington warned of the catastrophic consequences if Congress does not raise the country’s debt ceiling by August 2. After that deadline, the government would not be able to pay all its obligations for the first time in history. Officials warned that that could trigger financial chaos and vast hardship. By week’s end, there were signs of a temporary fix to the debt ceiling problem, but no agreement on a long-term deal on spending and taxes, which many had wanted, including the president.
President Obama: And I think it’s important for the American people that everybody in this town set politics aside, that everybody in this town sets our individual interests aside, and we try to do some tough stuff.
ABERNETHY: In the midst of the financial debate, where are the churches? Can religious leaders influence the politicians? Author and activist Reverend Jim Wallis is the editor of Sojourners magazine. His is a leading religious voice in political debate. Jim, welcome.
JIM WALLIS (President, Sojourners): Thanks, Bob.
ABERNETHY: There are two big questions that people have been arguing about in this town. One is the debt ceiling. The other is long-term. The debt ceiling is something has to be done now, but long term, how do we bring the country’s spending and taxes in line? You’ve been working very hard lobbying to protect government programs that help the poor. How are you doing?
WALLIS: Well, I think I’m happy with what we’ve seen so far. We started with a provocative question: What would Jesus cut? That got attention to the question. Then we fasted for almost a month in Lent. That brought more attention to it. Then we formed a “circle of protection”: Roman Catholic bishops, Salvation Army, National Association of Evangelicals, many people, not the religious left here, almost everyone saying that you can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poorest people. And I think that voice is now being heard. We’ve talked to Republicans, Democrats, and the White House right along on this.
ABERNETHY: You are trying, I think, to get a meeting with a lot of the players in this?
WALLIS: We have been meeting right along.
ABERNETHY: Well, what do you say to them?
WALLIS: We say, you know, there are principles here, that a budget is a moral document and must be evaluated by those from the bottom up. That’s our point of view. And the common good has to outweigh ideological political battles in this town. But we also ask them what their faith means. If they are people of faith, and many say they are, what their faith means, their moral compass, how they decide things.
ABERNETHY: You take that argument, what does your faith mean, to Republicans in the House who insist on no compromise?
WALLIS: We sure do. The Catholics, evangelicals, Republican side, Democratic side. Now we don’t get involved, Bob, in which bill we are going to support. We don’t lobby for bills. But we say there are principles here. You can’t just have the benefits all go to corporations and wealthy people and nothing for those who are most vulnerable.
ABERNETHY: But the common good. This idea of the common good, very important in religious and ethics. How do you define it, and who says what the common good is?
WALLIS: Well, this week we’ve organized 5,000 pastors to say let’s look at the real people in our congregations and our communities, what’s going to happen to them, as opposed to the Washington, D.C. question, who’s up, who’s down, who’s going to be the Speaker of the House next time, who’ll win the next election. The common good is about the real people, the people we have to always take into account. And pastors, I think, I wanted to talk to people whose job it is to have re-read the Bible to get to the focus on who the real people are here.
ABERNETHY: But this argument about how to cut spending, what could be cut, how to raise income, this is a very technical, very political argument. How do people, how do religious leaders feel? Do you feel that you have the ability to get in and be influential in something as technical as this debate?
WALLIS: You know, the details are technical and not difficult, really. Once you agree to some principles, the details can be worked out by the politicians. We say “let justice roll down like waters.” Let the politicians work out the plumbing here. You know, we don’t get into all the details. We’re saying there are principles here. If this is going to focus on targeting poor people, we say that’s wrong. It’s got to be shared sacrifice here. How you do it, this really isn’t rocket science. We could solve this if the principles were clear from the start.
ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine.
WALLIS: Thank you, Bob.
Decline of the Irish Catholic Church
DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: It’s often called the Emerald Isle—and with good reason. Ireland is as green as ever. But the country that once was a bastion of Roman Catholicism has changed. The vast majority of people here still call themselves Catholic—87 percent on the most recent census. But many of the most faithful church-goers in Ireland today aren’t even Irish. This Sunday Mass in Limerick is said in Polish for some of the thousands of immigrants who poured in during the economic boom of the past decade. But it’s hard to find an Irish congregation this packed, and especially this young, in bigger cities.
PATSY McGARRY (Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Irish Times): People still identify themselves as culturally Catholic even though they no longer go to Mass or go to confession. You’ll see them at first communions, you’ll see them at confirmations, and you’ll see them at funerals. They’re taking very much an a la carte view to the practice of their religion.
POTTER: As recently as the 1970s, almost 90 percent of Irish Catholics went to Mass at least once a week. Today, the number is closer to 25 percent. And in some parts of Dublin, just two or three percent of self-described Catholics regularly go to church.
(speaking to Irish woman): Did you grow up Catholic by chance?
WOMAN: Yes.
POTTER: Do you go to Mass now?
WOMAN: Not really that much. No, not much at all.
MAN: Weddings and funerals, things like that. That’s basically it.
POTTER: Those who do go for special occasions like this prayer service in County Galway can’t help but notice that the people in the pews have changed.
REV. TONY FLANNERY (Association of Catholic Priests): They’re old. That is the main thing. When you look down at a congregation from the altar now you’ll see mostly gray heads. The young people, the under 40s, have largely deserted the church in Ireland now.
POTTER: Irish priests are aging, too—on average, they’re well over 60. Many are still working into their 80s, and replacements have slowed to a trickle. At Maynooth, the country’s only Catholic seminary, the number of students being ordained to the priesthood has never been lower.
REV. HUGH CONNOLLY (President, Maynooth Seminary): Twenty years ago you could have been certainly over 20, maybe not that unusual to have a year where there would have been 30. Now we’re more likely to have somewhere under 10. Six, seven, that kind of thing.
POTTER: In the diocese of Dublin, not a single priest will be ordained this year—or next year. It’s been a stunning decline for a church that once virtually ruled the country.
McGARRY: It was a huge organization. It was like an alternative state within the state. It ran our schools, it ran our orphanages, it ran our reformatories, it ran most of our hospitals, and so therefore you can get an idea of the scale of what the Catholic Church was. It was an alternative society within Ireland.
POTTER: The Catholic Church here in Ireland saw its influence begin to wane with the social upheaval of the 1960s. But in the past twenty years, two factors combined to accelerate its decline: sudden prosperity and the shocking revelations of sexual abuse. The worldwide recession stopped the so-called Celtic Tiger in its tracks, but consumerism had already weakened the church’s hold on the Irish people, who had become far better educated over the previous 40 years.
McGARRY: They questioned their faith, they questioned the right of bishops to tell them how to live their lives.
POTTER: The body blow, however, came from the clergy abuse scandals that hit harder and closer to home in Ireland than anywhere else. Here, almost everyone knows someone who’s been affected.
FIRST WOMAN: Maybe we as older people did a lot of covering up. Also, we were very much into appearances, putting our best foot forward, saying the right things.
SECOND WOMAN: I think with all the scandals that have been revealed, it certainly made people think more and question a lot of things that were happening.
PEADAR CREMIN (President, Mary Immaculate College): Those who had a shaky faith now had an excuse for walking, because why would you go to the church every Sunday morning to hear somebody who potentially is in league with child abusers, and I think many people used the backlash against child abuse as a basis for saying, “Do I really want to subscribe, do I want to contribute, do I want to be part of that type of a church anymore?” I think at the heart of our problem is in a sense the church has lost its moral authority. The church has lost its right to speak out on issues.
POTTER: The abuse was a betrayal of trust, Pope Benedict acknowledged in a pastoral letter last year to Irish Catholics, his first-ever apology for the sexual abuse of children by priests. This year, during an extraordinary liturgy of lament and repentance at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, the Archbishop of Dublin and Boston’s Cardinal O’Malley prostrated themselves, asking God and the victims for forgiveness. But it hasn’t been enough.
CREMIN: People are still waiting, I think, for the kind of great atonement and the kind of fundamental change that will convince them that things have changed. There isn’t enough evidence yet that things have fundamentally changed.
FLANNERY: It’s a crisis, and it’s not one of the future. It’s one of right now. It’s quite extraordinary an organization as big and as ancient as the church that we cannot face a crisis that’s right at our doorsteps and begin to talk realistically about it.
POTTER: The kind of change Father Flannery advocates would be dramatic.
FLANNERY: Opening up the ministry of the church to lay people, to married people, to priests, to women. In other words, not confining it to the male celibate priesthood as we’ve had in the past, because clearly that is not working now, so we have to begin to think in different ways, but the Vatican is increasingly forbidding any discussion on that.
POTTER: Still, there are small signs of renewal. Some parishes now have lay people in positions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Kevin Mullally is a full-time pastoral worker. Sheena Darcy works for the International Eucharistic Congress.
SHEENA DARCY: I’ve seen young people come back to know God’s love. I’ve seen young people get more involved in the church.
KEVIN MULLALLY: They’re also searching for basic things, belonging and love and, you know, acceptance and tolerance, and all those elements go together in a spirituality.
SHEENA DARCY: Yes, there’s that acknowledgment that what happened was dreadful. It was absolutely dreadful. However, we do also, we do need to move on.
POTTER: Whatever happens, the Catholic Church in Ireland has already changed irrevocably.
McGARRY: I do believe Catholicism will continue, will survive in Ireland, and I do believe the clerical church will not. That doesn’t mean there won’t be priests, of course there will be, but I don’t think as a force it will ever again, in my lifetime certainly, will never have the power it had when I was a child. And I think that’s a good thing because it abused its power massively, and it became, I mean, a dictatorship in a democracy which was answerable to nobody.
CREMIN: I still have the view that what’s happening is actually something quite healthy, because the church we will end up with will be a church of committed, passionate, and dedicated people who will live the gospels rather than talk about them.
POTTER: That undoubtedly means the Irish Catholic Church will be smaller, but it may be, in a very different way, stronger.
For Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Dublin.
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Marriage Education
SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Every year, more than two million couples marry in the United States.
Conversation at wedding expo: When is your wedding? August 25th. Oh, you want to sign up here? Sure.
GONZALEZ: And some of those soon to be brides and grooms were here at this southern California wedding expo. As they plan their big day, it’s easy to find people ready to talk about what it takes to keep a relationship strong.
JESSICA VARGAS: I think we definitely are working every day on our relationship, making sure that that stays steady, and then we also have our personal goals that we want.….
RAYMOND GERST: We already went through the tuxedo rentals. We needed that…
GONZALEZ: Raymond Gerst and Jessica Vargas recently became engaged.
GERST: Communication, flat out. We are slowly evolving into having better communication between each other.
VARGAS: I know who he is. I know his flaws, I know the things that annoy me, but at the end of the day…
GERST: As do I…
VARGAS: …I have him, and I know he will be there for me, and as long as that communication stays good I think we’ll do all right.
GERST: As do I.
GONZALEZ: However, statistics show that just over 50 percent of first marriages in the US end in divorce. Couples whose relationships do sour, though, have gotten help from a powerful ally in recent years—the United States government. Starting with a Bush administration initiative in 2006 called the Healthy Marriage Initiative, Washington spent over half a billion dollars bankrolling various marriage education and healthy relationship programs across the country, many run by churches and religious groups.
DENNIS STOICA: We believe that being successful in marriage, it’s primarily a skills-based function, and what we provide is the skills to allow those people to be successful.
GONZALEZ: Dennis Stoica is the president of the California Healthy Marriages Coalition. It’s a nonprofit group that received over $12 million from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Most of the federal dollars Stoica’s group receives in turn goes to marriage education groups run by mostly Christian churches and religious groups, such as the Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino County, which held this marriage forum. It now gets more than 50 percent of its marriage education funds from the federal government.
STOICA: And it makes sense that the church would be interested in this. I mean, if you think about it, no matter what religion somebody belongs to or you’re affiliated with, all religions that I am aware of think that marriage should be a holy institute, so it is a strong alignment of values, yes.
GONZALEZ: The material used in government-funded marriage education programs mostly deals with communication problems and conflict management between spouses, like this scenario in a video produced by a federally funded group in Alabama.
Video excerpt: Robert! You didn’t even start dinner. I asked you two things and you promised two things: clothes and dinner. All you had to do was turn on the oven! I left you a note right on the refrigerator and I know you saw it because I see what’s in your hand. Hey! ….Whew! You can see where this conversation is headed. Robert and Tanya are both tired and stressed. He made some promises he didn’t keep, and she is coming on pretty strong…
GONZALEZ: Fighting poverty is primarily why the federal government is funding marriage education, the argument being that couples that stay together, especially in low-income minority communities, are more stable and less likely to seek government assistance.
Although few question the benefits of marriage, there are critics of Uncle Sam’s big role in marriage education.
PROFESSOR SHARON HAYS: Do you have the government telling you what kind of relationships you’ll establish?
GONZALEZ: Sharon Hays is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and an expert on families and government policy.
Man speaking at marriage forum: Would any of you care to share any of your joys or struggles in marriage?
GONZALEZ: She worries about federal money going to Christian religious groups that might criticize gay couples or couples who choose not to marry.
(speaking to Sharon Hays): If marriage is generally a good thing for society, it’s a good thing for people to get married, why shouldn’t government be involved in that?
HAYS: It is implicitly saying there is only one road. There is only one correct pathway, and it is the marriage pathway. Always when I look at all these materials on marriage promotion efforts, I worry that there is an underlying moral agenda here, that it’s actually not a story about ending poverty, but a story about morality—that it is the morally correct thing to be married. Unmarried people are morally incorrect. This is of course, right, the biggest concern relative to having government in the marriage promotion business.
STOICA: If people want to get married, we want them to be successful. But if people don’t want to get married, we don’t want them to get married, because if you don’t want to be married you’re not going to stay married.
Woman speaking at marriage forum: It is a commitment as one…
GONZALEZ: And Stoica says the groups he funds steer clear of proselytizing. However, he is a devout Catholic who sees his marriage work as a vocation.
STOICA: I believe this is God’s calling for me, is that I do believe that marriage is designed by God and that he wants people to be happily married, and that by helping people be happily married I’m fulfilling upon God’s calling for my life.
GONZALEZ: And you feel you can save people’s marriages without necessarily imposing your own religious standards on them?
STOICA: Absolutely. Our religious standards—they just don’t show up in the classroom. They just don’t show up.
GONZALEZ: Few independent studies have been done to assess the quality and effectiveness of federally funded marriage education. The federal government commissioned one report released last year by the social policy study group Mathematica. It studied 5,000 low-income couples in 8 states participating in Building Strong Families [BSF], part of the government’s marriage and relationship education effort. It found that “when results are averaged across all programs, BSF did not make couples more likely to stay together or get married. In addition, it did not improve couples’ relationship quality.”
HAYS: It is quite surprising, right. Here is this federal program that has been well funded for five years, and the research on it has shown that it is not effective. It is not effective in doing what one might call the simplest thing, which is to get people to get married.
GONZALEZ: Hays believes the money spent on marriage education should instead go to other programs, such as job training for the poor. However, Stoica stands behind both marriage and marriage education as ways to make millions of people’s lives better.
STOICA: I believe, frankly, that marriage education is the best anti-poverty program that the federal government has ever invested in, because of its preventative nature. Over 90 percent of Americans end up getting married. Over 95 percent of Americans say they want to get married. All we are doing is giving people increased probability of having what they want, which is a happy marriage.
GONZALEZ: The Obama administration is expected to continue supporting marriage education programs. It’s budgeted $150 million for the next fiscal year.
GERST: I’m thinking about having something like this on the tables …
VARGAS: But, see, then that totally changes my color scheme again.
GONZALEZ: At the marriage expo, the focus is preparing for the first few hours of matrimony and not the joys and challenges that will come later.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.
