Man, this pisses me off so much that I almost don't want to get married just out of spite. The administration has rolled together two issues that strike me as totally separate, connected only by the word "marriage": trying to help poor mothers hold onto their husbands/boyfriends, so the government can more easily withdraw its financial support; and trying to prevent committed gay couples from adopting the marriage tradition while making a cowardly effort to toss the civil unions question back to the states. I especially loved this non-sequitur:

Wade F. Horn, the assistant secretary of health and human services for children and families, said: "Marriage programs do work. On average, children raised by their own parents in healthy, stable married families enjoy better physical and mental health and are less likely to be poor."

Children raised in stable families surely do fare better, but that can't be used as evidence that pro-marriage programs effect stable families, as Horn seems sneakily to not-quite-imply here. There was a ruefully funny article about that in the New Yorker last year, about two women in a housing project taking a "faith-based" pro-marriage course that had absolutely nothing to do with the practical/logistical problems in their lives, let alone the dearth of marriagable men.

On that note, I have recently started compiling a sort of mega-post about 5 or 6 great books on poverty issues. Perhaps joanofarrgh will beat me to it, since I've already lent at least one of the volumes in question to her.

Administrative note: for those people reading this on http://www.beelzebot.net as opposed to their LJ friends' pages, there may be some turbulence ahead, as I switch hosts. My old host had intermittent slow/lost email problems and disturbingly clueless tech-support people. The new host seems friendly, cheap, and CNet-endorsed. We'll see what happens.