Is anyone surprised that NOW, the National Organization for Women, came out (to coin a phrase) against President Bush's healthy marriage initiative? I know I'm not.

Since its inception, NOW has shifted from an organisation that once protected women and promoted equality to one that pushes its own harmful Liberal social-engineering agenda, more involved in gay and minority issues than those of women. These organisations encourage women, minorities and homosexuals to think of themselves as the helpless victims of Evil Rich Straight White Men instead of the thinking human beings they are. That creates a need for groups like NOW, GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) or the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to "protect" them, in a self-perpetuating cult of victimhood. Anything that reduces the amount of self-described "victims" in the world reduces the power of the cult, and so the groups have to oppose anything that actually addresses social problems, like Bush's healthy marriage initiative.  NOW's objection to promoting healthy marriages and two-parent families is that somehow it "forces" the victims of domestic violence to "hook up" with abusers, according to Lisalyn Jacobs, vice president for government relations for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.  Huh?

Where do they get that? Is there a secret alternate version that only NOW members get to see?  Or is it that they're so wrapped up in their own hatred of men and their own percieved victimhood that the phrase "healthy marriage" looks like so much cuneiform to them?

For me, as for many people, NOW lost much of their credibility as a legitimate women's rights organisation when they sided with Bill Clinton instead of the victims of his sexual predation. One chapter of NOW even threatened to break away from the national group over this.  When they openly attacked Dr. Laura Schlessinger, then a radio talk show host, for advocating raising children in traditional families (gasp!), they lost whatever legitimacy they had left.  Aren't mothers women, too?  Mine certainly was. 

I haven't read every detail of President Bush's plan to promote healthy marriages, nor do I need to in order to understand that helping couples who intend to marry form a stable, loving, healthy relationship is a good idea.  Why is the divorce rate so high? Is it because movies and television denigrate family values, glorify infidelity and paint an unrealistic, or worse, downright nihilistic portrait of marriage?  Is it simply because with the rising divorce rate over the last half century, fewer and fewer people have an example of a real, working, stable marriage to emulate? According to Joel Cohen's article, "Human Population: The Next Half Century" (from the 14 November 2003 issue of Science), "...the rise in divorce and cohabitation is weakening the ties between fathers and children.  Nonmarital births increased as a percentage of all births in the United States from 5.3% in 1960 to 33.0% in 1999."  How many social ills stem from broken homes, single parents struggling to raise children, and abusive marriages? I wouldn't be far off the mark if I said "most of them".

Once again, President Bush seems to be trying to do something about the root cause of a problem instead of merely patching over the symptoms.  Helping couples work out their problems before they even arise -- a "preemptive strike", I suppose you could call it -- will reduce the number of single-parent families in the future.  President Bush plans to make sure couples interested in marriage have access to counseling to teach them how to get along with each other, how to resolve differences and conflicts, how to manage money and chores, and how to deal with the strain of raising children.  Who could possibly be against that? 

Groups like NOW and GLAAD that subsist on the "victim cult", that's who.