WASHINGTON (ABP) — President Bush delivered a confident and combative State of the Union address Jan. 20 that included calls for Congress to expand the government's ability to fund social services through churches and an appeal for more abstinence-based sex education for America's youths.
The speech also featured Bush's strongest statement yet in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
The president delivered the address to a House of Representatives chamber that appeared sharply divided along partisan lines, especially when Bush turned to his domestic agenda.
The 54-minute speech was interrupted often by raucous cheers from Republican members of Congress, who often stood to applaud while most of their Democratic colleagues across the aisle remained seated in stony silence.
A handful of Democrats — many of them African-American House members — offered Bush virtually no applause, even when most of their Democratic colleagues stood to applaud some of Bush's less controversial assertions.
As is often the case in Bush's speeches, he devoted a significant portion of it to promoting his “faith-based initiative” to expand the government's ability to fund social services through churches and other religious charities.
“Religious charities of every creed are doing some of the most vital work in our country — mentoring children, feeding the hungry, taking the hand of the lonely,” Bush said. “Yet government has often denied social-service grants and contracts to these groups.”
Bush has mentioned the initiative in previous State of the Union addresses. Last year, the president announced a proposal to open federal drug-treatment funds to religious groups. However, that legislation — like many of Bush's faith-based proposals — was stymied in Congress.
Nonetheless, Bush has used his administrative power to implement the initiative over the past three years. “By executive order, I have opened billions of dollars in grant money to competition that includes faith-based charities. Tonight, I ask you to codify this into law, so people of faith can know that the law will never discriminate against them again,” he said, to loud applause.
Immediately after calling for legislative implementation of the faith-based program, Bush announced a proposal to create a new “Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative.” The $300 million program, aimed at helping ex-convicts re-enter society, would serve “to expand job-training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups,” Bush said. “America is the land of second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.”
In a nod to his conservative base of support, Bush provided comments in apparent support of a constitutional ban on gay marriage, yet stopped just short of explicitly endorsing the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. Asserting that “activist judges” are “redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives,” Bush seemed to indicate support for a constitutional remedy to the situation.
“If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process,” Bush said. “Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.”
Same-sex marriage is expected to be an important election year issue. A recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision ordering the state's legislature to legalize gay marriage has thrust the issue into the national spotlight.
The Alliance for Marriage — a coalition of religious and conservative groups opposed to same-sex marriage — praised Bush's statements and interpreted them as support for the amendment.
“We are grateful to President Bush for saying that he supports a marriage amendment in response to the constitutional challenges to all of our marriage laws that are expected to follow from the court decision striking down [same-sex-only] marriage in Massachusetts,” said Matt Daniels, the group's president, in a press release issued immediately after the speech.
But the leader of another prominent anti-gay-rights group said Bush's support was not explicit enough. Calling the Massachusetts court decision “a cultural time bomb,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said Bush needed to act more quickly in putting his full legislative support behind the amendment.
“President Bush promised to help the families of America — after the bomb goes off and the damage is done,” Perkins said, in a press release issued within minutes of the speech's end. “Now is the time, before the [Supreme Judicial] Court of Massachusetts imposes same-sex marriage on America, to protect the sacred and irreplaceable institution of marriage.”
Bush also threw a bone to cultural conservatives by proposing a doubling of federal funding for sex-education programs that teach abstinence.” Abstinence for young people is the only certain way to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases,” Bush said to mostly bipartisan applause. “All of us — parents and schools and government — must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture, and to send the right messages to our children.”
Asked for their reaction to the speech immediately following its delivery, several Democratic members of Congress described it as partisan in tone and lackluster in its discussion of new ideas. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), told an Associated Baptist Press reporter that the domestic agenda items highlighted revealed Bush's “conservative extremism.”
Feingold particularly derided Bush's apparent support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, saying that the attempt to write that issue into the nation's governing document “trivializes the Constitution.”
Although Feingold has been a strong opponent of Bush's faith-based proposals in the past, he declined to comment on Bush's faith-based ex-convict proposal, saying he'd “have to know more about what exactly he's proposing” before passing judgment.
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