"Defense of Marraige" as the Fundy War On Women

[JHB]

Found a post by Patrick O'Heffernan at Seeing the Forestthat's worth bringing to peoples' attention, since like Social Security "reform", tort "reform", and tax "reform", it's important to keep in mind it's advocates' REAL goals, not just the explanation they put put for public consumption:

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Out of public view, Bryce tells conservatives something different –he lays out the real reason for the protection of marriage campaign. Writing in the ultra-conservative magazine , The Family in America, he says that he and other conservatives behind the campaign are not really concerned about same-sex marriage; they really want to force women back into submissive, trapped, traditional wife roles like those described in the Old Testament of the Bible. Their real goal is to roll back the last 40 years of the women's rights successes, end no-fault divorce so women have to stay marriage whether they like it or not, close daycare facilities, and defund all domestic and international family planning programs in order to get women back under the thumb of men where they belong . To speed up this re-enslavement of women, they advocate against pension benefits and Social Security which they claim have led to the breakdown of the intergenerational family as seniors are no longer dependent on the goodwill of their grown children and can't be exploited as baby sitters so wives can have more babies.
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The goals of these strategies are both short and long term. In the short term, the conservatives and the Christian Right are building a bundle of issues around marriage that they can use to excite and possibly expand their evangelical base without turning off non-evangelical Christians. After all, who is against strengthening marriage?

Additionally, by disguising their intentions as support for marriage, they hope to fool women, a traditionally Democratic constituency, into supporting Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections. The conservative communications machine is now using these messages to define marriage their way, create the “conventional wisdom” that marriage is in trouble (it is, but mostly in the red states and the Bible-belt), and that reforms are needed in government policy to protect it.
In the long term, the right’s goals are more Machiavellian. Married women, especially married women in male-dominate marriages, tend to vote for Republicans somewhat more than single women do, especially if their husbands are Republican. Conservatives have calculated that narrowing women’s options and channeling them into “godly” marriages where they are re-enslaved as “submissive wives” will increase female Republican voters over the long term. And in the very long term, daughters of these marriages will be raised to forgo college and get married and have large families – the profile of Republican voting women, thus guaranteeing a growing population of re-enslaved female Republican voters.
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http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_seetheforest_archive.html#110262369177395037