Representative Bill Flores (R-TX) joined host Tony Perkins on the Family Research Council's Washington Watch radio show last week during which time Flores drew a connection between the upcoming Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage and civil unrest in Baltimore.
According to Flores, poverty is the root cause of unrest and, while that may be true in some part, Flores says the cause of poverty is too many single parents.
via RightWingWatch
FLORES: "The single best indicator of whether or not a child is going to be in poverty or not is whether or not they were raised by a two-parent household or a single parent household, so the breakdown of the family has contributed to poverty. Look at what is going on in Baltimore today, you see the issues that are raised there. Healthy marriages are the ones between a man and a woman because they can have a healthy family and they can raise children in a way that’s best for their future, not only socially but psychologically, economically, from a health perspective. There is nothing like traditional marriage that does that for a child. Each of us have a mother and a father and there is no way to get around that."
As you might expect, Flores believes the Supreme Court will doom us all if it rules in favor of same-sex marriage and destroys "traditional marriage" once and for all.
Flores isn't alone, however. Other Republicans have pointed a finger toward a breakdown of the "traditional" family unit, including Republican presidential frontrunner Jeb Bush.
Bush’s prescription for reducing the rate further, however, begins with a call for poor people to get married. “If our government leaders want to attack poverty, they should first acknowledge that an effective anti-poverty program is a strong family, led by two parents,” he writes. “The evidence on this is incontrovertible.”
On one hand the Republican party is adamant that the best way to keep young adults and children off the street is for them to have two married parents, but they also insist that these two married parents should not be gay.
Unfortunately for them, their opposition to same-sex marriage may soon become inconsequential if the Supreme Court does the right thing and legalizes it in all 50 states.
There will come a time in the very near future when all the doomsday scenarios and dire predictions of the anti-gay marriage commentariat are proven to be conclusively false. Higher marriage rates may indeed improve the lives of children, but not all of those marriages will strictly be between a man and a woman.
As Bryce Covert at ThinkProgress points out, it's not necessarily marriage itself that produces better outcomes for children; it's the level of shared income. This discussion would be moot if so many adults were not struggling to get by on poverty wages that Republicans also refuse to budge on.