Pushed to the Altar

Pushed to the Altar tells the story of how a right-wing social movement took power in the Bush administration and installed unproven anti-poverty policies to fulfill ideological valorization of the two-parent, heterosexual family.

The report by political scientist Jean Hardisty is the most comprehensive examination to date of the ideological roots of policies that incentivize marriage. Dr. Hardisty locates these initiatives within the context of the Right’s family values ideology and investigates their scope, scale, intellectual and operational origins, merits, and outcomes.

Even though there is no solid evidence from the social sciences that marriage results in a higher income for poor women, the Bush administration launched marriage promotion experiments that were funded at the expense of proven poverty relief programs.

Hardisty further develops this topic in her follow-up report, Marriage as a Cure for Poverty?