Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the Bush marriage agenda: Opponents of gay marriage claim that there is some consistency here, in that gay marriages must be stopped before they undermine the straight ones. How the married gays will go about wrecking heterosexual marriages is not entirely clear: by moving in next door, inviting themselves over and doing a devastating critique of the interior decorating? It is equally unclear how marriage will cure poor women's No. 1 problem, which is poverty ? unless, of course, the plan is to draft C.E.O.'s to marry recipients of T.A.N.F. (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Left to themselves, most women end up marrying men of the same social class as their own, meaning ? in the case of poverty-stricken women ? blue-collar men. But that demographic group has seen a tragic decline in earnings in the last couple of decades. So I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty. The answer turns out to be approximately 2.3, which is, strangely enough, illegal. Seeking clarity, I called the administration's top marriage maven, Wade Horn at Health and Human Services. H.H.S. is not 'promoting' marriage, he told me, just providing 'marriage education' for interested couples of limited means. The poor aren't being singled out for any insidious reason, he insisted; this is just a service they might otherwise lack. It could have been Pilates training or courses in orchid cultivation, was the implication, but for now it's marriage education. As recently as 2001, however, Horn was proposing that the administration 'show it values marriage by rewarding those who choose it' with cash 'marriage bonuses.' When I suggested that — with food pantries maxing out and shelters overflowing across the nation — poor women might have other priorities, Horn snapped back: "It's fine for you to make the decision on what low-income couples need." Silly old social-engineering-type liberal that I am, I had actually doubted that marriage education might be helpful to couples doomed to spend their married lives on separate cots in the shelter. As one welfare recipient once told me, "We need caps and gowns, not wedding gowns."