Not Everyone in Utah Wedded to Its Official ‘Marriage Week’

It’s Marriage Week in Utah, but of the half a dozen couples gathered at the Salt Lake County clerk’s office to apply for marriage licenses, only one person had heard of the state-sponsored week designed to strengthen families and celebrate marriage.

And while most couples said they supposed the idea of marriage promotion and education was a good thing, others were skeptical.

“They may promote it, but it’s not going to change anyone’s choices,” said Marty Schliesser, 46, filling out his marriage application with his fiancee.

Marriage is not exactly threatened in Utah. The state already has the nation’s highest percentage of married-couple households, and 70% of the state’s 2.2 million residents are nominally members of the Mormon Church, which strongly espouses traditional family values.

Although Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members dominate the state politically and socially, proponents of marriage initiatives are careful to say their ideas are based neither on politics nor the desire to preach morality.

Gov. Olene S. Walker has said the week ending on Valentine’s Day had nothing to do with a bill in the Legislature to ban gay marriage.

Instead, backers say, with Utah’s divorce rate running slightly higher than the national average, the state is reeling from broken families. Children, families and the state all suffer the consequences.

The interest in marriage isn’t new here. In 1998, then-Gov. Mike Leavitt formed a Governor’s Commission on Marriage to recommend and implement ways to “promote, strengthen and increase awareness of the importance of marriage.”

In 2000, the commission used part of a $600,000 federal welfare grant to fund counselor training to teach “relationship enhancement” classes, a video, a website and informational pamphlets for low-income families.

The commission also spent $61,642 of the grant on a survey designed to gauge trends and attitudes on marriage among Utah residents. Among other findings, the survey found that the vast majority of respondents said marriage education and efforts to promote marriage and reduce divorce were good ideas.

But some question if the government should be meddling at all in marriage, or if it should be backing one lifestyle choice without promoting others.

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson refused to join other mayors in signing Walker’s Declaration of Marriage, saying its language defining marriage as between a man and a woman was exclusionary.

The executive director of the gay and lesbian advocacy group Equality Utah agreed, saying the governor’s scheduled recognition of couples with “Gold Medal Marriages” at the Friday night event would exclude some notable couples.

“I know gay and lesbian couples who have been together 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, who should be included in that, who are models for what a long-term, committed relationship should be,” said Michael Mitchell.

And some say efforts to promote marriage are misdirected.

“There’s a little wishful thinking here, that if we just tell people how good marriage is, they’ll go back to it,” said Stephanie Coontz, chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan group that seeks to include nontraditional families in the national dialogue.

Research such as a recent marriage study in Utah ask the wrong question, she said.

“The right research question is not what is the best family form in the abstract,” she said, “but given that people are living in all these different forms, what can we do to help families function better -- any type of family?”