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1. Either it's "You Got Trouble In River City" (Harold Hill in "The Music Man"
whereby you whip up popular dissent by attacking morals instead of going after inherent political corruption and/or reform.
or
2. It's hard to get people to disagree on the promotion of and societal benefits of marriage and family. It's a couple of logical fallacies of 1) Appeal to the Masses and 2) Appeal to the Emotions. Their premise is you can't improve society until you've fortified "marriage" and marriage on THEIR terms.
And maybe it's a long-range plan whereby they control marriage, thereby controlling "morals". If they get sheeple to be more moral (read, religious), they get them into church. Once in church, the church will tell them how to vote and they do it mindlessly, throwing away their franchise. And it keeps republicans in office that much longer and maybe pick up a few seats along the way.
It makes condemnation and feelings of superiority easy to maintain. It's also less taxing on the ol' cognitive overhead--you assign a simple, non-explanatory reason and you can stop worrying about understanding, empathy, and all the things that grant superiority.
It's what many on the other side do.
Here are some reasons.
1. A lot of people don't like change. They fear it or dislike it because it's unpredictable and causes a lot of disruption. That's conservatives and many conservationists. I've had people on the right say change is just bad. Then I've had conversations on the left with people that say we need to save forests in the wonderful state they were in when they were a kid--or the 19th century--or the 16th century. Thing is, many forests were different at those three times, and all reflected the role of humans in spreading fire, disease, and plants. (Even in the Amazon, in many areas there are far more food-producing trees than you'd think because hundreds of years ago humans spread them. The "virgin forests" are, in many places, downright slutty.)
My mother, a staunch (D) from the time she was 16 until she stopped remembering any political views always said "change is good." Then Reagan came along and she complained about him and was furious when I reminded her that "change is good." Change she liked was good. We confuse words for things with the things themselves.
2. Social stability. If you look at the stats, single-parent households do worse on average than two-parent households. You have to have a really sucky two-parent household for the kids to turn out worse than a comparable single-parent family. That holds for all income groups, all races, father- or mother-headed households. If the single parent marries, the kids do a lot better. If the single parent has a live-in boyfriend or girlfriend, the kids don't do as well. Married people have higher income. Higher life expectancies. More wealth accumulation. Better educations. On average.
It's why divorce was the liberal cause du jour back in the '40s and '50s. Conservatives fought it. It makes no sense to say that conservatives also divorce and have all the same problems all other humans have and therefore they're hypocritical. That is pure nihilism: Either we abide perfectly by our ideals or we must have no ideals at all. (This is the same kind of easy and feel-good thinking as before. We don't have to be perfect, but, goddam it, we insist everybody else that we don't like be perfect on our terms.)
3. Christianity. A large chunk of the theological terrain has a nice parallelism going between God/Church/Jesus/believer and the Father/mother/older brother/younger sibling model that to some extent is still the bulwark of American families--with the traditional "older brother" role sharply reduced in American life but still turning up in phrases said by fathers to their oldest son like "you're the man of the family while I'm gone."
The church doesn't need another church to be whole. The Father doesn't need another Father to be whole. The lay follower doesn't need to retain the entire argument in order for the conclusions to be picked up and carried. Most of my high school students would rather not be bothered with the argument--just give them the conclusion so they can get on with more important things like texting their friends; they've had 2nd period physics for 8 months and feel a pressing need to tell their friends that they're actually in physics 2nd period on a regular basis, even a week or two before the end of school. They basically ping each other to avoid feelings of insecurity and isolation. D'oh.)
Other religious trends look at other aspects of the family and somehow assign importance to them. So Islam has a nice hierarchy of submission (hence the name, Islam, which means "peace" like "pacification" means "peace" .
