Writer Backing Bush Plan
Had Gotten Federal Contract
By Howard Kurtz
"The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of
marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying
childbearing until marriage," she wrote in National Review Online, for
example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for
taxpayers and children."
But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the
Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's
proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October
2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the
initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for
department officials.
"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?"
Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she
would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the
contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.
Later in the day, Gallagher filed a column in which she said that "I
should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush
marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My
apologies to my readers."
In the interview, Gallagher said her situation was "not really anything
near" the recent controversy involving conservative commentator Armstrong
Williams. Earlier this month Williams apologized for not disclosing a $241,000
contract with the Education Department, awarded through the Ketchum public
relations firm, to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind
law through advertising on his cable TV and syndicated radio shows and other
efforts.
Gallagher received an additional $20,000 from the Bush administration in
2002 and 2003 for writing a report, titled "Can Government Strengthen
Marriage?", for a private organization called the
National Fatherhood Initiative. That report, published last year, was funded by
a Justice Department grant, said NFI spokesman Vincent DiCaro. Gallagher said
she was "aware vaguely" that her work was federally funded.
In columns, television appearances and interviews with such newspapers as
The Washington Post, Gallagher last year defended Bush's proposal for a
constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage.
Wade Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, said his
division hired Gallagher as "a well-known national expert," along
with other specialists in the field, to help devise the president's healthy
marriage initiative. "It's not unusual in the federal government to do
that," he said.
The essay Gallagher drafted appeared under Horn's byline -- with the
headline "Closing the Marriage Gap" -- and ran in Crisis magazine,
which promotes humanism rooted in Catholic Church teachings. Horn said most of
the brochures written by Gallagher -- such as "The Top Ten Reasons
Marriage Matters" -- were not used as the program evolved.
"I don't see any comparison between what has been alleged with Armstrong
Williams and what we did with Maggie Gallagher," said Horn, who founded
the National Fatherhood Initiative before entering government. "We didn't
pay her to write columns. We didn't pay her to promote the president's healthy
marriage initiative at all. What we wanted to do was use her expertise."
The Education Department is now investigating the Williams contract.
The author of three books on marriage, Gallagher is president of the
Washington-based Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, a frequent television
guest and has written on the subject for such publications as the New York
Times, Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard.
While she was being paid by HHS in 2002, Gallagher in her syndicated column
dismissed the arguments against "President Bush's modest marriage
initiative" as "nonsense," writing: "Bush plans to use a
tiny fraction of surplus welfare dollars to fund marriage education services
for at-risk couples."
In a column later that year that appeared in the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Sun
News, Gallagher said Bush's welfare-revision bill would, among other things,
encourage "stable marriages," and that it was a "scandal"
for Democrats to reject the president's plan and fail to offer an alternative.
National Review Editor Rich Lowry said of the HHS contract: "We would
have preferred that she told us, and we would have disclosed it in her
bio."
Tribune Media Services dropped Williams's column after his administration
contract was disclosed. Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes
Gallagher's column, plans no such action.
"We did not know about the contract," spokeswoman Kathie Kerr
said. "We would have probably liked to have known." But, Kerr said,
"this is what we hired Maggie to write about. It
probably wouldn't have changed our mind to distribute it."
© 2005 The Washington
Post Company