NEW YORK (AP) – The national furor over same-sex marriage has complicated the task of officials and civic leaders trying to energize support for President George W. Bush’s $1.5 billion proposal to promote stronger marriages among heterosexual couples.

“The intensity of the same-sex marriage debate is so great that it swallows up everything else to do with marriage,” said David Blankenhorn, a prominent advocate of family-support programs. “It’s a politically electric word right now.”

Bush first proposed his Healthy Marriage Initiative two years ago and some pilot programs have been funded, mostly aimed at encouraging cohabiting low-income couples to marry. But the full-scale, five-year initiative remains hung up in the Senate as part of a welfare bill that is awaiting reauthorization.

Since its announcement, the initiative has attracted effusive praise and scathing criticism.

Many skeptics say the government has no business intervening in what should be a private realm. Some groups contend the programs could discriminate against single women, pressure them into abusive marriages, and convey that they should find a husband rather than seek self-sufficiency. Gay-rights activists are bitter that Bush would request funds to aid heterosexual couples while advocating a ban on same-sex marriages.

“Whatever the challenges marriages currently face, same-sex relationships are not the cause of the problem,” said David Tseng, president of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Supporters of the marriage initiative say the programs will be voluntary, and could help nurture solutions to the perennial problems linked to children raised in poor, single-parent homes.

“We are conservatives – we do believe that government ought to be limited,” Wade Horn, assistant health and human services secretary for children and families, said in a telephone interview.

“But healthy marriages are good for children, good for adults, good for communities. When something can be shown to be a social good, government should not be neutral.”

Horn said he has been striving for the past two months to disentangle the marriage initiative from the gay-marriage debate. He traced the entanglement to articles in the New York Times in mid-January that – in his eyes – gave the impression Bush’s marriage plan was a new, election-year initiative aimed at placating conservatives upset by gay-marriage developments.

“Both these debates are worth having, but they are separate debates,” Horn said.

Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values and a leader of a coalition called the Marriage Movement, said other news stories that followed the Times articles amplified on the same themes, and “flagrantly mischaracterized an important public policy issue.”

The New York Times has defended its articles. Spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said: “We believe our coverage has been thorough, fair and balanced.”

The fate of the marriage initiative now appears to hinge on how Congress deals with the 1996 welfare law, which needs to be reauthorized. Blankenhorn and others fear partisan disagreements over other aspects of that legislation might lead Congress to merely extend existing components, without approving new programs such as the marriage initiative.

Democrats in Congress are less enthusiastic about the marriage initiative than Bush’s fellow Republicans. But some policy analysts predict that many Democrats might vote for the program in order to display pro-marriage credentials ahead of a possible vote against a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

“The gay marriage debate has complicated things for some congressmen,” said Michael Tanner, a welfare expert with the Cato Institute. “There’s all the more reason why they don’t want to appear anti-marriage.”

The National Organization of Women Legal Defense and Education Fund is among the most vocal critics of the marriage initiative.

“There are currently more non-marital families than married families in America,” it says in a statement. “Congress should not attempt to coerce low-income individuals into one type of family structure.”