Posted on 05/13/2003 5:49:48 PM PDT by Utah Girl
In Government as Family Therapist, Stephen Baskerville writes that something's gone wrong when moderate liberals defend President Bush's Healthy Marriage Initiative. Baskerville is one of the most prominent spokesmen for fathers' rights activists, divorced men who believe they are victimized by ex-wives and family courts. They are a small but vocal group. Write something they don't like and you'll be flooded with angry e-mails. But I'll take that risk, because Baskerville is wrong. Bipartisan support for promoting healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood suggests that something's gone especially right.
That something is grounded in the growing recognition that marriage matters for the well being of children. Social-science research indicates that kids tend to do best when they grow up with their biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. By now, as James Q. Wilson dryly noted, most sociologists — and even the New York Times — have accepted this common-sense conclusion. The bitter "family values" wars of the early 1990s have subsided, leaving the anti-marriage Left on the political margins. Reducing father absence is now a stated goal of both Democratic and Republican policymakers. That's a good thing.
What's odd is that Baskerville implausibly paints President Bush's pro-marriage plan as a Clinton-initiated imposition of "big government." Bush-administration officials would beg to differ. In reality, the administration's proposals are quite modest. They consist of using a small percentage of welfare funds to develop community and faith-based programs that help interested couples develop the skills to sustain healthy marriages. Baskerville echoes NOW when he falsely claims these programs would be "mandated" and "dangerous." (Indeed, Baskerville is no fan of the president. In fact, he had to be thrown out of the National Summit on Fatherhood in 2001 for screaming at Bush during the President's keynote address.)
Thus, I'm inclined to believe that Baskerville casts Bush's proposals as Clintonian in an attempt to discredit them in the eyes of NRO readers. Like most writers, Baskerville adjusts his argument to appeal to his target audience. For example, in a Washington Post op-ed, he criticizes President Bush, worries that a problem "disproportionately afflicts African Americans and other minorities," and calls for "serious bipartisan cooperation." In Crisis, a Catholic magazine, he praises the prophets and quotes the pope. Yet regardless of the publication, Baskerville's overall story remains the same.
What, exactly, is his thesis? It begins with legitimate concerns about no-fault divorce and child support enforcement, but quickly devolves into conspiracy-theory nonsense. On Fox's O'Reilly Factor, he let 'er rip:
We've created in this country a very dangerous and destructive machine. It consists of judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, bureaucratic police, and many others who all have a vested interest in one thing. And that's ripping away as many fathers from their children as they can.
…
[F]amily court judges have learned that the more children they take away from their parents, the more business there is for their courts and for those who are the recipients of their patronage. … And they can dole out a father's income and many other goodies to an assortment, an entourage, of judicial courtiers who also profit from having children taken away from their parents.
There you have it: The root cause of widespread fatherlessness in America is a cabal of corrupt family-court judges who pay off assorted "judicial courtiers" by tearing fathers away from their kids. Baskerville admitted to a skeptical O'Reilly that "most people don't realize" this state of affairs. Indeed.
Some might argue that because certain government policies weakened marriage, government policy should work to reverse the damage. Not Baskerville: "[M]arshaling the government to strengthen families seems especially pointless when it is government that weakened the family in the first place," he writes.
Certainly, some government policies have weakened families. Welfare policies may have contributed to the rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing. No-fault divorce laws have led to more broken homes. But the rise in father absence is a huge demographic shift, which has occurred throughout the West. Social scientists debate the relative contributions of various causes, such as economic trends, the sexual revolution, and so on. James Q. Wilson blames slavery and the Enlightenment. To just point one's finger at "big government" — let alone the "family law patronage machine" — doesn't cut it.
This conspiracy theory leads Baskerville to assert, absurdly, that "[pro-marriage] promoters have no interest in bringing [divorce rates] under control" and that "no government really wants to reduce the rise in single-parent homes." Who is he kidding? Does he honestly believe that Bush-administration officials, religious leaders, and others in the diverse marriage movement are flat-out liars? That people like Wade Horn, former president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and other architects of the Bush marriage initiative are anti-family agents under really deep cover?
And that's not all. Child-support enforcement is an American "gulag." Domestic-violence-treatment programs are bad because they require men who abuse women to engage in self-criticism. Besides, Baskerville explains, "[T]he hysteria over domestic violence is largely geared toward one aim: removing children from their fathers."
Back in the real world, where concern about domestic violence is about domestic violence, promoting healthy marriages seems like a pretty good idea. One-third of all births occur out of wedlock. Up to half of all marriages end in divorce. The social costs of father absence are well-documented. Government programs expand to try to meet the needs of children in fatherless families. Meanwhile, no government program can love, nurture, and discipline a child. Though helpful, child support checks can't provide a day-in, day-out role model of responsible masculinity.
Spending less than two percent of TANF funds on voluntary programs that might result in more children growing up in intact families does not portend the arrival of an intrusive police state. As Maggie Gallagher has explained, "Strengthening marriage is the key to the ultimate victory of the conservative notion of limited government." Americans — and our government — ignore the weakening of marriage at our children's peril. The Bush administration's innovative proposals to promote healthy marriages deserve wide support.
— Tom Sylvester is a research associate at the Institute for American Values and blogs at www.marriagemovement.org.
If federal and state governments really do want to save money they should consider doing away with no-fault and make it impossible for parents of children under the age of 18 to get a divorce. Single parent families use the largest part of social services while two-parent families use much, much less in the way of social services. I'm doing research on this to start lobbying for a change in no-fault divorce law for the next Texas legislative session. Children of divorce are more likely to have problems in school, drop out of high school, have emotional and behavioral problems, and be involved in crime. The most significant factor governing a child's economic status is whether or not the parents are divorced. And the safest place for a child to be, in terms of neglect and abuse, is in the home with both the biological parents.
This should be part of every state's law. Also the introduction of a binding Covenant Marriage Agreement that would preclude the state's involvement in your marriage should be offered to every couple in lieu of a state issued marriage license. These contracts have some "teeth" in them and are more binding than is the regular marriage agreement. See www.no-one-is-married.com if you are interested in more information.
Kathlyn Smith
President
Marriage Our Mission
No, you cannot force people to live together. But, you can make it so onerous for them to leave that folks will certainly think twice before committing to marriage and will more than think twice before filing for divorce. In Sheffield v. Sheffield, the Texas Supreme Court said something to the effect that the parties to a marriage are not necessarily good husbands and wives, but they are good husbands and wives because they have to be. In other words, they learn to get along with one another because they didn't have the easy out of no-fault divorce in 1878.
Under state law married couples have an OBLIGATION to support one another and support the family. I agree that you cannot make a person live under the same roof with another person if they don't want to, but you can bet that a lot of the nonsense going on would be curtailed if fault-based grounds were reinstated. If these people knew that they would forfeit the rights to everything obtained or gained during the marriage, including the marital home and rights to the kids, there would be serious consideration before hopping into bed with someone else and destroying a family. Fault based grounds would make adultery illegal once again and return the right to the faithful spouse to sue a 3rd party for damages for interfering in a marriage. Serious counseling with the goal to save the marriage should also be a part of the plan.
Studies have proven that the kids are better off in a home with their biological parents even if they fight like cats & dogs. You can go to the Heritage Foundation website to find studies that substantiate that.
Kathlyn Smith
President
Marriage Our Mission
We could construct laws which require parents to support and raise their children in a cooperative fashion, even requiring actual dual custody (the real deal not every other weekend and summer vacation) of children. This could be the case whether the parents are married, divorced, or never married.
I really don't think giving the state the opportunity to decide "fault" in a personal relationship is going to help children. However, if they are required by law to support AND physically be present for their kids, whether or not they are married (and I'm talking daily interaction and care such as homework help, shopping, running errands, going to school meeting etc.) then it would behoove the parents to work together to formulate a plan much as married people must do. The impetus is to ensure people are there for the kids. As long as you have to physically be around and cooperate with your co-parent, many may say, "heck we may as well be married".
But even if they aren't married, or never were married, the idea is to emphasize parents obligations to their kids. I don't think it helps kids to force adults to marry or stay married. Is this a legitimate government function? But ensuring child welfare is, and that's the main point. And we could do that by toughing up support requirements for parents, married or not, so that dead beat parenting is less of an option.
This could be a real problem for people who have several sets of kids living in different cities or states, but we could step up the $$$ requirements if you're not actually present and accounted for, to make people think twice about creating a lot of kids which they then ignore. If two parents are better for kids than one, lets make that a priority. Making divorce more difficult won't help all those kids whose parents where never married to begin with.
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