Reasoned Arguments Belong in the 1950s

The Idaho Statesman makes a poor argument for why the Idaho Family Task Force is wrong. They spend several paragraphs comparing issues like water, tax reform, education, etc. to the family and conclude:

The family is every bit as essential as a predictable water supply, a good tax structure, strong schools or safe highways. But it is naive to view the family as an institution unchanged by the world surrounding the home.

They hardly view the institution as unchanged by the world. However, the formula for what works for the family is ages old. It hasn’t changed because of economics or outsourcing, or growth. These are not the issues that change the formula.

The Statesman then throws out another argument, which at first appears to have merit:

The lawmakers talked about what it would take to keep mothers at home. They failed to recognize that fathers sometimes can or will stay at home.

This appears to be legitimate, except that if state policy makes it easier for one parent to stay at home, gender doesn’t really matter. Apparently, logic is something that newspapers used in the 1950s and is outdated for today.

They also failed to acknowledge that in today’s economy, both parents often must work to pay for necessities.

That was implicitly acknowledged in the call for lower taxes. The Statesman certainly doesn’t want women to stay at home. As I talked about last weekend, it often makes little economic sense for both people in a marriage to work due to the fact that there’s a huge ledger of expenses , including more meals eating out, the cost of owning and operating a second car, the cost of a work wardrobe, the cost of child care, etc. What keeping both parents in the workplace does is provide the Statesman and their statist allies a lot more tax money in order to spend on the Statesman’s never-ending desire for greater government spending.

The lawmakers embraced a ban on no-fault divorce, as if a complicated, costly divorce process will somehow make marriages stronger. Sadly, divorce is much more an emotional decision than an economic or logistical decision. Lawmakers seemed to begrudge the idea that, no-fault divorces or not, some Idaho households will be one-parent households.

There were two proposals, one was to eliminate the no-fault divorce which serves as an easy escape route, and the other one which the Statesman refuses to acknowledge is to provide incentives for people to opt for premarital counseling, which done right either allows a couples to work out differences before marriage, or to realize they have “irreconcilable differences” before they tie the knot.  Likewise, the proposal encourages those organizations that already offer marriage counseling. While they could have done more, they hardly decided to say, “Okay, no fault divorce is gone…All marriages will stay together.”

And of course, there’s a concern about single parent homes. While there’s some great single parents out there, the over-abundance of single parent homes in our state and the country constitutes a social problem from which flows many ills. The ability of some to rise to the challenge and overcome doesn’t eliminate the reality of the challenge.

Of course, there have been Letters to the Editor about this. Sharon Fisher who suggests:

Improve education for girls, so they don’t feel their only choice in life is to get married and raise children.

I find the first suggestion off the mark. My wife went through public school and left feeling that staying home as a full time wife and mother was not an option, based on what she was taught there.

Improve access to pre-marriage counseling.

You know the odd thing about this is that there’s already a proposal to strengthen support for pre-marriage counseling in this report. This just isn’t what the Statesman sensationalized.

Improve low-cost access to safe, legal birth control, to guarantee that every child is a wanted child and to reduce shotgun marriages.

Shotgun weddings? Excuse me, whose living in the past again? That is so amazingly rare these days as people rarely-to-never get married just because a baby comes along. They’re all about self-actualizing.

Improve access to early childhood education, to make sure all children start on a level playing field. Improve access to affordable, safe day care and supervised after-school programs, so families where parents work know their children are well cared for.

So despite the fact that children who’ve spent a lot of time in day care have increased behavioral problems, apparently it makes sense somehow to make day care a centerpiece of the program.

Writes Dede Shelton:

Where are the dads? W[h]ere are the men who fathered children, leaving the mothers to raise and support them? How can the “Family Task Force” blame all drug use, crime and divorce on women who have stepped up to raise these children after the men in their lives left them mostly unsupported? Will restricting divorce really keep men in the home? I don’t think so.

Dede does have somewhat of a point here. Restricting divorce won’t address this problem, because in many cases, men who leave kids weren’t married to begin with. What it may do is allow women to be more comfortable into marriage as a stable relationship rather than as one that can be dissolved at any moment. However, there’s not a whole lot to be done with ill-advised relationships other than improving child support enforcement.

In today’s letters, Mike Chitty writes:

Children from good, two-parent families may enjoy advantages that children from single-parent homes might not, usually due to financial circumstances, but not because of a lack of parenting skills or concern for one’s children.

First of all, I think that children benefit from the presence of a male and a female in their lives. Fathers matter and so do mothers. Some of it is simple math. Two heads are better than one is generally true. I’d also suggest that the economic is tied to marriage, not the marriage to economic benefit. And while most single parents care about their kids, it’s very hard for one person to do the work of two. Some manage to do it very well, but that’s the exception not the rule.

Raising children in the toxic atmosphere of a “dead marriage” is no answer to the crime problems of today.

Discouraging divorce is more of an answer to the crime problems of tomorrow. Few marriages that are truly “No fault” situations are unsalvagable if couples choose to work it out rather than walk away. And of course, should both partners feel the marriage is unsalvagable, they can mutually agree to end it.

Sam Sandmire writes:

Trial lawyers are the only beneficiaries of repealing no-fault divorce laws.

I find this a remarkable statement for a number of reasons. First of all, since no-fault divorce the number of lawyers in the divorce field has gone up substantially. Secondly, when a no fault divorce reform bill was under consideration, most lawyers opposed it. This would be very odd if this would help trial lawyers. One of the few divorce lawyers supporting it explained the costs of divorce currently:

But aren’t the laws set up to make sure women and children are supported and the property gets preserved and divided fairly?Answers–
1- Yes, but you’re dividing a shrinking pie, plus the people have new expenses from new relationships and children.
2- Everyone gets poorer, and the judge is going to make everyone share the sacrifice, whether they’re the one who wanted the divorce or not.
3-It’s true that the law lets the judge make one party pay the other’s fees, or divide the property differently to punish someone who does something really awful or wastes or steals a lot of money. But it costs thousands to prove anything like that, so it only works if you’re dealing with really big money. Justice is expensive. Also, in practice, the guilty try to use all of these remedies against the innocent, and defending against them sucks up all the lawyer’s time and the client’s money.

How much does a divorce cost, for ordinary people?

A: Not counting what it does to the standard of living, and having to pay support, and the expenses of visitation, you can get one for under $10,000 per spouse in lawyer fees if you’re lucky and if both the spouses and their lawyers are reasonable and fair. But you really can’t predict that. In fact, it is considered unethical for a divorce lawyer to even give a client an estimate, because it’s so out of control. Either side can pull all kinds of stuff in court that just makes both the lawyers waste time until one client runs out of money. I just finished one case where they settled, but then the husband had to spend $70,000 just to enforce the settlement agreement!
–A custody fight is more like $20,000 apiece. And the thing with custody cases is that no matter how reasonable one side is, how much you give up in order to stay out of court, the other side can always demand more until you have to choose between fighting and never seeing your kids. Also, after the settlement or the court decision, either of you can come back to court the next year to try the case all over again. And you may be fighting about visitation arrangements until the children are grown.

So with a mutual consent law in place, you’d have less people pursuing divorce and you’d also have an incentive for a couple who decide to get divorced to work out an amicable arrangement, rather than going through court. Given the high price tags that attorneys attach to stuff like this, the argument that a return to fault divorce benefits divorce attorneys is illogical at best.