A Dire Warning for Families from the RNC

The Values plank of the Republican Platform 2008 contains a section on Preservation of Traditional Marriage. The gist is not new. The federal government has mangled marriage and family to the point of legally destroying the institutions and now they’re leaving their mess in the states. There is an additional sentence tacked on at the end however that is extremely important to understand.

As the family is our basic unit of society, we oppose initiatives to erode parental rights.

Thought that was covered by the Constitution? It is usually only in the experience of divorce with children that people discover that the most basic rules of civilization no longer apply. Courts no longer list parental rights among our country’s fundamental rights. They are issues in partisan politics; like should we allow oil drilling on certain federal lands or increase taxes on the rich?

Even if you are the world’s best parent and have never violated a law, whether you are allowed to raise your own children is now a political question. Married couples are in the same boat. It appears that this is the specific target group to which Republicans are offering their support. But why should you need it? Why are parental rights – including the right to raise your own children – subject to political winds? What happens if the party in power turns against you?

What happened is that the federal government got into the business of domestic relations, starting with the creation of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. This first step was taken by tacking the then unpopular idea onto Social Security Amendments of 1975, which contained a list of more popular social service amendments. When President Gerald Ford signed it, he pointed out that the addition took the federal government too far into domestic relations and promised to propose legislation to correct it. He did not remain in office long enough to follow through.

By 1990, the new program had successfully lobbied for a dramatic expansion of the welfare system to – for the first time in history – encompass all families. New financial incentives were included to push states to bring families into the fold. The broadening effect is easily seen in statistics on child support “collections” presented by the House Ways and Means “Green Book” 1998. In 1978, child support payments made through the government system consisted only of payments related to welfare entitlements and amounted to about $1.1 billion. In 1997, payments through the system had risen to about $13 billion, including almost $12 billion in non-welfare related payments that would normally have been paid directly from parent to parent.

The rate of compliance with child support orders did not increase, but the federal incentives paid to states – which are tied directly to the amount paid through the government system – increased dramatically along with the great gorge of newly forced participants in the welfare system. This is why, despite failure to produce its intended effect, the program continued to grow.

There was another way to cheat the system to produce even greater shares of federal incentive spending. If the amount of payment ordered is increased, then more money flows through the government system from the same number of payers. States took the step of arbitrarily increasing amounts ordered by application of politically controlled child support formulae, which were themselves another product of the federal program.

This of course led to lawsuits against states for arbitrary government intrusion into family life, among other things. It is here, and for this reason, that the legal respect for the established institutions of marriage and family met its death. In 1993, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found itself deciding P.O.P.S. v Gardner, a class action suit in which the constitutionality of the Washington State child support formula was challenged. The parents group P.O.P.S., which represented payers in non-welfare entitlement related cases, had proven their technical points. Experts appearing on both sides generally agreed on the most basic aspect of their points – the arbitrary nature of the child support calculations.

It appeared as though P.O.P.S. was in a good position to win the case, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was in no mood to dampen the federal government’s biggest pork-barrel program du jour. To avoid consideration of the facts in the case, they made the dramatic politically activist decision to reclassify all of domestic relations law from civil law to social policy. Under the new classification, arbitrary political control is the norm. Examples include the levels of various welfare entitlements and taxes. Classification for the latter is also referred to as economic policy, among other things, but the rules related to constitutional review by courts are exactly the same.

Marriage and family, as we knew it legally, were originally left entirely “to the states and to the people” by the US Constitution. The federal takeover began in 1975, eventually transforming state involvement into subordinate units for implementing federal mandates. The 1993 decision eliminated individual rights, including parental rights, for the purpose of eliminating protection from arbitrary intrusion. From a legal perspective, the institutions of marriage and family have been transformed from sacred institutions deserving the greatest level of protection and respect to arbitrarily defined politically controlled elements of the welfare system.

No one should underestimate the danger of the removal of individual rights from the national equation. A great deal of extremism has been demonstrated in both state legislatures and in Congress in the area of family policy over the past three decades, most of it to date affecting divorced and never married parents and their children. But the reclassification affects all families. Even a poorly written law or bureaucratic mistake can lead to problems that are difficult and perhaps even impossible to fix. That is the nature of the relationship people have with the state when civil rights protection is gone.

Tags: New World Order

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Analysis, Child Support & Custody, Culture, Current Events, Economics, Family, Fatherhood, Judicial Activism, Law, NewsWax, Politics, Vox Populi, parents rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 822 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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