Republicans Need To Decide If These Are The Battles That We Really Want To Fight
I like Mr. Chisum. I think he is a good guy and an accomplished legislator. But when I picked up a copy of yesterday’s AAS, I was again reminded of the differences that we hold. Though bill filing is months away, Mr. Chisum has proudly proclaimed that he will be re-filing legislation that, he says, will help to “keep families together” by essentially making it more difficult for married couples to seek a no-fault divorce. In announcing his intentions to re-file House Bill 2684, Mr. Chisum had this to say:
“We’re going to attack it at both ends — marriage and divorce — in an effort to keep families together.”
Ah, I love it when my government pro-actively steps in to offer their correction to the mistakes I have made with my own life. Yes, when I enter the ballot box, telling me that I can’t get a divorce before I jump through your hoops is exactly what I am electing my representatives to do.
All fun aside, while I think that Mr. Chisum’s heart is in the right place, here are some problems I see with the legislative language that he will be pushing come next spring. Right now in Texas, a married couple seeking a no-fault divorce has to wait a minimum of 60 days for that divorce to process. Under the previous version of Mr. Chisum’s bill, that minimum wait period would increase from two months to two years.
I am sure that what Mr. Chisum is banking on here is that given enough time, couples seeking a divorce will reconsider. Some might, but some will not. And what further damage are we going to add to their already wrecked lives by drastically delaying the point in life where they can finally move on?
To be fair to Mr. Chisum, his legislation does create an out where couples seeking a no-fault divorce could still obtain theirs in 60 days. But to do so would require they first sit through 10 hours of Crisis Marriage Education Courses, and his bill language is very clear as to who will have to pick up the tab for these crisis courses, those seeking the divorce.
Increasing the cost of a government provided service (yes, divorces are a service) is not very Republican at all, but their is a bigger picture here that we need to also focus on, and that is the question of is Mr. Chisum’s idea just government stepping further into our personal lives and meddling more and more with the personal decisions that we face?
I am glad that Mr. Chisum and his wife have been happily married for over 50 years, and I, too, am saddened a bit by our divorce rate. But there are unfortunate times when marriages just don’t work, and there is nothing that all the legislation in the world can do to ever fully prevent that. We are an imperfect species destined to not always make the right choices with our lives, including our marriage decisions.
I’ve had close friends seek no-fault divorces before. I have looked in their eyes and seen the pain that they were going through. I have heard the anguish in their voices as they told me there was nothing to be said through marriage counseling that had not already been privately poured over. In some ways, I have grieved that loss with them and I have also felt a bitter-sweet rejoice upon the day that it was finally over and they could each begin walking the long road of moving on and picking up the pieces of their broken lives. To make any couple in that situation have to wait two years to put a dark episode in their lives behind them is, to me, grossly unjust.
To come full circle, I think that Mr. Chisum and the Texas Conservative Coalition needs to sit down and think long and hard about this bill and if this is the fight we as Republicans want to stake our claim to. Because to be frank, I think that for every individual whose marriage this bill might save, we’re going to alienate countless more who believe that divorces are personal struggles that the government has no right to get further involved in.
At least that’s how I feel.
One Response to “Republicans Need To Decide If These Are The Battles That We Really Want To Fight”
By Brent Connett on Jul 7, 2008
Critics of efforts to encourage healthy and lasting marriages insist the state shouldn’t get involved with our private lives. The State is, and the entirety of the Texas Family Code is evidence of that, starting from the basic requirement of getting a marriage license. It is in all our interests to save the building block of society: marriage.
Decades of ill-advised policies (no-fault divorce and TANF incentives for single-parenthood, to name two) have created a body of law – and culture - that favors divorce and celebrates single parenthood. Taken on an individual basis, divorce is a personal and painful event in the lives of a man and woman (and certainly their children). In the aggregate, however, there are significant societal ramifications and fiscal costs that stem from the larger culture of divorce that has metastasized in recent decades. With our high divorce rate, the dockets of civil courts fill; the Attorney General oversees a division to collect child support payments; single parents who once benefited from two incomes turn to the state for taxpayer-funded benefits (i.e. TANF and CHIP) to fill the gaps caused by declining household incomes. Divorce costs the state approximately $3 billion dollars per year, making incentives to encourage marriage and discourage divorce a cost-saving measure just as much as they are vital social policies.
The Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute did not start down this road lightly. Decades of research by pre-eminent social scientists like James Q. Wilson, Barbara Defoe Whitehead, Charles Murray, Maggie Gallagher, Stuart Butler, and many, many others point toward the same conclusion: marriage makes for healthier, wealthier adults and children; broken families create the contrary. Furthermore, this is just another area of social policy in which conservatives are having to undo decades of deleterious policies, including the advent of no-fault divorce, the consequences of which were predicted and have played out.
This issue may or may not affect the re-election of certain members but that misses the point. Encouraging marriage and discouraging divorce are policies directed at undergirding the values that strengthen our culture, even if changes to the Family Code are only small parts of the change that is necessary.
The proposal by Rep. Chisum is not a mandate. Creating incentives for healthy marriages, and disincentives for family breakdown, is socially and fiscally conservative and must be pursued by the 81st Texas Legislature.