Still destroying the family

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views July 28, 2003]

After a while, everybody falls in line. At one time, conservatives understood the damage that government interference had done to the family. Liberals were excoriated for pushing social programs that created substitutes for fathers by making them redundant. Now, along comes the Department of Health and Human Services with a plan to "rebuild" the families its policies have spent decades destroying. And who are among those supporting these proposals for a new form of social engineering? Why, "conservatives," of course.

Imagine the government providing "marriage education" courses, where "relationship skills" are taught, along with a little "anger management." In "Government as Family Therapist" (National Review Online, 5/6/03), Stephen Baskerville tells of Bush administration proposals to promote "healthy marriages," that have won the hearts of some Democrats. Claiming that these proposed initiatives extend Clinton-era programs, Baskerville suggests that something's gone wrong "when liberals can criticize a conservative administration for imposing big government on the family." He writes:

Government as family therapy was an idea that in fact originated with the Clintons, who saw it as an opportunity for politicizing children and extending government into the deepest recesses of private life.

After describing one meddling social scheme after another, all of which mushroomed during the 1990s, Baskerville points to the one issue that none of the social engineers or bureaucrats will touch, that of no-fault divorce.

From a public-policy standpoint, there is one reason why marriage has deteriorated: Thirty years ago, with no public discussion, "no-fault" divorce laws effectively abolished marriage as a legal contract. Anyone can now rip up a marriage agreement for any reason without accepting any liability for the consequences. Today, many divorces are enacted over the objection of one spouse. . . .

Despite protests to the contrary, no government really wants to reverse the rise in single-parent homes. Governments throughout America are filling their coffers with federal money for everything from child-support enforcement to child protection to domestic violence programs -- all of which proceed from broken homes. Hypocritical programs to preach the importance of marriage and fatherhood will merely result in new rosters of clients.

More ominously, Clinton-initiated fatherhood programs have already created a blend of psychotherapy with law enforcement, in one of the most dishonest and destructive policies ever foisted on the public: child-support enforcement. Welfare created this "gulag," as attorney Jed Abraham calls it in From Courtship to Courtroom: What Divorce Law is Doing to Marriage; no-fault divorce extended it to the middle class, where the money and political power are concentrated.

Baskerville describes Soviet-style self-denouncing sessions, where fathers engage in forced confessions and self-criticism. These are features of federally funded "domestic violence" programs, supervised by penal officers who supposedly are practitioners of "life skills and relationship" therapy. Humiliation as therapy, perhaps? He continues:

No evidence indicates that large numbers of fathers are abandoning their children; the government has no compiled data to back its claims that they are not paying support; and no study has ever justified the expanding federalization of enforcement since 1975. Two federally funded studies have concluded that nonpayment has never been a serious problem. No public outcry ever demanded that government take action, nor has any public discussion of this alleged problem ever been held. The initiative has been taken throughout by government officials, who in doing so have vastly expanded their power.

"Fem-fear," Phyllis Schlafly calls it. For fear of the feminists. And, like their fear of low vote counts, fem-fear will not abate any time soon among Republicans. Baskerville dismally concludes:

Here we see the culmination of a government perpetual-growth machine that has been building for decades: Destroy the family through welfare and no-fault divorce; then evict and criminalize the fathers; then institutionalize the children as state wards through various "services" to relieve single mothers. This is precisely the loss of freedom through the erosion of the family that conservatives have long been warning against. Now their own leaders are implementing it.

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