Britain Scraps Child
Support Agency While Republicans Remain Torporific
Last week, British ministers
announced their intent to demolish the national Child
Support Agency (CSA). They have
realized it is an overbearing, expensive failure hurting marriage, driving
divorce, and placing the government in the middle of never-ending
power-squabbles over money and children. They plan to return responsibility to
parents who (for the most part) will be expected work out their own support and
parenting arrangements.
Lord Hunt called for a new agency: “One which puts
children first, gets more children out of poverty, actually gives
responsibility back to parents to try and resolve child support issues
themselves. But
where they can’t, you have a strong organization … strong on enforcement and is
efficient. The problem with assessments … is the agency has to keep track of
ever-changing circumstances.
At the same time it’s in the middle of warring parents.”
The new agency is slated to focus on parents who refuse to
pay anything. This
is as it should be: shared parenting and reasonable
support of children will never take place so long as governmental focus is
solely on extracting the largest possible sums money by making them fatherless.
British author Melanie Phillips
painted a profound portrait of Britain’s child-support state (which is quite tame
compared to ours), in her treatise ‘Why Labor Despises
Family’: “The result has been such a
catastrophic failure in parenting, particularly among the poor, that the
Government is now assuming the role of surrogate state parent, with an
oppressively detailed and prescriptive strategy for telling parents how to
bring up their children … Thus, the state takes draconian control of our lives,
parents are radically disempowered, freedom is grossly undermined — and the
social catastrophe of family disintegration still continues apace.”
While British Conservatives are cleaning house,
The failure of the (now-Republican) Great Society to
deliver any palpable social improvement for the horrendous expenditures
squandered proves points I will repeat until the Republican Party assumes room
temperature. Personal
responsibility means not entitling mass irresponsibility and radical-feminist
social deconstructionism.
Compassionate conservatism means that most men and women will
make the right choices when government refuses to entitle wrong choices. We must end the war
on marriage now, and let the marriage-market revivify naturally.
When we reform the child-support-state, most men and women
will choose partners more wisely to begin with. Women will avoid childbirth until
marriage (or look to marriage to naturally resolve the occasional accidental
illegitimate birth). Most
spouses will work through the normal problems and processes of marriage and
aging. Finally,
most couples will reasonably share childrearing and support responsibilities
when divorce is necessary.
Astonishingly, Republican leadership (and nearly all of
Congress) remains statuesquely torporific on these
issues of tremendous national consequence and wide voter antipathy. Republican analysts
do not think the votes are there. Just ask the next 100 people you meet
on the street to prove them wrong.
At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in March,
RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman confessed to a history of
sedimentary inertia when given a cameo opportunity to answer a few simple
questions about basic child support, domestic violence, and marriage issues. His response: “I’m
going to give you a non-Washington answer because I don’t know enough about
this to comment, which you don’t typically get out of
Republicans who think feminists will vote for them under
any circumstances have yet to meet Ann Coulter. Begging for the Streisand vote,
they placed Senator Joe Biden (the inheritor of Senator Paul Wellstone’s harem
of drive-by feminist gangsteresses), in charge of
VAWA Reauthorization. Then,
the Senate leadershi
The House just voted to increase VAWA funding. Fortunately,
President Bush wants a 15% cut, but for the wrong reason. VAWA should be cut
entirely because it is largely a very destructive feminist divorce-entitlement
system, not because fiscal conservatism calls for across-the-board spending
cuts.
The House unceremoniously dumped the Marriage Amendment
into the Potomac attached to a concrete block imported from
As if blocking sensible social reform is insufficiently
conservative, party leadership is stonewalling potential Presidential
candidates calling for change. Dr. Mark Klein, running for
the 2008 Republican nomination, has done surprisingly
well at state conferences despite a complete absence of political history. Were Dr. Klein not
a virgin barging into a cavernous temple full of narcoleptic mummies, new life
and ideas might be breathed into the Party, and the
disengaged conservative base might have something more useful to do than
watching Bill Maher debate the few real Republicans that still have anything
worth hearing.
Republicans, understand this: Your situation is now
desperate. The
motivated male and equalitarian-female majority vote that won past elections is
now fully-detached and fervently looking elsewhere. Playing the “war on terror” card is old news
and will not carry upcoming elections.
Social reform under policies Republicans pursued for the
past decade is a failure.
The overall birth rate is at record lows,
while the proportion of all births to unmarried women increased to 35.8
percent in 2004, the highest ever recorded. The Republican
child-support-state has not
palpably reduced poverty.
More
Americans are cohabiting in weak relationships, and fewer are marrying to begin
with. Divorce
rates are still very high, at 3.8 per 100,000 population (the small decline in divorce rates parallels
declining marriage rates).
Unsurprisingly, we have more (disengaged) men in prison,
as a percentage of population, than any other free nation. In fact, our ratio of 726 inmates per 100,000
population is more than 500% that of
Moral: when a young boy is brought up expecting not to be
a father and a husband, is raised by a feminist-dominated educational system
and a television set, has no father in his life, and is eventually sold into
feminist servitude, the future of America is not what it used to be.
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David
R. Usher is Senior Policy Analyst for the True Equality Network,
and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri
Coalition