Time to replace no-fault divorce w/ mutual consent

The IVA is now on the radio three times a day with a “Pro-Family Minute,” a 60-second daily briefing on cultural trends and how they intersect with life in Idaho.

Ben Stein’s new documentary, “Expelled,” will be shown at 7:05 p.m. at

the Edward’s 22 Cinemas in Boise on opening night, this Friday, April 18.

We’ll have an informal reception at 5:30 p.m. that night at the Guang Zhou restaurant, located right across the plaza from the main entrance to Edward’s. Hope to see you there!

When I have brought up the subject of reforming Idaho’s “no-fault” divorce provision, even with lawmakers, I often hear that the government should just stay out of the divorce business, or that it really isn’t the government’s business, or other words to the same effect.

However, a comprehensive study released today tells us that divorce is most emphatically the government’s business, since it costs American taxpayers at least $112 billion a year.

This is due to the costs divorce imposes on society for health care, criminal justice, welfare programs and lost income-tax revenue due to family fragmentation.

Taxpayers cough up $63 billion in Medicaid and welfare programs for

single-parent families, spend another $9 billion in child-welfare costs, and $19 billion to maintain courts, police, prisons and jails.

Reducing these costs is clearly a legitimate concern for policymakers and legislators.

The place to begin in Idaho is by replacing “no-fault” divorce with “mutual consent” divorce.

“No-fault” divorce is really “unilateral” divorce since it allows one spouse to unilaterally break up a marriage without cause. This is significant when research reports that in 80% of the cases one spouse wants to keep the marriage and family together.

In fact, divorce law is the only place in code where we guarantee a legal victory to the individual who wants to break a contract.

“Mutual consent” divorce would require that a marriage entered into by mutual agreement could only be dissolved by mutual agreement, and would likely reduce the divorce rate by 30% according to John Crouch of Americans for Divorce Reform. This is particularly significant in Idaho, where the divorce rate, perhaps surprisingly to many, is almost 50% higher than the national average.

In 1985, there were 26,300 pages in the federal tax code. This jumped to 40,500 by 1995, and today stands at an astronomical 67,200 pages.

The average person spends 26.5 hours and more than $200 ($444 for the self-employed) collecting and compiling information for the tax man, totaling $92.6 billion in “value of lost time” costs. And it’s even worse for businesses. The corporate cost of compliance is about $170 billion, and GE’s 2006 tax return ran to an unbelievable 24,000 printed pages.

What to do? As Newt Gingrich suggests, perhaps the best place to begin is to provide an optional flat tax plan, the “one page, one rate” plan. It would implement a single rate of taxation for all Americans, which is a simple matter of justice. A person with twice the income pays twice the taxes.

Graduated tax rates are inherently unjust, for they tax people at different rates depending on the amount of their income. (Imagine going to buy a car, asking how much it costs, and being told, “Well, that all depends on how much you make.”)

The flat tax would eliminate the taxes on savings, capital gains and dividends, and give U.S. companies less incentive to transport jobs overseas.

A “flat tax” return could be prepared on a postcard: subtract from your income a standard deduction, multiply the result by the single rate of taxation, and you’re done. And if it’s optional, which is the American way, people still enamored of the 67,200 pages of tax code can knock themselves out.

It makes so much sense it’s most likely politically impossible. But, hey, we can dream.

Note: The Gem State Voter Guide will address both divorce reform and the flat tax. The deadline for candidates to return the questionnaires is April 25.

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Ø Good news and bad news from the culture front. The good: fewer teens are getting pregnant and fewer pregnant teens are having abortions. In fact, the abortion rate among teenagers is the lowest since 1974. The bad: while two-thirds of white and Hispanic wome

n keep their babies when they get pregnant, just 48% of African-American women opt to do so, perhaps a result of Planned Parenthood’s racism and deliberate placing of clinics in minority neighborhoods. An astonishing statistic: according to the CDC, 45% of all pregnancies now are among women who are not married. If there was ever a time for the evangelical church to remind our culture of the sacredness of sex, its design exclusively for marriage, and that child-bearing should only take place within marriage rather than apart from it, it is now. (Study: Fewer Teens Getting Pregnant, Fewer Pregnant Teens Have Abortions; Fewer U.S. teens are getting pregnant: study | Reuters)

Ø While I have no support whatsoever for the practices within the recently raided polygamous community in Texas, I have grave concerns about the justification for the raid. Authorities still have not

identified the source of the complaint, or even verified that it came from a current resident of the compound. Four hundred children have been separated from their mothers, even from those against whom no charge has been made, leaving Texas authorities with a completely unmanageable child care situation and a legal nightmare. If the authorities were going to move against this community, they should have done so at the very beginning, on specific charges of statutory rape and adultery. (Since you can only have one spouse under Texas law, every sex act with another “wife” was a criminal act.) Facing your accuser in open court is one of the keystones of our legal system, but children now can be yanked away from their parents on the basis of anonymous and unproven accusations, which is a gross injustice. (Women of polygamist retreat speak out - Yahoo! News)

Ø Andrew McCarthy, a key prosecutor in the trials for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and author of the new book Willful Blindness, warns that we must not underestimate the dark energy behind radical Islam. He says, “The primary cause of Islamic terrorism is Muslim doctrine,” and adds, “We are not fighting a tiny, rag-tag collection of

fringe lunatics who have somehow ‘hijacked’ the ‘true Islam.’ The stubborn fact is: Islamic doctrine is supremacist, chauvinist and rife with calls to violence against non-Muslims.” To quote author Mark Steyn, “There are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam.” McCarthy’s biggest concern is that we in the West “don’t have the stomach for the fight” because of our “self-loathing and arrogance.” We doubt whether we are “worth the trouble to defend,” and wrongly assume “that if people hate us, we must deserve it.” Part of the solution involves a “strong military component. There is simply no substitute for killing and capturing jihadists.” As far as accommodating Islam in

America

, we should “make no apologies for the fact that we are not an Islamic society and have no intention of becoming one.” (Wartime Malpractice - National Review Online)

Ø Meanwhile, Christianity continues to wither in Europe, as France increasingly resorts to blowing up crumbling and empty churches, at least the ones which haven’t been converted into mosques. At the same time, a Hamas cleric (the same Hamas with whom Jimmy Carter is

cavorting this week) said in a sermon last Friday that Islam will soon conquer the city of Rome before spreading through all of Europe and then on to the Americas. He called for Islamic “military conquests of the capitals of the entire world,” just after calling the Jews “the brothers of apes and pigs.” He preached last June that, “The most exalted form of jihad is fighting for the sake of Allah, by fighting the enemies head-on, even if it leads to martyrdom.” At some point, we need to start taking these people at their word, and cut off immigration from countries that sponsor, support, or accommodate Islamic terrorism. It may too late for Europe, but it is not too late for the U.S. (Churches crumble in France, and a country asks how it can save them - International Herald Tribune; FOXNews.com - Hamas Cleric Predicts 'Rome Will Be Conquered by Islam'; Click here to view al-Astal's sermon on MimriTV.org)