ND Shared-Parenting Initiative: Trust Parents, Not the System

http://mensnewsdaily.com/2006/08/22/...ot-the-system/

The North Dakota Shared-Parenting Initiative: Trust Parents, Not the System
August 22, 2006
By David R. Usher

The weak arguments against North Dakota's November shared-parenting ballot
initiative offered up by HHS Executive Director Carol Olson and Grand Forks
Herald columnist Lloyd Omdahl offer up the same misleading arguments we have
heard for years: that divorce courts work perfectly, the "system" is all
that citizens need, and social services has already saved the world.

They have proven only one thing: you cannot trust the social services
apparatchik to do the right thing even where the need is intuitively obvious
to everyone not bought by federal windfalls. If they had paid attention,
17,000 citizens in North Dakota would never have found reason to sign the
shared-parenting ballot petition.

Carol Olson's position is patently perverse: the only thing that matters is
maximizing federal income to the state, even if it means senselessly
destroying the lives of children and, indeed, fatherhood itself. She would
replace good families and principles with an oppressive village bought by
political payoffs. She cares only about maximizing federal revenues,
pretending that decreases in state expenditures (and correspondingly federal
entitlements) somehow represent a "loss" to the state.

In support of mass family gentrification, Omdahl pretends that replacing the
destructive "one size fits all" approach, with a long-overdue legal standard
requiring North Dakota courts to normally uphold parental rights in divorce,
is somehow misguided.

A wall of writers and activists pinned the tail on this donkey. Dr. Stephen
Baskerville, Don Mathis, John Maguire, Mitchell Sanderson, and Rob Port
weighed in to prove the state sorely wrong.

While state laws often set forth a theoretical preference for "joint
custody" when "parents cooperate", the adversarial nature of the divorce
process ensures this cannot happen in the substantive majority of cases.
This inures to the financial benefit of trial lawyers and bureaucrats whose
power and income magnify by customarily destroying one parent in divorce
while leaving the custodial parent and children at the mercy of big
government.

Every major study on the divorce proves that children who lack active
paternal parenting and socialization do worse than their luckier
counterparts. Problems such as teen pregnancy, truancy, suicide, gang
involvement, and drug use substantively disappear when children have both
parents actively and continuously involved in raising them.

States that order and enforce shared-parenting also benefit from the highest
rates of natural child-support compliance: a fact that is anathema to
bureaucrats stridently opposing the shared-parenting petition.

Women are often mislead into believing that sole custody provides the best
financial outcome after divorce by maximizing the property settlement and
child support. This illusion drives irresponsible divorce decisions in the
first place and encourages the petitioner's attorney to cause as much
conflict as possible to assure the sole custody outcome.

Unfortunately, these traditional divorce court practices only ensure costly
and painful litigation by good and responsible fathers who are astonished
that the system would attempt to arbitrarily render them childless.

This perverse, traditional courtroom game conveniently maximizes fees for
divorce lawyers, courtroom psychologists and "special advocates", maximizes
federal funding to fix families broken by the system, leaves families deeply
in debt, and destroys the possibility of cooperative parenting permanently.
And, where this pre-scripted fight takes place behind closed doors, it is
virtually invisible to everyone else.

With shared-parenting, mothers will no longer find themselves burdened with
"doing it all" while begging for free child care and state assistance.
Family financial resources will be optimized, children will be far less
likely to be damaged, and child-support will finally be reasonably fair.
Notably, these benefits are the precise reasons why social services
agencies, lawyers, and anti-family politicians oppose the shared-parenting
initiative.

The shared parenting initiative will do exactly what most of us
non-bureaucrats know is best. It will protect children from bitter custody
battles and ensure they do not take place unless a parent is truly unfit.

Assuring natural rights of children and parental rights in divorce will
prevent the commonplace systemic wrongs which gave rise to the
shared-parenting initiative.

Where history teaches that we cannot trust bureaucrats to reasonably protect
parental rights, to shape a divorce system that does not customarily inject
disagreement into divorce; and where shared-parenting is proven to assure
the best outcomes for children, we must force the enactment of laws that
trust parents in the substantial majority of family law cases.