There are financial costs to the breakdown of the family:
Divorce and unwed childbearing cost taxpayers at least $112 billion each year or more than $1 trillion over the last decade. This estimate from the Institute for American Values is, as the authors suggest, likely to be an underestimate.
This staggering but plausible tally of the economic costs of family dissolution follows what we have long known about the social costs. All our major social ills – poverty, violent crime, substance abuse, truancy and more – are more closely linked to family breakdown and single-parent homes than to any other factor. A poor black child from an intact home is more likely to succeed than a rich white one from a single-mother home.
It is hardly surprising that massive financial costs follow from this: Welfare, law enforcement, education, health care – all these budgets are justified by the pathologies generated by single-parent homes. Indeed, family dissolution not only creates costs; by destroying society's basic economic unit, it also prevents generating the wealth to meet those costs.
Yet, even this is only the beginning. More alarming still are the political costs. For contrary to the beliefs even of most conservatives, divorce and unwed childbearing are not the products merely of a decadent culture. They are driven by government – the same government that is extracting $112 billion annually from our pockets.
The anti-parent crusade of public education is one way in which government is involved in the anti-family movement:
Divorce has transformed welfare programs into mechanisms for creating fatherless homes in the middle class. And here the welfare bureaucracies go further: After driving out the fathers, they are seizing family wealth and even incarcerating the fathers.
This criminalization of parents is not isolated. Perhaps the earliest welfare state provision was the public school system, which jealously guards its prerogatives of using children as political pawns. The recent California appeals court decision allowing the criminalization of homeschoolers is only one indication of government's increasingly aggressive stance toward parents. The federal decision in Fields v. Palmdale, ruling that parents have no right to a voice in their children's public school education, is another.
Then there is the favorite use of children as political pawns by the government to attack the family…calims of child abuse:
For example, child support enforcement is advertised as a way to recover welfare costs by forcing "deadbeat dads" to support children they "abandon." In reality, it has become a massive subsidy on middle-class divorce, effectively bribing mothers to divorce with the promise of a tax-free windfall subsidized by taxpayers. It is also a means for incarcerating fathers without trial who cannot pay the extortionate sums. Far from saving money, child support enforcement loses money and – far more serious – subsidizes the divorces and unwed births that generate these additional costs.
Programs ostensibly for "child abuse" and "domestic violence" – problems also originating in single-parent welfare homes – have likewise become tools to create single-parent homes in the middle-class through divorce proceedings. Patently trumped-up accusations of child abuse or domestic violence, presented without any evidence, are used to separate fathers from their children and, likewise, to jail them not through criminal trials but through "civil" divorce proceedings and in new, openly feminist "domestic violence courts." Thus does family dissolution also undermine our most cherished due process protections.
Further, mothers are not only enticed into divorce with promises of lucrative support payments; they are also coerced into it through threats of losing their children themselves. Mothers are now ordered to divorce their husbands on pain of losing their children through spurious child abuse accusations. Intact middle-class families now live in fear of a visit from the dreaded "child protective services" with the possibility of losing their children.
When big government’s role of a Nanny State becomes that of a Police State, children are left behind in a broken family environment that is real child abuse. But there is something we can do about it. Here is a link to a web site that has a petition to create a Constitutional Amendment regarding parental rights. Here is an analysis of the current Supreme Court regardng the issue of parental rights:
In the most recent parental rights decision by the Supreme Court (Troxel v. Granville), Justice Scalia made it clear that he is a political supporter of the concept of parental rights. He believes that this right is an inalienable human right and was included within the Ninth Amendment's declaration of reserved rights. However, because parental rights are not explicitly stated in any constitutional language, Scalia voted to deny parental rights the status of an enforceable constitutional right.
Troxel v. Granville was a plurality decision with six separate opinions. None of these conflicting opinions commanded a clear majority. Two of the justices voting in favor of parental rights have now left the court. They have been replaced by John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who are reputed to share many of the legal views of Scalia. Whether Roberts and Alito think like Scalia remains to be seen. But it is beyond question that many young conservative legal scholars are trained to think just like Scalia on this point. His views are the mainstream among groups like the Federalist Society.
In short, Scalia believes that no right is protected unless it is expressly stated in the text of the Constitution. While most of us like this theory if it is used to reverse Roe v. Wade, we would be quite alarmed if parental rights were suddenly no longer a protected constitutional right.
The Troxel case dealt with the right of grandparents to demand visitation with their grandchildren over the objection of the children's parents. Only four justices joined the main opinion of the Court, which held that parental rights were "fundamental," meriting the highest level of constitutional protection. (Two of these, Rehnquist and O'Connor, are the justices who have since left the Court.) Justice Thomas wrote an opinion concurring in this result and emphasizing the same basic legal test.
Justice Souter wrote a separate opinion saying that parents have rights, but not fundamental rights. This means he holds a low view of parental rights.
As we already noted, Justice Scalia said that parental rights were not protected because they are not explicitly in the Constitution.
Justice Stevens held that parents do not have the right to override state legislative decisions of this nature—which is consistent with Stevens' overall anti-tradition, anti-religious perspective.
Justice Kennedy believed that modern family life was too complicated to be run simply by parents and he advocated a "balanced" approach, which is consistent with Kennedy's general anti-traditional theories.
Accordingly, we have only three current Supreme Court justices (including Thomas) who sided with a strong view of parental rights in this most recent decision. And two of these are among the most liberal members of the Court—Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Even if Alito and Roberts are both strong advocates of parental rights, we should not rest our confidence for the future of this country on a current five-to-four Supreme Court majority.
And the anti—parent movement is a global one and lays out the true intent of Hillary's Village:
In 2002, I published a novel, Forbid Them Not (Broadman & Holman), with the premise that a thinly-disguised Hillary Clinton had been elected president. The first act of her new administration was to secure the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). I do not claim the gift of prophecy, but there is a looming possibility that I may be proven right.
If this treaty becomes binding on the United States, the government would have the power to intervene in a child's life "for the best interest of the child." Currently, the government can intervene in this fashion only by going to court and proving that parents have been abusive or have neglected their children. (This standard also applies in divorce cases on the presumption that the family unit has been broken.) This means that whenever the UN-dominated social services system thought that your parental choices were not the best, the government would have the power to override your choices and protect your child from you. If this treaty becomes binding, all parents would have the same legal status as abusive parents, because the government would have the right to override every parental decision if it deemed the parent's choice contrary to the child's best interest.
Specifically, spanking would be banned under the express terms of the UNCRC. Moreover, children would be required to be taught in a religiously "tolerant manner". (The American Bar Association, which supports the treaty, has already opined that teaching children that Jesus is the only way to God violates the spirit and meaning of the UNCRC.) The ability to homeschool one's children would become not a right, but a UN-supervised activity that could be overturned if social services personnel believed that it would be "best" for your child to receive another form of education. These are not idle speculations, but the proven result of the UN's own interpretation of the treaty as they have reviewed other nations' compliance with the treaty's provisions.
Here's the difference: No other major nation in the world has a constitutional provision that makes a provision of a treaty automatically part of the "highest law of the land." This is the Constitution's Achilles heel. In every other nation, the UNCRC is a political liability—if ratified in America, it would be an enforceable and binding law.
Under existing Supreme Court precedent, a treaty cannot override an express provision of the U.S. Constitution. But a treaty can override a reserved right (Missouri v. Holland). And a treaty certainly can override either a state constitution or state statute. Parental rights are reserved (or implied) rights; they are not an express provision within the Constitution.
A ratified treaty would clearly threaten our longstanding constitutional recognition of the liberty to raise our children. Moreover, it would instantly override every legislative victory ever won for homeschooling.
A federal district court has already ruled, in two separate cases, that the UNCRC is binding on the United States under the doctrine of customary international law. The Supreme Court has also begun to use the UN Convention, not as binding authority, but as persuasive authority in interpreting the Constitution. For instance, in the recent case Roper v. Simmons, the Court enacted a new statute-like rule that no state may impose the death penalty on juveniles—based in part on the Court's reading of this UN Convention.
The left does not believe in parental rights and has the legal and political mechanisms in place to fully eradicate this liberty.
Now is the time to take action by signing the petition and urging our congressional delegation’s support for the Constitutional Amendment to grant parental rights.
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