Legislating Better Families
Idaho Task Force Suggests Ways To Make Families Stronger
By Greg Lemon, 11-09-07
The Idaho House of Representatives Family Task Force has issued a series of recommendations for making Idaho families stronger, according to an article in the Idaho Statesman today. The task force was convened by House Speaker Lawerence Denney and is using the typical 1950s family, where mothers frequently stayed home, as a benchmark.
The chairman of the task force is Rep. Steven Thayn. He sees divorce, single parent households and cohabitation as contributing to increase in drug use and crime.
According to the Statesman: “Thayn believes that reducing divorces could save the state $200 million because the crime rate would drop if divorces dropped. He thinks making it more difficult to get divorced would help families avoid what he sees as the pitfalls of non-traditional families.”
The task force also backs an idea to end no-fault divorce, which allows couples to divorce for without reason. They also recommend family impact statements to accompany proposed legislation.
Opponents of the groups’ recommendations say the government has no place in controlling family matters. It seems to be an issue the task force also struggled with, but ultimately decided that the government should do something. Task force member Marv Hagedorn, R-Meridian, told the Statesman: “I do believe we need to do some more preventative maintenance to keep our families together, whether that means incentivizing people to stay together or deincentivizing people to break apart.”
The lone Democrat on the task force, Branden Durst from Boise, said the group isn’t facing the reality of the modern-day economy, where a family needs two wage earners to survive.
“Clearly, I think that the reality is our economy can’t support having single-wage earners in every household,” Durst told the Statesman. “What’s important is the quality of the family and the people in the family.”
The story has sparked controversy, reflected in the dozens of comments it’s drawn. One reader wrote:
I am a native Boisean, a wife, and a mother with a successful career outside the home. I am absolutely incensed at the implications made by this initiative: that my employment makes me a materialistic, irresponsible parent; that my family is contributing to the degradation of society; that my husband and I are not equally suited to earn a living and care for our children; that our children lack guidance and are doomed to lives of crime and drug abuse; and that anyone is better off by my being “kept” anywhere, by anyone.
For a complete list of the task force’s recommendations, check out the Statesman’s story.
[End of article]Where do these social Neanderthals come from? What dark, twisted, blighted, narrow worlds produce such bizarre views?
And why do so many inhabit Idaho, as well as goodly portions of Wyoming and Montana?
I suspect Thayn must not only home-school his kids, but has a similarly straight-jacketed upbringing himself.
Ah, self-imposed ignorance -- the gift that keeps on giving and wanting to jam itself down your throat.
Interesting. I received this in an email today. What a quinkidink.
An excerpt from Good Housekeeping in 1955:
*Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have be thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they get home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed.
*Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you'll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.
*Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
*Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Run a dustcloth over the tables.
*During the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering to his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.
*Minimize all noise. At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Encourage the children to be quiet.
Be happy to see him.
*Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
*Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first - remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
*Don't greet him with complaints and problems.
*Don't complain if he's late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.
*Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or lie him down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.
*Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
Don't ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
*A good wife always knows her place.
Huh. Easy divorce is an oxymoron.
Those "blissfull" days of the 50's are long gone and no family task force is going to bring it back. What an eye roller you make of me, mister Denney.
I don’t understand why these efforts to “strengthen the family” always seem to come at the price of weakening women. Are legislators such as Steven Thayn so insecure in their masculinity that they feel their only choice is to limit women’s choices?
That said, if Representative Thayn truly wants to strengthen the family, here’s some steps for him:
Improve education for girls, so they don’t feel their only life choice is to get married and raise children.
Improve access to pre-marriage counseling. Instead of making divorce harder, make sure people are suited for getting married in the first place.
Improve education for both boys and girls, so they can get better-paying jobs when they do choose to raise a family.
Improve low-cost access to safe, legal birth control, to guarantee that every child is a wanted child and to reduce shotgun marriages.
Increase the minimum wage, to make it easier for a parent to choose to stay home with children.
Ensure that everyone in Idaho has access to health insurance.
Increase support for treatment facilities to help remove the scourge of drug and alcohol addiction.
Improve support for dads who choose to stay home with their children.
Improve access to early childhood education, to make sure all children start on a level playing field.
Improve access to affordable, safe daycare and supervised after-school programs, so families where parents work know their children are well cared for.
Provide incentives for employers to set up on-site daycare to make it easier for working parents.
Improve enforcement of child support payments.
Improve counseling for and legal protections against spousal and parental abuse.
The thing is, Thayn and people like him aren't really trying to strengthen the family, or they'd be doing things like this. 'Strengthening the family' is the presenting issue, the Mom-and-apple-pie label applied to it with which no one can disagree. What it's really about, however, is controlling women by limiting our options.
Sharon,
excellent response. I second pretty much everything you've said there.
I notice that the Task Force has ignored many of the real problems and is basically using the Idaho Values Alliance to create the agenda. They willfully ignore non-standard families in an effort to push the Christian ideology of one-man, one-woman families to the detriment of all others. They decry the defacto-relationship, pushing their ideology again, while ignoring worldwide data that doesn't agree with their statistics.
This will just turn out to be another useless government boondoggle, allowing people like Marv to suck up taxpayer funds and then just shrug their shoulders when their suggestions result in nothing positive for Idaho families.
Excellent comments Jay and Sharon. In the wake of Larry Craig where do Idaho Republicans get off that they have the moral authority to scold the rest of us on our lifestyles? After all its their closet they forced him into. And why do they think its a proper role of government to engage in social engineering? And why do they think we want to go back to the 50s that brought us fine upstanding Republicans like Joseph McCarthy?
Jay, reality has a well known liberal bias. You can't fight them with facts.
You're right Inky, Thayn is a home schooler. He hates the public school system. Want some blighted views? Go to Thayn's website here. http://www.reclaimidaho.com/ Keep posted to the Idaho liberal blogosphere for evidence of his hypocrisy in the coming days.
It's hard to understand Thayn isn't a character out of Sinclair Lewis or Ed Abbey: he's a real living breathing Idaho politico. And that worries me.
Comment By Artist, 11-15-07amen to Sharon's suggestions. A living wage and access to healthcare are what would Most support families. I know many cases where one partner (usually a woman) works in a lower paying job or chooses not to have more children because she/he is the one who gets the healthcare benefits. And if no one has healthcare benefits both (or the single parent) must work.
By the way does anyone remember that "ADC" was originally meant to support having a person home with the children. These "family values" people aren't even consistent.