North Dakota shared parenting initiative falls short

Lesson: Keep It Simple, Stupid

Those who follow the subject may have heard that the initiative to the voters in North Dakota for shared parenting failed. I’m quite impressed that a group of advocates got together and were organized enough to get the signatures. That task alone is daunting. The margin they lost by was also not a land slide- so they definitely proved to the voters that there is merit to the issue. However having participated in a group recently investigating the viability of an initiative here in Washington, I was surprised when I heard that the bill included reforming the support payments as well. I believe this was the cause of their loss. I'm not alone in this assessment as Glenn Sacks had nearly the exact same words to say.

Advocates for shared parenting here in Washington have been focusing only on the time factor and the parenting rights. We have been very conscious about leaving the financial tiger of the heavily funded arm of DSHS and associated lobbies alone. It’s not that the child support guidelines don’t need massive reform (like child support is currently another word for alimony and has nothing to do with a child’s needs or either parent’s ability to fill them financially as well as a ton of other issues related to fraud) rather you don’t try to take on every battle in one vote and you don’t put an issue as complex or with as much well funded opposition as modifying support payments in front of voters.

I’ve been somewhat pleased to see support and movement in the legislature on shared parenting here in Washington this past year. In fact it became a topic of debate in a house race between Rep Dean Takko and GOP challenger Tim Sutinen in the Longview area this fall. After some debate on the subject, both candidates came out in favor of the proposed legislation at which point we would have liked to have seen candidates take the debate to the next level, which would have been a pledge to hold opponents of the legislation to a standard of accountability.

What do I mean by a “standard of accountability?”

This means that while feminist advocates like to tell horrid stories of domestic violence and use it against this legislation, they like to leave out the statistic that says these same women abuse children 2:1 over fathers. They like to shout about the abuse, but pull the wool over the eyes of the legislature about child abuse or the number of child rape cases perpetrated by “mom’s new boyfriend.”

A standard of accountability means that when an activist judge gets up and says the process of determining custody is very complex and weighs lots of factors, they also have to EXPLAIN why the result of this “complex process” comes out with exactly the same result 90% of the time in their own court room.

Of course when it comes to standards of accountability, anyone looking at the WASL scores and general academic under-performance of the last generation of children, they would see a 100% correlation with the decline of children having 2 parents involved in their lives.