While Gov. Sam Brownback promotes marriage with the goal of cutting welfare costs in Kansas, lawmakers in Mexico City want to experiment with temporary marriage to make it easier for young couples to split without hassle and expense.
Liberals in the city’s assembly, according to a Reuters report, propose a reform in the civil code that will allow couples to decide on the length of their commitment, opting out of a lifetime. Under the proposed change the minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple decides the marriage is a mistake.
Those with a two-year contract would have to go to city hall and re-up when their time expired. That would require 25 two-year contracts before a guy and gal could celebrate their golden anniversary. As the Catholic Church said, “despicable,” or the equivalent.
Marriage here and in Mexico City (where the divorce rate is 50 percent) is already temporary. Marriages last when there is love and commitment. The state can generate neither. Divorce, as the Mexican leftists argue, should be within reach of the poor. But putting a predetermined destruct date on marriage licenses is a bad idea for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is that it would encourage couples to decide in advance how long they could stand each other. The result most likely would be more split-ups, not fewer. Who wants a reputation as a poor prophet?
Here in Kansas, our governor appears persuaded that because 62 percent of our state’s impoverished children live with an unmarried parent or parents, marriage status plays a determining role in creating poverty. By taking away whatever barriers there are to marriage, more couples would marry and by taking that legal step would get richer, his thinking goes.
That’s making very complex things unrealistically simple. First, give the poor some credit. If they thought getting married — a very easy, inexpensive thing to do — would bring in money they’d do it in a New York minute.
They don’t get married because marriage is supposed to be permanent. Staying single is a kind of honesty. And a kindness, too: why would I want to shackle anyone to me when I don’t know where my next meal is coming from?
THE SEARCH FOR “proof” that Kansas welfare benefits to the poor could be slashed without doing anyone harm simply by finding some way to increase the marriage rate in that cohort of people is both specious and cynical.
It is not a coincidence that while the administration pursues ways to enhance the budget by cutting payments to the poor, Gov. Brownback is getting ready to propose a cut in the state’s income tax at the highest level. Spending less on welfare would give budget room for a tax cut.
How’s that for a reverse on Robin Hood? Take from the poor; give to the rich. If the Legislature buys that callous immorality Kansas is in a heap of trouble.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
