McManus Marriage Savers Schedule and columns: Shared Parenting and TANF Anniversary -8/29/06

Thu Aug 31 14:26:08 EDT 2006

- MARRIAGE SAVERS FALL TRAINING SCHEDULE 2006- COME ONE, COME ALL!
- THE NEED FOR SHARED PARENTING
- IMPACT OF WELFARE REFORM AFTER TEN YEARS

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- MARRIAGE SAVERS FALL TRAINING SCHEDULE 2006- COME ONE, COME ALL!

Here is the fall schedule for the signing of Community Marriage Policies
#208-215 from Portland, Maine to Pomona, California and from Huntsville, AL
to Whippany, NJ!  In most places we will celebrate the signing of a CMP and
also train Mentor Couples and clergy on Friday night from 6:30-10pm and on
Saturday from 8:30am-5pm  The training, by Mike and Harriet McManus, covers
five stages of intervention: Marriage Preparation, Marriage Enrichment,
Marriage Restoration, Reconciliation of Separated Couples, and helping
Stepfamily couples. ANYONE who wants to attend is WELCOME, but must register
with the local contact cited below. You can also take a full two-day
training with Mike and Harriet on how to establish Marriage Saver
congregations and Community Marriage Policies at the Denver 2007 Smart
Marriages Conference.

SEPTEMBER 
Sept. 15-16: Manassas, VA, Dudley United Methodist Church
Rev. Ralph Sutter 703 754-4380.

Sept. 22-23: Palmdale, CA: Mike and Harriet will meet with clergy from
southern California cities to explain how a Community Marriage Policy can
reduce divorce and cohabitation rates at 3pm followed by the usual training.
Rebecca Brooks, 661 943-7550.

Sept. 30: Columbus, OH - Sat morning: 8:30-12:30
Dr. Steve Judah, 614 451-0116.

OCTOBER
October 6-7: Zanesville, OH: Signing of America¹s 208th Community Marriage
Policy plus training.
Burl Lemon, 740 319-7075.

October 13-14: Portland, ME - 209th Community Marriage Policy signing
Plus training.  
Steve Beirne, 207 772-2968

October 20-21: Huntsville, AL - 210th CMP Plus training.
Debbie Preece, 256-519-7100.

October 27-28: Millersburg, OH - 211th CMP Plus training.
Linda Hershberger-Kirk, 330 674-5545

NOVEMBER
Nov. 4: Crystal City, VA: Mike & Harriet will speak at the Children¹s Rights
Council at 2pm on the need for reforming No Fault Divorce, plus proven
strategies to save separated couples or those in crisis marriages.
David Levy, 301 559-3120.

Nov. 17-18: Whippany, NJ: - 212th CMP. Plus training.
Len Deo, N.J. Family Policy Council, 973 263-5258

Nov. 24-25: Elkton, DE: 213th Community Marriage Policy Plus training.
Rev. Alan Bosmeney 410 398-4234.

DECEMBER
Dec. 1-2: Pomona, CA: #214 CMP plus training.
 Ken Allison, 951-545-6146

Dec. 8-9: Casper, WY: - signing Wyoming¹s second CMP, and the nation¹s
#215th. Plus training.  Call Kathleen Kennedy, 307 775-0010

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- THE NEED FOR SHARED PARENTING
Ethics and Religion Column
August 19, 2006 
by Mike McManus

John Murtari, 49, is sitting in a Syracuse jail for two weeks as I write,
and has refused to eat or drink to protest ³gross and repeated injustice²
by the court system in a custody battle over access to his son, Domenic, 13.

>From the state¹s perspective, he is a deadbeat dad, who owes $60,000 in
child support.

However, the initial support level was not based on his income, but the
$70,000 he once earned as a software engineer for a defense firm.  When the
company filed false reports, he says he blew the whistle and was fired the
next day.

Though president of his own software firm, his earnings are half of what he
used to make.  The first injustice is that his child support level was set
far too high. Second, the court allowed his wife to move to Colorado, in
spite of his protest.  She¹s studying for a third college degree, which she
could have pursued in New York State. Why should any court allow a divorced
parent to move so far away that child visitation by the parent left behind
is almost impossible?

If Domenic visited him, John had to fly to Colorado, pick him up, bring him
back, and then return with him to Colorado. Three round trip tickets cost
$1,000 per visit.  But the court would not allow him to deduct that from his
child support payments. That¹s a third injustice.

Fourth, he repeatedly filed for modifications of his child support level,
and was denied. He was assigned a public defender who told him, ³John, just
pay the money.  You¹ll see your son when he is 18.²

John has been paying $50 a month, which is skimpy.  However, he estimates he
has spent $60,000 in support of his son, but none of it counts in the
court¹s eyes. In the last seven years, he flew out four times a year for
visits, and picked him up for vacations in New York twice a year. ³How many
of those could I have traded away - and not lost our relationship?² he asks.

So he sits today in debtor¹s prison, to call attention to the plight of
divorced parents denied regular access to their children.  John told me
before going to jail that he would not eat or drink and would force the
prison to keep him alive with a feeding tube. For ten days the jail refused
to do so. His weight dropped from 155 pounds to 127. His blood pressure fell
to a dangerous level.

Stories appeared in local newspapers, and a feeding tube was inserted. He
asserts, ³This is not suicide wish or hunger strike. My goal is not to hurt
myself but to make them expend an uncomfortable amount of effort to keep me
in custody.²

There has to be a better answer and there is.  It is called ³shared
parenting,² or ³joint custody,² which is granted in only 16 percent of
cases. According to a study by the American Psychological Association, ³A
major advantage of joint custody may be its ability to address the high rate
of current father absence subsequent to divorce. Joint custody has been
correlated with increased father involvement.²

Second, ³Joint custody versus sole maternal custody was associated with
adolescent¹s positive adjustment.  Several studies found that increased and
reliable visitation by the noncustodial parent (usually the father)
predicted positive adjustment of children.²

Feminists oppose joint custody on grounds that child support will be
reduced. However, ³the consensus of studies² found that ³child support is
either increased² or not significantly different. A fourth benefit is that
there is ³decreased re-litigation² with shared parenting, and less conflict
between spouses in general.

Thus, research proves what common sense would suggest.  Shared parenting
results in greater father involvement, more financial support, less
litigation and happier children.

David Levy, an attorney who is President of the Children¹s Rights Council,
reports another great impact of joint custody. States with the greatest
amount of joint custody enjoyed a big drop in divorce rates. The six states
with the most joint custody are, in order, Montana, Kansas, Connecticut,
Idaho, Rhode Island, and Alaska.  The states with the highest decline in
divorce in the 1990s were Alaska, Kansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Montana and
Idaho.

Why?

³If a parent knows that he or she will have to interact with the child¹s
other parent while the child is growing up, there is less incentive to
divorce,² says Levy.

Here¹s a political issue for this political season.

Candidates for governor or state legislatures: why not fight for more joint
custody to support kids and lower divorce rates?

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- IMPACT OF WELFARE REFORM AFTER TEN YEARS
Ethics and Religion Column
August 23, 2006
by Michael J, McManus

 President Clinton pledged to "end welfare as we know it" when elected in
1992. But he vetoed two Welfare Reform bills before signing one in August,
1996, just before his re-election.

 Arguably, no law has had such a positive national impact since passage of
the 1965 Civil Rights Act.  Between 1970 and 1996, federal aid to the poor
tripled, yet the percentage of black children in poverty remained stubbornly
at the 40 percent level. Why?

 Welfare was given with only two rules: a mother could not work and she
could not be married to an employed man. "It was an incentive system from
hell," argued Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and the primary
architect of Welfare Reform, known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
(TANF)..

 He says, "It created a sea change, by replacing one-way handouts with
reciprocal obligations.  Handouts had bred a climate of dependence. In
exchange for benefits, government now requires constructive behavior to move
out of poverty by working." And rather than prolonged dependence, benefits
were limited to a total of five years.

 Sen. Pat Moynihan called the law, "The most brutal act of social policy
since reconstruction." He predicted "Those involved will take this disgrace
to their graves."

 Marion Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund, called the
law "an outrage...that will hurt and impoverish millions of American
children." Even the sober, thoughtful Urban Institute predicted the law
would push 2.6 million people into poverty, including 1.1 million children.

 Edelman's husband, Peter Edelman, resigned his position as Assistant
Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services predicting a wide
disaster: "There will be more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant
mortality," and would fail even in promoting work because "there simply are
not enough jobs now."

 What really happened?

 Jason Turner, who ran New York City's program tells of a woman applying for
TANF, who heard the new rules, shook her head saying, "I might as well take
a job." Exactly. 

 The number of families on the dole dropped from 4.3 million to 1.89
million, a 56 percent plunge.  However, no one, not even Robert Rector,
predicted such a sharp decline.

 Did that push millions into poverty? No. There are 1.6 million fewer
children in poverty, with the greatest decreases among black children,
falling from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004. That is
nationally unprecedented. Further, dependence fell most sharply among young
never-married mothers with low levels of education and young children.

 "This is dramatic confirmation that welfare reform affected the whole
welfare caseload, not merely the most employable mothers," Rector testified
recently.

 Some critics noted that the poverty rate has risen in recent years, which
is true.  But it fell from 23 percent of the nation below the poverty line
in 1996 to 16 percent in 2000, and did move slightly back up to 18 percent
in 2004.

 One weakness of the original law was that each state could define what it
meant by work. Some called bed rest, or attending smoking cessation classes
or motivational reading as work. This year, the Administration did persuade
Congress to make sure that work is what most Americans believe it is, and
required that at least half of the caseload be working.  Critics said this
was setting the "bar too high."  But since 2002, Georgia has gone from 8
percent participating in work to 67 percent.

 States largely ignored provisions of the original law to take steps to
"prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock births," and "encourage
the formation and maintenance of two parent families." So the new law
specifically set aside $100 million a year that must be spent to strengthen
marriage, the first dedicated funding stream to help create healthy
marriages.

 This year Ohio did set aside one percent of its $1.2 billion TANF budget to
strengthen marriage and families, $12 million. This week marriage activists
in other states began to mobilize to pressure their states to adopt a
similar ONE PERCENT SOLUTION modeled on Ohio.

 Present divorce law makes divorce too easy to get.  If one person alleges
the marriage is "irreconcilable," the other spouse can make no defense to
stop the divorce.  Most divorces are filed by women because they know they
can usually get child custody.

 The solution? "Whoever is the creator of the divorce does not get the
child," argued Eloise Anderson, who ran welfare in Wisconsin and California,
at a Heritage Foundation meeting. At least joint custody should replace sole
custody, as I argued last week, to give kids better access to fathers,
greater financial support, and less likelihood their parents will divorce.

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