Chisum's "Marriage Tax" Is A Failure

Those of you who live in Texas may know State Rep. Warren Chisum (R-Pampa) as the right-winger who is trying to unseat Speaker of the House Joe Straus (R-San Antonio).   Chisum doesn't like Straus supposedly because he is a "moderate" Republican.   That's ridiculous, of course.   While Straus is a fairer speaker than the Texas House has had in many years, he's definitely a conservative.

Those of us in the Panhandle know the real reason Chisum wants to unseat Straus, and this has recently come out in some of the dirty infighting for the speaker position.   It is because Straus is Jewish, and Chisum (a fundamentalist christian right-winger) just can't stand the though of anyone but a fundamentalist christian being speaker (preferably himself) -- even if the non-fundamentalist non-christian is a fellow Republican.

Chisum is the kind of nut that thinks he was sent to the legislature to save souls -- that is, push his brand of fundamentalist christianity on all his fellow Texans (whether they want it or not).   To see this, all you have to do is look at the kind of bills he introduces.   He was able to wrangle two bills through the legislature in the last session (although thankfully the worst aspects of them were removed or toned down by his fellow legislators before they were passed).

The first was a bill to require the teaching of a Bible class in all Texas high schools.   Chisum wanted this to be a required course that all Texas teenagers would have to take to graduate.   The bill was passed and all Texas high schools must offer a Bible course, but the course was changed to be an elective course and no one has to take it that doesn't want to.

The second bill that he got passed was nicknamed the "marriage tax", because it double the state fee for a marriage license to $60 -- unless the couple received pre-marital counseling.   This was a thinly-disguised effort to get people into religious counseling (since most pre-marital counseling courses are offered by churches and taught by ministers here in Texas).   Of course, the couple could opt to pay for a secular counselor (but that would cost at least as much, if not more, than just coughing up the $60 fee).

The new law has been a dismal failure.   The statewide figures for those who opted to take the pre-marital counseling instead of paying the increased fee are incredibly low -- less than 15%.   That's probably about the same number that would have taken the counseling without the new law and increased license fee.   And in some urban counties, the figures are even lower.   Tarrant County (Fort Worth) shows less than 10% of couples opted for the counseling, and in Harris County the number was only about 5%.

I'm sure some right-wingers will claim that even though the law did not get significant numbers of couples into marriage counseling, it at least increased the amount of money fed into the state's coffers.   That's just silly.   The amount of money raised by the state on marriage licenses is negligible when compared to the enormous state budget.

The fact is that the "marriage tax" law is as miserable a failure as Chisum is as a legislator.

Chisum's Law Is Abject Failure

We have a right-wing nut-job here in the Texas Panhandle who has made it his personal goals to pass stupid laws and embarrass Panhandle residents. It is Republican Rep. Warren Chisum. In the last legislative session in 2007, he decided he knew how to fix Texas marriages and bring down the divorce rate -- whether anybody wanted him to or not.

He decided that everyone should get some marriage counseling before they got married. To try and force people to do this, he doubled the state portion of the marriage license fee from $30 to $60. All the couple had to do was get some pre-marital counseling, and the fee would be waived.

The only thing he didn't think of was that most people do not want the state to interfere in their marriage plans. As one Dallasite who wed last December said, "The state doesn’t have any business telling me what constitutes a good marriage."

It turns out that his program has been a huge failure (as anyone with half a brain could have predicted). Most couples have just paid the extra $30 and bypassed the counseling program. Tarrant County is a good example, where out of about 5,000 marriages only about 140 have opted for the counseling. That's less than 3%. That's not just a failure -- it's a spectacular failure.

But failure doesn't seem to faze Chisum. He's still determined to interject his ideas into other people's marriages. In this legislative session, he's introduced a bill that would force people to get marriage counseling before a judge could finalize their pending divorce. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that some divorces are good and need to happen.

Why would you force a woman to go to counseling with a husband who beats her (and who she may be trying to hide from)? Why would you force a woman to go to counseling with a man who was abusing her children? Is it really a good idea to force a woman to go to counseling with an alcoholic or drug addict?

He seems to think that men and women are too stupid to know when a divorce is the best thing, and they need a psychologist to tell them if it's OK or not. Chisum may be that stupid, but most other people are not.

I think it's time for Chisum to get his big nose out of other people's marriages.