Welfare programs tend to discourage the formation of families by making a breadwinner spouse/father unnecessary. His function is replaced by a guaranteed tax-paid income that carries no responsibilities or duties.
It has been obvious for some years that the welfare system is a major cause of the breakdown of the family structure among the people who receive those taxpayer-paid benefits. What is news is the role played by the Legal Services Corporation.
The LSC was created in 1974 as an agency to provide legal services to individual poor persons unable to afford a lawyer. A new booklet published by LSC called “Legal Services Corporation vs. the Family” paints a depressing picture of how tax-funded lawyers have adversely reshaped family law by initiating and litigating class action suits.
In their first foray into federal courts, LSC lawyers brought test cases in which the courts in 1968 knocked out the regulations of 19 states that denied AFDC benefits to a woman who cohabitated with a man, a law designed to discourage illegitimacy and to foster familial values. In 1973 LSC lawyers brought a test case which knocked out laws that excluded illegitimate children from benefits, and the precedent of that court decision preempted attempts by the states ot develop programs that favor traditional families.
Next the LSC lawyers went after what is called “deeming regulations,” the various laws which stated that the income of members of a family were “deemed” to be available to the entire household. The Congressional intent of these regulations was to eliminate duplicate benefits and to reinforce the family as a cooperative, self-supporting unit, based on the commonsense concept that family members share with each other.
LSC lawyers filed more than 30 challenges to these laws, particularly attacking “deeming” regulations that involve siblings and grandparents. Each of these LSC suits is an attempt to get an independent source of income for pregnant teenage girls without requiring them to live with their parents and without requiring parents to share in the support of their minor daughters.
LSC lawyers challenged the policy of restricting food stamps to traditional households, and succeeding in getting the Supreme Court to throw out a legislative provision that favored families over non-familial groups. LSC litigated to invalidate the section of the Food Stamp Act that distinguished between family households and households composed of unrelated individuals.
From the beginning, LSC lawyers have given a high priority to getting divorces. The evidence shows that LSC lawyers encourage divorce as an alternative to resolving domestic problems, since divorce opens up the availability of immediate welfare payments.
LSC training materials advised their lawyers, when arranging divorce agreements, to sign an agreement absolving the absent parent from paying child support. In case after case, LSC lawyers tried to relieve parents of their obligation to support their children so that the children could be supported by welfare payments.
As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the U.S. Supreme Court in one of the cases brought by LSC lawyers, “our jurisprudence historically has reflected Western Civilization’s concepts of the family as a unit with broad parental authority over minor children.” But LSC lawyers have worked hard to restrict parental authority in the most effective possible way, namely, by providing minor children with independent income.
LSC lawyers have been in the forefront of litigation against parental consent laws, particularly in the area of abortion and contraceptives. Although parental consent is required for every other medical procedure performed for a minor, legal services lawyers have argued in court that parental consent “violates a pregnant minor’s right to privacy, which includes the right to decide to terminate a pregnancy by abortion.”
LSC lawyers argued in court that minors’ constitutional right to privacy includes engaging in voluntary sex, even under the age of 14. LSC lawyers have even participated in cases on behalf of abortion clinics (hardly indigent clients) seeking to prohibit demonstrations, picketing or counseling nearby.
Despite a clear prohibition in the statute, LSC lawyers have been active in most of the legal challenges to state and federal abortion regulations. LSC lawyers tried to knock out laws prohibiting the funding of abortions except those necessary to save the life of the mother and argued in court that indigent women should be able to have an unlimited number of abortions at public expense.
The result of this vast network of LSC litigation is that traditional family law has been largely changed to relieve family members from financial responsibility for each other, so that welfare programs replace both parent and spouse. The result has been to undermine the stability of the family as a self-reliant, cooperating unit, bound by duty and responsibility, and replace it with individuals (a large percentage of whom are minors) who have little hope of ever escaping dependency on welfare payments because they have been taught NOT to help each other.
