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♦ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2006 4A Munaimi .Ijounuxl OPINION Daniel F. Evans Editor and Publisher Julie B. Evans Vice President Don Moncrief Managing Editor Bug on the windshield This report came across the news ser vice the other day. A man in Virginia was fired because he had a “pro-marriage”decal on the wind shield of his pickup truck. Not same-sex marriage, not “let’s support marriage between people and animals.” (Can you honestly say we won’t see that sometime in our future?) No, he had a bumper sticker on his truck that read: “Please, vote for marriage on Nov. 7.” That is the day voters in Virginia will be considering a proposed amendment to the state constitution protecting tradition- al marriage between a woman and a man. Can you imagine? Getting fired because you stand for something your father and mother and their father and mother and on and on, generation after generation have stood for? It just doesn’t make sense. This country has gone absolutely psycho in regard to political correctness. And even further, we are the vast major ity - we meaning people who still believe in tradition - and yet we let others treat us as if we’re the minority. And we’re not talking about fair here. We’re not out to rob them - them being peo ple who tend to be on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from what we believe - of their rights but they absolutely insist on robbing us of ours. But the truth is, if everybody who believed in traditional marriage were to go out and buy a bumper sticker stating so, and then if we were to all get fired, this country would come to a screeching halt. Then with any luck, the guy - or gal - who fired this gentleman would be washing windshields for a living. Seeing red over green We stand corrected. In Thursday’s Houston Daily Journal we said it would be nice for someone to think outside of the box. We asked the question wouldn’t it be great if developers didn’t just bulldoze the land flat before putting up new houses. That way we could save the trees and resi dents could in turn enjoy the shade and save energy at the same time. It appeared that - preserving the earth - was secondary to: Get ‘er done and more importantly, get ‘er done fast. In fact, there are several perfect examples of that mindset down 41 alone - two con tending to see which can go up first right across the street from each other. But, we’ve come to find out - the hard way via several none-too-happy phone calls - that the opposite is also true. There are those - one who even offered to give us a ride through his subdivision as proof - who are good stewards of the envi ronment. They have taken responsible as stakehold ers in our planet and to them we apologize and hope they keep up the great work. And maybe, just maybe, influence the rest in their business along the way. Letter to the editor Nasty ads one way street Like most folks, I get turned off by attack ads during election season. But in light of some of the letters to the editor I’ve seen lately, I thought it was only fair to point out that negative campaigning in the race between Mac Collins and Jim Marshall is no one-way street. See LETTER, page $A Foy S. Evans Editor Emeritus And even further, we are the vast msiority - we meaning people who still believe in tradition - and yet we let others treat us as if we're the majority. Sears tackles family fragmentation When she became a trial court judge in 1989, Leah Sears was alarmed to find that nearly 20 percent of the civil cases on her dock et were related to domestic relations issues. By the time she had ascended to the position of Chief Justice of Georgia in July of 2005, those domes tic relations cases - involving divorce, child custody, child support and alimo ny - had soared to over 65 percent. In a speech she gave to the Atlanta Rotary Club last year. Chief Justice Sears explained the legal ramifications of family fragmentation: “The superior courts around this state are busy, and in many locali ties, overburdened,” she said. “Judicial resources have been stretched to the limit. Court calendars tend to be lengthy and crowded.... Justice often takes many months to accomplish, if not years.” “Typically crime and criminals receive most of the blame for this. The criminal justice system is seen as a revolving door for repeat offenders, most of them regularly committing crimes that in one way or another serve the illegal drug trade... Each year Georgia’s tax payers spend millions of dollars to prosecute law breakers and put them behind bars. “We seldom hear much, however, about Georgia’s civil justice system and the heavy domestic relations caseload. The costs associated with that burden have, for some reason, gone unnoticed for years... But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a family law caseload prob lem in Georgia, because we do.” She explains that domestic relations cases not only outnumber all other civil cases, they also outnumber all felony and misdemeanor criminal cases combined. In fact, Georgia’s superior courts devote more time to domestic relations cases than they do to crimi nal cases. Perhaps more telling - and troubling - is the fact that one out of four children under the age of 18 in Georgia had a case with the Office of "Sure, they're cute. But anytime those two show up at your door with their hands out, it's downright scary!" If you blink while reading this, you missed it all It’s time to come clean over some thing I did the other night, some thing I had never done before. After plodding through a novel that became more tedious as it went along, I skipped ahead 50 or so pages and went right to the final chapter to see how everything came out. There you have it. I’m not proud of what I did, but I did it. I am a terrible person. Normally, when I begin a book, I stick with it, no matter how long it takes. If it’s nonfiction, I might skip around but eventually read the whole thing. Leaving pages unread is a waste of words. I’m the same way with television and movies. If I don’t watch the entire film or show, I haven’t really seen it, and someday I’ll have to go back and watch the entire thing again. For instance, the last movie I saw in a theater was, let’s see, King Kong. (No, not the 1933 version, wise guy; the one that came out last year.) It was a long, long movie, and somewhere between the jumbo soft drink and the Empire State Building, I really needed to visit the restroom. But I stayed in my seat, endured, meditated, prayed. Why? Because if I had missed even a couple of minutes of the movie, I wouldn’t really have seen King Kong. My wife, now, is the complete oppo site. She can miss parts of a show and OPINION Ramdy S Hicks bj 1 Columnist SgHfc-/.;. Georgia Family Council Child Support Enforcement. It’s the latter statistic that takes us beyond issues surrounding the courts into what troubles Chief Justice the most: what has happened to the fam ily- “We can tell from the overburdened courts of this state that suffering is taking place on a larger and larger scale. In 1955, the year I was born, for every 100 children born, four were born out of wedlock while eight had parents who divorced. By the year 2000, that number had risen fivefold: for every 100 children born, 33 were born out of wedlock and 27 had parents who divorced.” She points out - as I have many times in this column - that research demonstrates that positive outcomes for children are generally higher in intact families where committed moth ers and fathers are raising their chil dren together. Adults and children from intact families are less likely to live in poverty, suffer from physical and emotional illness, or engage in risky behaviors than adults and chil dren from fragmented families. The chief justice makes it clear that it is not her intention “...to make all single parents feel bad about the choices they’ve made” or to imply that all children from broken homes are destined for a failed life. “Many single parents succeed as par ents against steep odds,” she says. “And they have my utmost admiration. But communities where lasting mar riages are common have better out comes for children, women and men than do communities plagued with never mind at all because she fills in the missed parts by the time the cred its roll. For instance, when we’re watching television and she gets up to get a drink or answer the telephone, she always says, “Don’t stop it.” She knows I will automatically reach for the remote to pause the action when one of us gets up. By the way, that is why I love the digital video recorder our cable com pany provides. It lets us pause the action, back it up or fast forward without missing a second of the show. This device was invented just for me. I can walk into the room when the news or a game is playing and back it up to the beginning or replay segments where I couldn ; t understand what happened or what was said. I five by the remote control because I want to know everything that goes on. I don’t like reaching the end of a show and wondering where that guy came from or seeing that a character j Glynn Moore Columnist Morris News Service HOUSTON DAILY JOURNAL high rates of divorce and unmarried childbearing.” The past must not simply be viewed “as the graveyard of bad or outmoded ideas. Not all change is for the better. Some change makes things worse. And the changed way many people today view marriage has obviously made things worse.” What it all comes down to is that family fragmentation is clogging the courts, burdening the economy and, most significantly, causing much suf fering. For these reasons, Justice Sears argues that marriage “is more than a private emotional relationship. It is also a social good.” In response to the mounting prob lems caused by family fragmenta tion, last July, the Georgia Supreme Court voted unanimously to create the Georgia Supreme Court Commission on Children, Marriage and Family Law to help relieve Georgia’s overburdened court system. The Commission will be chaired by Chief Justice Sears and will be com prised of two committees: the Advisory Committee on Healthy Marriages, chaired by Justice Sears, and the Committee on Justice for Children, chaired by Justice P Harris Hines. Both committees will study the legal conse quences associated with the growing fragmentation of Georgia families, and make recommendations for addressing their root causes. It just makes so much sense. When families stay together and divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing decrease, so will many of our culture’s challeng es, including the caseload of an over burdened judiciary. It’s encouraging to see leaders in our state tackling such a tough and important issue. Georgia Family Council is a non-prof it organization that works to strength en and defend the family in Georgia by impacting communities, shaping laws and influencing culture. For more information, go to www.georgiafamily, org, (770) 242-0001 or greggCwfam.org. has vanished faster than the new crew man on an old Star Trek episode. I like to think I need to see the entire show because of an old news man’s curiosity. My wife, on the other hand, thinks I’m quickly becoming Monk Lite. I must disagree with her. Is it con sidered obsessive-compulsive behavior to sit through the credits of movies and TV shows? I don’t think so; some day, I might need to know the name of the key grip for that film, or who played Second Cop, or whether any animals were harmed in the making of that production. You know, a psychologist could have a field day with one of us. (Pssst, it’s my wife who needs help, Doc. My behavior is completely normal. Really it is. Really.) Getting back to that novel I cheated on: In my defense, I really tried to fin ish it. The story was so convoluted, though, that it reminded me of what the wife of Chevy Chase’s character in the movie Funny Farm said after she had read the manuscript of his first crime novel. She told him something like this: “There are flashbacks inside flashbacks, flash forwards, and I think you even flash sideways once!” That reminds me: I need to go back and watch that movie again sometime. I forget who wrote the screenplay. Reach Glynn at glynn.moore@morris. com