New Lecture Series: The Sexual Revolution
Collegium Intermarium and the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture
I have been asked by my university, the Collegium Intermarium, and by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, both in Warsaw, to put together a public lecture series on the theme, “The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences.” The lectures will be aimed at undergraduate level university students, but they are also intended to be accessible to the general public (without charge, I believe). I plan to focus on the political dimension, which is subject to amelioration, rather than dwelling on “cultural” factors that we cannot readily change.
I am devising the lectures now, and I have decided to post drafts here on Substack in order to get feedback from knowledgable readers. So I will be grateful for your comments, criticisms, suggestions, and so forth, in order to improve the lectures before they are recorded. Please do not hesitate to sound off.
Here is a tentative outline, describing the series as a whole:
Outline
Course Title: The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences
Lecturer: Stephen Baskerville
Scope of Topics:
Introduction to the Sexual Revolution
Sexual Ideology
Highlights of the Sexual Revolution
Effects of the Sexual Revolution
Responding to the Sexual Revolution
I hope to have the first lecture or two available for reviewing in the next few days.
If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.
Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.
US federal welfare reform of the 1980s removed decisions on the amount of child support ordered from their COMMON LAW foundation. Ostensibly for the purposes of consistency in the amounts ordered and reducing welfare dependency in single parent households, mandatory guidelines were established. Use of the guidelines produce orders that are significantly higher on average, but ignore a range of factors that define the economic circumstances of post-divorce families and have never been shown to produce a corresponding reduction in welfare dependency. Some of those factors are gender discrimination, where men only obtain custody of children in less than 10% of all child custody case, but are ordered to pay in over 90% of all cases. Empirical and academic studies show when fathers have joint custody over 90% of ALL child support is paid. When they just have continuous visitation/parenting time rights, 70% is paid in full. Even those without any visitation pay 45% of child support in full.
Despite all of this, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) put out a paper showing that inability to pay support by fathers is the leading cause of child support arrears in the nation. Fathers cannot pay and survive in over 66% of all cases where they are unable to pay. In over 20% of all cases, mothers don't want child support.
Child support was brought into this country from former Soviet Family Law through Sweden and became "The Wisconsin Model". Child support decisionmaking is to base guidelines on economic studies as an alternative to individual case decisions based on principles. [Beld, 2003;
Baskerville, 2003] Yet no theoretical foundation for child support decisions has ever
developed within the field of economics. In fact, the largest federally funded study of
divorced fathers in the United States, which almost singularly included the economic
consequences of post-divorce transfer payments, was conducted by research psychologist
Sanford L. Braver. [1998] Braver and David Stockburger are also contributing to the
literature on inconsistency and inequity of child support awards through a systematic
comparison of objectives and guideline results.
Most states have elected to use simple formulas suggested in a 1987 document published
by the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement. [Williams, 1987] The primary
recommendation was for use of what has become known as the "Income Shares" model,
which is based on an experimental statistical design developed a few years earlier as a
research project for the Washington State Association of Superior Court Judges. [Hewitt,
1982] For use in welfare cases, Williams suggested an even simpler model, the percent-of income formula proposed in Wisconsin. [Irwin Garfinkel, 1979; Garfinkel and Melli, 1990] The
percent-of-income formula arose from studies of foreign child support policy conducted at
the Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty, and bears a striking resemblance to the
Russian formula developed during the Soviet era. [RSFSR, 1969] What is called the
Wisconsin Model in the United States is still very close to the guideline currently defined in the Russian Family Law Code. [RFFLC, 1995].
On Developing Child Support Decision Theory: Principles 55 RSFSR (1969) Article 68 of the Russian Soviet Family code established July 30, 1969; one quarter of earnings for one child, one third for two, and one half for three or more (modified by Code No. 223-FZ of December 29, 1995; see RFFLC, 1995) RFFLC (1995) Article 81 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation No. 223-FZ of December 29, 1995 (still applies a percent-of-income formula, see RSFSR, 1969)
In the Marriage of Smith, Or 626 P2d 342 (1981).
Kindly, include information on the topic of child sexual abuse in the USA and statistical evidence concerning the same. You'll see Dr. David Finkelhor's published study from 1990-2022 at my home page www.abuse-excuse.com in a PDF link and note there was a significant decline of 63% in the incidence of child sexual abuse but the number of investigated reports by CPS remained fairly constant at about 300,000/annum.