Off and Running (at the mouth)

Herewith will begin all the news, thoughts, rumination and ranting about:

1. California family law,
2. family law, and why we have it;
   
3. law in general in this man's United States, and
4. pretty much anything else which crosses my radar

that you choose to read.

Some of the axes which will be ground, and idees about which I may be fixe * will likely include:

• Why do people get married? Why do they think they're getting married? Why should the state (both in the poli sci sense, and specifically the Golden State) be involved?
• Should it be harder to get married, and easier to get divorced?
• More people in California "go to court" about their family issues than for anything else besides traffic tickets. The California family court system, once the model for the rest of the country, is slowly being reduced to complete gridlock/system crash/meltdown. How do we make the family court system work better than it does? Why has no politician in recent memory won elective office on the campaign promise: "I'll make the family law courts work better, even if we have to spend money to do it!"?
• Why do we let folks who can't keep themselves out of jail, support themselves, or get and maintain a driver's license, raise kids, even their own? If we, as a society, think this is OK, how do we keep these folks from messing up their kids? Should we?
• Is raising a child to be a good citizen more important than raising him/her to be a good Christian/Muslim/Jew/Buddhist? Is it more important that children be happy, or successful? Is any of that the government's business?
  

So you know what you're getting. I haven't decided on a comments policy yet, but it'll be along soon, along with guest posters, links both useful and entertaining (to me, at least) and whatever else I cook up.


rfgs

*The version of the posting tool I'm using doesn't seem to feature multinational fonting, so I can make that look appropriately Francophone.