Texas' Proposed 'Get Married, Stay Married, and Be Fruitful and Multiply' Law Has People Talking and Heads Exploding
streiff reporting for RedState
Texas state Representative Bryan Slaton introduced a bill in the Texas state legislature that would cut the property tax bill of all married couples, especially those with children.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have gotten a lot of hate over the “don’t say gay” law, but the “get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply” bill introduced by Slaton is bringing out the crazy on the left.
I’m 100% in favor of the bill because I am biased toward large, two-parent families. And, like Ronald Reagan, I believe, “If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.” I think we’ve gone out of our way to make family formation difficult for too long. In fact, the “means testing” of benefits seems calculated to produce single mothers with multiple children. As a society, we penalize families who prefer to have one parent at home and make subsidized child care available. Children who are homeschooled are, in most school districts, unable to participate in sports, extramural activities or even to use educational programs in the public library available to public school students. The federal tax code bakes in a “marriage penalty” that makes it more advantageous for a couple to live together than get married.
The US population is below the rate needed to sustain it without significant immigration. So in my mind, we should all get behind anything that encourages Americans to get married, stay married, and have kids.
Slaton’s bill offers the following tax relief:
(b) A qualifying married couple is entitled to a credit against the taxes imposed in a tax year by a taxing unit on the residence homestead of the couple in which both spouses reside. Subject to Subsection (c), the amount of the credit is equal to the amount, expressed in decimal form rounded to the nearest hundredth, computed by multiplying the amount of taxes imposed by the taxing unit in the applicable tax year on the qualifying married couple’s residence homestead by 10 percent.
(c) A qualifying married couple with four or more qualifying children may substitute the following, as applicable, for 10 percent when computing the amount of credit to which the couple is entitled under Subsection (b):
(1) 40 percent, if the qualifying married couple have four qualifying children;
(2) 50 percent, if the qualifying married couple have five qualifying children;
(3) 60 percent, if the qualifying married couple have six qualifying children;
(4) 70 percent, if the qualifying married couple have seven qualifying children;
(5) 80 percent, if the qualifying married couple have eight qualifying children;
(6) 90 percent, if the qualifying married couple have nine qualifying children; or
(7) 100 percent, if the qualifying married couple have 10 or more qualifying children.
The bill has also caused heads to explode because of how it defined marriage and family.
1) “Qualifying child” means a child of any age who is:
(A) a natural child of both spouses of a qualifying married couple born after the date on which the qualifying married couple married;
(B) an adopted child of both spouses of a qualifying married couple adopted after the date on which the qualifying married couple married; or
(C) the adopted child of one spouse of a qualifying married couple adopted after the date on which the qualifying married couple married if the child is the natural or adopted child of the other spouse and that other spouse was a widow or widower before the date on which the qualifying married couple married.
(2) “Qualifying married couple” means a man and a woman who are legally married to each other, neither of whom have ever been divorced.
I like the fact that it encourages adoption. I suspect the “never married” part is to prevent people from running the same type of scam that used to take place with federal income taxes, where couples would get divorced in December and remarry after January 1 to avoid the “marriage penalty.” Still, in a country where allegedly half of all marriages end in divorce (there are a lot of reasons why this is probably a bogus number, but that is a different story), it has raised some ire.
The biggest cause of panty-wadding is the definition of a “qualifying marriage.” When we’ve reached the point where a Supreme Court justice is afraid to define “woman,” we need some moral clarity like Slaton’s description to bring us back to sanity. I’m sorry, but homosexual and transgender people will never be a “married couple,” as far as I’m concerned, no matter what the Supreme Court says. It seems to me that as long as we’re using tax codes to reward and punish behavior, limiting a property tax abatement to couples engaging in heterosexual behavior is justified; see the Reagan quote.
Slaton, apparently, has a history of proposing bills that never go anywhere, and, as of this writing, there are no co-sponsors for the bill. Of course, I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t even guess how this would play out in court. But, as we’ve moved past equal opportunity to a racial and sexual spoils system where it is legal to discriminate against disfavored classes, it is evident that the whole “equal protection under the law” thing is no longer operative.
Even if this bill’s purpose is only to make a statement, I applaud Representative Slaton’s effort. We need to talk about rewarding marriage and childbearing and disfavoring divorce and bizarre sexual appetites.
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