STEPHEN BASKERVILLE: When child support becomes extortion, families lose.

As a member of Virginia’s advisory Child Support Review Panel, I witnessed how officials rig the process. The panel was packed with divorce operatives with pecuniary interests in making divorce more lucrative and common. It consulted only “experts” who urged increases and ignored scholars like Bryce Christensen, who points out “the linkage between aggressive child-support policies and the erosion of wedlock” and who charges that “the advocates of ever-more-aggressive measures for collecting child support … have moved us a dangerous step closer to a police state.”

When I described these abuses in a major newspaper, I was promptly removed from the panel.

Officials acknowledged that “opinions published in the … Washington Times” were the reason. The then-health secretary wrote, “I find it difficult to see how you could effectively participate along with representatives of other groups that very likely have different perspectives than yours.”