Sometimes the things legislators don’t do are as important as the things they get done.

Kansas legislators have been getting quite a bit of criticism this session for not doing certain things  especially things that would require additional revenue like raising funding for public K-12 schools and higher education. So it’s probably only fair to thank legislators for a couple of things they decided this week not to do.

One of those was the decision to reject a bill that would have done away with no-fault divorce for Kansas couples with dependent children. Since 1969, the law has allowed married couples in Kansas to divorce on one of three grounds: incompatibility, failure to perform a material marital duty or mental illness or incapacity. By claiming incompatibility, couples could divorce without proving any wrongdoing by either spouse.

Since that time, no-fault divorce has become the norm in Kansas for a number of good reasons. First, it reduces the amount of time an attorney must spend on the case and therefore reduces the fee. It also allows couples to part without pointing fingers or assigning blame.

This is particularly important for couples with young children. In most divorces, there is an arrangement for both parents to remain involved in their children’s lives and do a certain amount of joint decision-making on raising their children. Clearly, this is easier to do if there has been a minimum of conflict during the divorce.

Forcing couples to stay together “for the children,” is an unproductive intrusion into personal relationships that the government is in no position to evaluate. The Kansas Senate made the right call when they killed this bill last week.

Another intrusion that was beat back last week was a bill that would have restricted how many passengers a teen-age driver can have in his or her vehicle. The bill would have barred 15-year-olds with restricted licenses from transporting any minor passengers not related to them. Drivers who are 16 or 17 would have been allowed one minor passenger, unless it was a brother or sister or they were going to a school activity.

The intent of this bill was good, because its sponsor was concerned that young drivers are easily distracted  sometimes with deadly results  by having a carload of young passengers. But the bill had many problems, not the least of which was how it would be enforced. Kansans could imagine a police officer trying to discern how many passengers were in a car and how many of them might be related to the driver.

Perhaps the worse excuse given for a vote in favor of the bill, however, was offered by Sen. Kay O’Connor, R-Olathe, who gained notoriety for her comments last summer about why women shouldn’t have been given the right to vote.

On first examination, O’Connor said, “I thought it was a big daddy government coming in where it shouldn’t.” But on further reflection, she decided, “This piece of legislation is going to be very good for parenting. It gives the parent another hammer or crowbar to get a 16- or 17-year-old to do something.”

If the state is going to use laws as a “hammer” to support every behavior parents should be enforcing for their children, the statute books soon will be too heavy to lift. Parents need to be parents and set reasonable standards for their children, who, by the way, they know far better than state lawmakers do.As the session nears its midway point, it’s good to know legislators have been able to get a few issues, including these two bills, off the table so they can continue their plod toward resolution of a far more important issue, the state’s budget dilemma.