Bob Whiteside wrote:

"Kenneth S." wrote in message
...
Tracy:

I share your underlying philosophy about the importance of marriage.
The question is: what do we do to promote this philosophy?

The fact that 50 percent of U.S. marriages end in divorce, and that a
huge number of social problems result from these breakdowns (as well as
from nonmarital births), is emphatically NOT accidental. It follows
from the existence of a wide range of people in the U.S. who order their
priorities in a way that destroys marriage. The people who do this (for
the most part) don't realize what they are doing. The Biblical verse
"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" is applicable to
most such people. (But it's not applicable to all of them, because some
of them WANT to destroy marriage -- or, as they would say "traditional
marriage" -- and know very well what they are doing.)

The people who have destroyed marriage in the U.S. are the people who
have favored the rights of individuals over the rights of families and
children. In particular, the feminist movement in the U.S. and other
countries has focused all its attention on enlarging the range of
choices available to women, even when this enlargement takes place at
the expense of men and children, and of society generally. (I take no
satisfaction in saying this, but back in the late 1960s, about 40 years
ago, when the feminist movement was getting started, I KNEW what the
ultimately outcome would be. Even back then, there were people -- and I
was one of them -- who said: "But what about children?" They never got
any answer, and now, decades later, we know that there WAS no answer to
be given.)

This news group is about child support. So it is appropriate to
illustrate this point by reference to child support. Anyone who has
been involved in child support issues for any length of time, and who is
not blinded by the feminist mindset, soon recognizes that child support
in the U.S. is not about children and their needs. It is about ensuring
that the widest possible range of choices is available to women. It is
about ensuring that women are able to make the decision to establish
fatherless families, secure in the knowledge that the men involved will
be forced to subsidize these decisions.

What could be done to rebuild marriage and two-parent families? I
don't look on myself as a radical, but in this area I see no alternative
to a radical solution. Government must get out of the business of
intervening in families entirely. There must be no state or federal
laws about divorce, alimony, or "child support." Instead, couples
contemplating marriage must be told that they must enter into binding
prenuptial contracts that specify all the details, including the details
of what would happen if there were a divorce.

If marriage were privatized in this way, we would have an end to the
situation where, in the U.S., special interest groups are able to lobby
state legislatures for changes in the laws on divorce and "child
support," and then have those changes applied retroactively to existing
marriages, including those that have taken place years earlier, and not
even in the same jurisdiction.

Unfortunately, in the U.S. we are still a long way off recognizing the
underlying realities of the situation. Meantime, the special interest
groups who are destroying marriage and the family continue to make
steady headway. They are helped by all the politicians, bureaucrats,
and members of the judiciary who see short-term gains in pandering to
these groups.

My bumper sticker would be: "Privatize marriage!" Until that happens,
my alternative bumper sticker -- and I suspect that of many divorced men
-- is: "They'll never get me up in one of those things again."

What is particularly ironic is women, who are hard wired to foster
relationships, are also responsible for initiating over 70% of the divorces.
Some switch seems to go off in their heads after several years of marriage
that changes what they think about the man they are married to, and all of a
sudden they need to change men.

I went to a funeral on Friday with my next door neighbor. Her son recently
got divorced after his wife chose to have an affair and wanted out. We
talked about the Braver study where he found that women seek to end their
marriages for touchy-feely reasons like needing to find themselves. My
neighbor said just in the last year she heard about a rash of marriages
breaking up, and the women who were all in their late 30's, stated those
types of touchy-feely reasons, like getting in touch with their inner self,
to end the marriages. And in one family at the funeral all three sons were
divorced from 30 something women who had affairs and ended the marriages.

My personal opinion about why marriages fail is women buy into the "you can
have it all" feminist line of thinking and they decide that they need to
have it all right now. The financial and emotional incentives are in place
for women to be rewarded for their transgressions with at least half the
family assets, long term security with half their spouse's retirement
benefits, a predictable flow of CS payments, medical coverage and child care
for the children, continued use of the family home, the possibility of
spousal support, emotional stability by being named custodial parent, and of
course being perceived as a strong woman for being willing to kick a man who
was making them miserable out of their life. IOW - all of the incentives to
end marriage and the emotional support systems are available to women only.

When men come to realize the reality of how marriages end (and you have to
go through it to finally get it) they discover how one-sided the process is.
The only way I believe marriages will be made to last is if fault is
reinstated in marriage break-ups and fathers are awarded custody 50% of the
time overall, and 100% of the time when mothers have affairs. (The same
should apply if men cheat too.) And that is where privatized marriage
contracts would become very powerful motivators to remain faithful in a
marriage and to stay in a marriage.


Some of what you say above, Bob, seems to be borne out by the factual
information about the divorce rate among second marriages. It seems to
me that I have seen data indicating that this rate is even higher than
among first marriages.

I would be curious to know how women who broke up their first marriages
feel after being in second marriages for a while. Even if these women
don't divorce their second husbands, I suspect that many of them
probably feel that their second marriages (and their second husbands)
have just as many defects as their first marriages and husbands. I
think men in the U.S. today won't go far wrong if they assume that most
women like to get married . . . AND like to get divorced after they get
married.

As to your suggestion for reinstatement of the fault grounds for
divorce, in one sense I agree with you. However, such a change still
retains government involvement in individual marriages. In the U.S.
today we face a situation where there are all kinds of special interest
groups with a vested interest in seeing the weakening of marriage (the
various branches of the divorce industry, feminist organizations,
homosexual groups, etc.). So as soon as something is done to strengthen
marriage, such as ending no-fault divorces, the special interest groups
start working on weakening it again.

It would be better, in my view, to put individual marriages beyond the
reach of these special interest groups. The way to do that is to have
no general laws on marriage, divorce, child support, etc., and to make
the only general requirement that all couples getting married have
comprehensive prenuptial contracts.