Bob Whiteside wrote in message
nk.net...

"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.



I don't believe custody should be awarded based on cheating. Custody should
be 50/50 unless one of the parties is unfit. I also think that where a lot
of the problems come to play is folks getting married so young. We go
through so many changes as we grow in life and at 20 years old, we are still
naive children. That women initiate divorce in there early 30's doesn't
surprise me one bit. I know a few women who did initiate divorce and know
that I think about it, they are in their early 30's. It seems that many of
them have grown to want more from life, they have progressed in their
personal career while the husband is still what most would call a loser.
(Not working, not working to get better jobs, ect) The husbands make small
amounts of money and spend it at the bars or gambling. So they realize it is
not working for them and move on. As people grow, some grow apart, others
grow together. The last generation and previous to that, there was no growth
for the women as she was typically a stay at home mother/wife. Now women are
working and have careers. We don't all want to have a man supply us with our
fortunes, some of us get that ourselves. Still not to put blame on either
sex, marriage is just something that a couple should wait until they are
more settled and mature to do.

T