Divorce

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
It's not just
a good idea

Law

Icon law.svg
Random enforcement

Divorce is the legal closure of marriage.

Divorce is a right long sought after by the homosexual Mafia, among other things[1]. It is a long held tradition of Christian family values, and it's so important to Christians that they decided to make a law in California that they and only they should have the right to divorce.[2] To further highlight divorce as a sacrament reserved only for heterosexuals, Rush Limbaugh has obtained three divorces.

Divorce is second only to homosexuality in terms of destructive power to a Good Christian Marriage. There are some very consistent Religious Right-types who are intent on either banning divorce outright, or making it much harder to get. This includes things like pushing for covenant marriages. However, despite the popularity of banning same-sex marriages, for some reason very few people want to make it harder for themselves to get a divorce.

Contents

[edit] Divorce and liberty

Conservatives usually refer to the divorce rates as an example of "the deterioration of moral values" and supposedly a modern problem. In reality, they are wrong.

High divorce rates, are nothing more than the result of a civilization recognizing the freedom to its people to create relationships and break them apart without much drama. Doing so ensures that incompatible relationships are weeded out and people have a higher possibility to find someone they are actually happy with rather than be miserable for the rest of their lives.

A parallel can be made in the free market, with the right of people to easily form companies and break them apart. This allows many permutations and people with similar interests to come together, as well as drift apart when a relationship isn't working. Arguing against divorce is the equivalent of saying that if someone formed a failed company with a con artist, he should never have the right to break apart from it till death. One can only imagine how well this would work.

Predictably, the countries with the lowest divorce rates are often the ones with miserable authoritarian family structures. Countries like Iran, Libya, United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan occupy one end of the list as low divorce heaven, while countries like the USA, UK, Finland and Denmark are populated with evil, amoral, divorce-happy heathens.

[edit] No-fault divorce

No-fault divorce is divorce without a court trial. Before the introduction of no-fault divorce, a person wishing to end a marriage -- aka, the "plaintiff", "petitioner", or "complainant" -- had to go to court and prove that the actions of their spouse -- aka, the "respondent" -- constituted sufficient grounds for divorce. Some of the more common grounds were adultery, long-term incarceration, insanity, abandonment and cruelty.

Any third party participating in these actions -- i.e., a mistress, or a friend that the respondent would allow to participate in abusing the plaintiff -- could be named as a "corespondent." In some jurisdictions, corespondents were required for divorce proceedings to take place. Occasionally, should there be no adequate grounds, lawyers would help one or both parties manufacture grounds -- including the hiring of a mistress -- in order that the divorce would be approved.

According to Wikipedia, the Bolsheviks introduced no-fault divorce in the Soviet Union in 1918. Prior to this, marriage in Russia had been controlled by the Russian Orthodox Church. This changed because communist policies required that all church functions be transferred to the state. Before that, no-fault divorce was also introduced in France in 1792 during the French Revolution, before its abolition by the Restoration.

Because the "Commies" were among the first to institute no-fault divorce, many saw no-fault divorce as a socialist plot to undermine family values and destroy the family. However, as more people -- especially feminists -- examined this new model of divorce, they found that no-fault could allow people -- both men and women -- to escape the trap of abusive spouses.

In the United States, California was the first state to approve of no-fault divorce, which took effect on 1 January 1970.[3] Surprisingly, the last state to adopt no-fault divorce was not Utah but New York on 15 August 2010.

In this column, a columnist for the Daily Beast writes of her five-year battle to keep her husband from divorcing her. She finally had to give up her fight when he moved to New Jersey so that he could divorce her from there after a one-year residency. (This action became moot when New York passed its no-fault law.) In the article, the writer seems to think that readers will not only sympathize with her battle to keep her husband from leaving her, but also lament with her the fact that American women can no longer stop their husbands from divorcing them. However, she unwittingly portrays herself as not just obsessed, but batshit crazy. (The comment sheet following the article is one of the longest in the Daily Beast's history, with nearly every commenter telling the writer that she's nuts.) Ironically, many of her actions that she so proudly writes about might be considered as long-term abuse towards her husband. Furthermore, her actions may indicate a narcissistic and/or borderline personality -- which may have been what drove her husband away from her in the first place. Her obsessive actions illustrate why no-fault divorce is an unfortunate necessity.

[edit] Divorce and (American) fundamentalism

A commonly noted phenomenon is that "red" states most obsessed with preventing homosexual marriage also tend to have the highest divorce rates in the country. In fact, studies have shown that not only does fundamentalism appear to directly cause its members to marry earlier, the main apparent cause of increased divorce, but in county-by-county analysis stronger religiosity negatively affects the divorce of others living in the region[4]. Other commonly cited factors, such as unmarried cohabitation, don't demonstrate any statistical relationship.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-id4GKsaQk
  2. On 31 August 2010, the 5th Texas Court of Appeals one-upped the voters of California by ruling that gays married in other states could not divorce while living as residents of Texas. (Yessiree, Bob! We hate 'em, we hate 'em getting married, but we'll be goddamned if we let them get divorced once they go out of state to get married!)
  3. Before 1970, Nevada -- which liberalized its divorce laws in the 1930s -- was the only divorce haven outside of the U.S.S.R. Complainants needed a mere six-weeks residency -- Reno was the most popular destination -- to file for divorce. However, although Nevada provided many grounds for divorce and a fairly easy burden of proof, the state still required a divorce trial.
  4. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/674703?uid=3739744&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104422177167
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support