Free Republic

STEVEN CROWDER, THE right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.” Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct...

Eight months into his recovery after being struck by a car while biking, Ben Bollinger of Vancouver, Canada received a surprise bill for $3,752.01. The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) was asking him to recoup the damages caused to the vehicle that hit him, Global News reports. Bollinger told Global News that he was riding on a bike path when a vehicle ran a stop sign and collided with him. He said that he flew 14 meters, or about 46 feet, after being struck and was hospitalized with a broken hand and foot. But the ICBC claimed that he...

In a recent lecture at the Family Research Council (FRC), Ryan McPherson, an associate professor of history at Bethany Lutheran College, claimed that no-fault divorces played a pivotal role in the culture wars. Even though the “dissolution revolution never quite finishes,” somehow the term “no-fault divorce” has “acquired colloquial acceptance,” McPherson pointed out in remarks at the FRC. “By 1980, thirty-seven of the fifty states had significantly altered their divorce laws toward the no-fault standard of California and the UMDA [Uniform Marriage Dissolution Act],” McPherson wrote in an essay which appeared in The Family in America: A Journal of Public...

What is no-fault divorce? When you ask most people, they will say it’s a mutual-consent process, or that it preserves privacy, or that it eliminates blame for the failure of the marriage. Not many people will answer that it’s a lawsuit in which one party is suing the other party. And even fewer will know that it came from the Soviet Union. Like previous divorce actions, no-fault divorce is still a lawsuit, which means that one party is invoking the state’s police powers against the other party. The main difference now is that the person filing for divorce no longer...

High in the catalogue of social pathologies afflicting marriage and the family in America stands our system of family law, the central purpose of which is to enforce no-fault divorce. In a letter to the Holy Father and the recent Extraordinary Synod on the Family, almost fifty international scholars and religious leaders joined us in urging the Church to consider the effects of no-fault divorce, along with other barriers to faithful, lifelong marriage. State laws on divorce began to be implemented in the late 1960s, but today have been absorbed into the legal and cultural mainstream nationwide. The logic of...

What if you had to pay for justice? What if you couldn't afford it? Would you be left with lawlessness, clutched in the grip of oppression? The makers of the independent documentary film Divorce Corp. seem to think so, as they charge the family court system with being "a dark corner of the judicial system where fiefdoms and tyrants still thrive..." First-time writer and director Joseph Sorge experienced the complexities of the family law system -- observing the injustices practiced in the family courts. Through his research he discovered that divorce affects nearly 50 percent of American households and 41...

Bai Macfarlane, the director of Mary's Advocates says, "When Catholics force no-fault divorce on their families, our American Catholic leadership remains silent bystanders. Pastors promote annulment and even divorce. We are asking the Holy See if we have the right to have canon law protections applied to our families by our local bishops and tribunals." .... ...Sheryl Temaat, who has been repeatedly publish by Homiletic and Pastoral Review says, "Petitioning the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts for assistance in helping American Catholic families overcome the plague of divorce is long overdue. Practically every day we read how children are abused...

As a general rule, plaintiffs who file for "no-fault" divorce should be found unfit to gain custody of their children. This should be done for the protection of the children involved. But most importantly it should be done to restrain the growth rate of the scourge known as "no-fault" divorce. Radical homosexual activists have been bold in their attempt to redefine the basic make-up of the family by assaulting the God ordained institution of marriage with whatever creative sexual union could be devised. Yet the damage they've inflicted upon children to date is miniscule compared to the arrogance, selfishness, and...

Columbus, Jan. 20, 2006 (CNA) - An Ohio mother of four has launched a constitutional appeal against an Ohio civil divorce and custody decision, arguing her religious beliefs and free speech were used against her in the proceedings.Marie “Bai” Macfarlane’s husband abandoned her and their four children in 2003 and began no-fault divorce proceedings. Macfarlane is a stay-at-home mother and devout Catholic who homeschooled her children until 2004.Her potentially precedent-setting appeal was submitted by Ave Maria School of Law professor Stephen Safranek. The Constitutional Law professor argues: “The civil courts do not have sole authority to end her marriage or...

Geraldo Rivera's mustache is safe. The television personality had pledged to shave it off if Michael Jackson had been found guilty of child molestation. Geraldo had nothing to fear. A California jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of murder, so why should it hold Michael Jackson accountable for molesting children? Maybe Michael can now help O.J. search for the "real killer." Cable TV went berserk. The predictions were mostly wrong and the analysis was idiotic. One of O.J. Simpson's attorneys, Robert Shapiro, predicted on CNN that the jury would convict Jackson. Legal analyst Wendy Murphy confidently prophesied to Fox's Shepard Smith, "I...

Code: ZE05012901Date: 2005-01-29Home Alone -- and UnhappyReflections on the State of U.S. ChildrenSTANFORD, California, JAN. 29, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Concern over problems facing the younger generation is nothing new. A recent book, however, links juvenile difficulties with another controversial subject: changes in family structures. Commentator and author Mary Eberstadt, a part-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, argues that for some years now there has been an "historically unprecedented experiment in family-child separation in which the United States and other advanced societies are now engaged." In her recent book, "Home-Alone America," Eberstadt explains that there have been two main causes...

The debate over gay marriage and the entire homosexual agenda was a point of great contention in the 2004 election cycle, as voters in 13 states passed local marriage-protection amendments. Just this past month, the U.S. Senate reintroduced the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would use the Constitution to define and protect traditional marriage as being the union of one man and one woman. Of course the radical gay rights activists are livid about this, but they need to face the facts. As decadent as modern America has become, the average citizen still doesn’t embrace the idea of unelected judicial tyrants...

In a recent column, Barbara Kay extends the "broken window" theory of crime to a discussion of marriage. The concept, originally devised by social theorists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling -- and later popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point -- looks at the relationship between major crime and minor disorder. Breaking the window of a seemingly abandoned car turns it into a derelict, so that a vehicle no one touched for weeks is stripped clean within hours. "Gay marriage is that broken window," writes Ms. Kay. "Continuing vandalism will see marriage abolished altogether." Assuming that the...

Riding the momentum from the November election and the huge public opposition to same-sex "marriage," Delegate Kathy Byron and other legislators have introduced a "Family Bill of Rights." This ambitious bill will check not only the homosexual challenge to marriage, but also the huge erosion of parental rights. Stronger still, state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli has offered a bill to begin countering the "no-fault" divorce epidemic.

As posted half-way down the front page of www.NoDNC.com To those who are concerned at Focus On The Family and Focus On The Family Action  Dear Concerned, In spite of all the good that Focus On The Family has done in the area of family rescue, I believe you have missed seeing the major enemy: No-Fault Divorce. It is true that divorce came as a result of feminism and hearts drawn away by self-centered, and selfish actions, but the major enemy, Easy Divorce, came as a result of uncontested changes in divorce laws in all 50 states. All of us have done much...

The Politics of Family DestructionBy Stephen BaskervilleThe debate on the family is becoming increasingly politicized. President George W. Bush proposes federal programs to promote marriage and fatherhood and to enlist churches. Liberals respond that government does not belong in the family but then advocate federal programs of their own.Yet the more polarized the issues become the less willing we are to look at the hard politics of the family crisis. Family policy is still discussed in terms set by therapists and social scientists: the rate of divorce and unwed motherhood, the level of poverty, the impact on children, the...