No-Fault Divorce Deconstructed

Accuracy in Academia ^ | May 16, 2015 | Spencer Irvine

[Academiadotorg]

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 Policy.

The Family in America is published quarterly by the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Security. Yet and still, while California set the standard for Divorce American Style, even the architect of the Golden State’s UMDA, admitted there were unintended consequences of, essentially, redefining divorce.

“Women and children have borne the brunt of the transition that took place in California’s legal regulation of the family between 1970 and 1987,” Herma Hill Kay, a professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, stated in 1987. Nevertheless, no-fault divorce never made it into the crosshairs of conservative culture warriors.

“Strangely, the Moral Majority was virtually silent about divorce,” McPherson writes. “Standard histories of Falwell’s movement do not even list ‘divorce’ in the index.”

Moreover, religious leaders pretty much went with the flow too. “As early as 1988, half the staff directors appointed to the Lutheran Layman’s League—an affiliate of the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod—were ‘divorced and remarried,’ a fact which its board dismissed as irrelevant to their work as Christian mentors,” McPherson writes.

[Academiadotorg]

Is no-fault divorce an oxymoron?

[The_Reader_David]

Is no-fault divorce an oxymoron?

Certainly with the ordinary meanings of words. Of course "fault" here is given the technical legal meaning, so not really.

[TurboZamboni]

I’m told even the IRS can’t take your stuff without a reason.

[SamAdams76]

“Women and children have borne the brunt of the transition that took place in California’s legal regulation of the family between 1970 and 1987,”

In the history of humankind, has there ever been an event (except baldness) that has NOT affected women and children more adversely then men?

[cuban leaf]

Nevertheless, no-fault divorce never made it into the crosshairs of conservative culture warriors.

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It did mine. From the time I became a Christian. And when it happened to me after 20 years of marriage, it happened almost exactly as described in the article below:

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Universal Divorce
A Male’s Perspective On A Bad Idea

If you were to believe those brawny viragos at NOW, you might think that universal divorce was a force for liberation of women, and just a splendid thing for kids. You know the line: marriage is the vilest form of chattel slavery, men molest their kids when they’re not beating them like drums, and such like. (Actually, I can’t think of a better authority on children than 12,000 squalling lesbians who don’t have any. Can you?)

Well, let me offer a revisionist view of divorce, from a male point of view:

After a few years under one roof, Willy Bill and Cupcake no longer get along well. Part of it is Willy Bill’s fault, and he knows it. Part of it is Cupcake’s fault, but she doesn’t know it. She expected marriage to fulfill her fantasies and make her happy. It didn’t, because married people are just married people, and life ain’t all ham hocks and home fries. This too is Willy Bill’s fault. Life, that is.

Since Cupcake wasn’t happy being single, and wasn’t happy being married, she now figures she’ll be happy divorced. She’s going to have a dynamite social life, not like living with what’s-his-name. She’ll have a fascinating job and a swell place. Joe Perfect will appear on a white horse and life will be roses again. She forgets that it never was, and anyway there just isn’t that much Prozac. The divorce occurs.

Which devastates the kids. She says it’s better for them to have one parent than to have parents who don’t get along. This is the Enabling Fantasy of divorce. Ten years later the kids will still be trying to get mommy and daddy back together.

Next, Cupcake learns that the business world is not importunate in its desire for women of thirty-six with no resume. Day care is expensive. As kids get older, their toys cost more. What’s-his-name may have been inadequate as a fantasy mechanic, but he did have a sizable paycheck.

Joe Perfect doesn’t show up, which is hardly surprising. Cupcake isn’t Suzy Prom Queen any longer. Most guys shy away from women who always have kids in tow. They have either had kids, and don’t want more, or else never wanted them in the first place. As men get older, marriage becomes less important to them.

Cupcake finds that the men she might date, typically two to eight years older than she is, are a sorry lot. The good ones have been taken. The leftovers are either gay, or confirmed bachelors, or three-time losers looking for their fourth divorce, or such awful dweebs that nobody wanted them in the first place. Or they’ve been burned in one marriage and aren’t about to make that mistake again.

In the divorce, either she got the friends or she didn’t. When a couple split, the friends seem to think they can continue to be friends with only one of the former couple. If he got them, she’s horribly lonely. If he didn’t, she finds that married couples, which most of them were, don’t want single people around. Four’s company; three’s a triangle. If she’s attractive, it’s worse.

Then come the long empty weekends when nobody calls. Depression arrives. She has a hard time growing a new social life because the kids are always there. Depression is two to four times more common in women than men, depending on whose figures you like, and she’s got reasons to be depressed. No retirement, for example. She gets a prescription for lithium. Try finding a single woman past forty who isn’t on Prozac, lithium, Depacote, Zoloft, or Welbutrin, all the M&Ms of the irremediably unhappy.

You can’t divorce a car payment. Cupcake finds that she has to have a full-time job, and maybe some part-time jobs too. Days only have twenty-four hours. She doesn’t have time to be a full-time mother and have an adult’s social life. Often motherhood draws the short straw. She starts leaving young kids alone for long periods while she goes out. By no means all divorced mothers do this, but more do than the newspapers tell you. Latch-keyism becomes inevitable. The kids, unsupervised, feeling neglected, angry because Daddy left, begin to get into trouble.

Not infrequently mommy comes to resent her offspring. They’re always there, always whining and fighting and wanting this and that. They make her life miserable, which doesn’t happen with two parents, and there’s no respite in sight. At best she becomes irritable and seems cold. At worst she slaps the hell out of them.

Then, dear God, puberty hits. Other things being equal, women are better parents than men for small children. A man would go crazy. For older kids, no. At adolescence they begin asserting themselves and testing Cupcake. A fifteen-year-old girl makes Attila the Hun look like a milk-fed pansy in lace shorts. With mammals like that, Cupcake will soon reflect, no wonder the dinosaurs died out. The kids walk over her, becoming contemptuous. She comes close to hating them for it.

A man would say, “No. You aren’t going to run away with a feeble-minded dope-dealer who plays bass guitar. Because I say so. We’ve finished talking about it.” It would stick. Women don’t do this as well.

Relations with the ex run from none to good. Like as not, she hates him because the divorce didn’t make her happy. Frequently she gets back at him through the kids. An angry man smacks someone. A woman’s aggression is passive: She withholds sex or, after the divorce, the kids, while earnestly pretending she’s doing something else. He gets no influence in raising the tads, doesn’t get the report cards or school pictures, isn’t consulted.

At best, he gets called only when the kids get into trouble and she can’t handle it. Daddy becomes The Heavy. Five years later when they figure it out, they will be grateful. But that’s five years off.

And there’s nothing he can do about it: “joint custody” or not, if she doesn’t comply, his choice is to put up with it, or sue mommy, which is not the high road to a kid’s heart. He puts up with it.

Don’t you love it? I mean, what a deal. The kids hate the divorce like poison, Willy Bill misses his kids horribly, and Cupcake gets to grow old by herself in a bleak apartment with a cat named Fluffy.

If that’s not social advance, I don’t know what is.

[Academiadotorg]

I heard that too.

[Opinionated Blowhard]

“No fault” divorce was one stepping stone on the way to gay marriage. “Marriage” as an institution has been taking blow after blow for decades, starting in the 1960s. If you ever wonder why we are where we are when it comes to births out of wedlock, living together, gay marriage, etc., “no fault” divorces is one of the reasons.

[Jack Black]

No fault divorce is the key to the dhimmitude of men in America. Since it has been instituted marriage has become a bad deal for men, something you understand if you are a middle aged guy with a bunch of divorced guys you know.

Younger guys have figured it out, which is why they are not getting married at anything near the rates that were common a couple generations ago.

It's now "normal" (ie: more than 50% of cohort) for men to have never been married at age 34.

A lot of other social problems are related to this. If you are not married till 34 you are a lot less likely to have kids, if you do have kids you might have one or two, instead of three of four.

A big part of the demographic collapse of native born citizens is made up for by importing high-fertility couples from other cultures where people still get married and make babies.

[jagusafr]

Back when I was handling family law cases, I saw way too many people convince themselves that “it’s better for the kids that mommy and daddy are apart than fighting all the time”. It’s crap. It’s a pathetic, selfish excuse for bailing out because life’s too hard when you have to (gasp) compromise. I did divorces, etc. for 6 years. One Friday, I walked out of the office, turned around, walked back in and told my office manager that if I EVER took another family law case, she could beat me about the head and shoulders. The practice never skipped a beat and everybody was happier.

To those FReepers who are offended by my frankness above - I have “spirited discussions” with my wife of 29 years on a regular basis. Neither of us has ever considered divorce, because a promise made before God Almighty is to be kept. That, and we love each other even when we’re not IN love with each other.

[Jack Black]

That's quite a posting. Nicely told story, and sadly all too common.

Here is a pair of articles from Breitbart on the growing movement of men disentangling themselves from woman.

The Sexodus Part 1: The Men Giving Up On Woman and Checking Out of Society

The Sexodus, Part 2: Dishonest Feminist Panics Leave Male Sexuality In Crisis

There is an organized movement now of "Men Going Their Own Way", that is choosing not to for long term relationships with woman. Here is the Google Search result for MGTOW.

I stumbled onto this stuff a month or so ago, and found it quite interesting.

[Talisker]

Nicely written, thanks.

What’s left out is the ubiquitousness of women’s groups encouraging their members to get a divorce. These groups, some open, most “secret,” are full of arrogant, sadistic drunks on Prozac with middle-manager positions. They are “Hillary’s Army,” and never a fouler group have existed. They exert enormous pressure on other women to comply with their agenda, and like “Fight Club,” their first rule is that no one ever talks about their existence as a group. But they exist, more than ever before, and like the stars on Hillary’s special-order American flag they are upside-down and fatal to everything they touch - family, children, men, laws, and their own sanity.

[cuban leaf]

To those FReepers who are offended by my frankness above - I have “spirited discussions” with my wife of 29 years on a regular basis. Neither of us has ever considered divorce, because a promise made before God Almighty is to be kept. That, and we love each other even when we’re not IN love with each other.

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Interestingly, that is exactly my attitude. Sadly, in a “no-fault” world, you BOTH have to believe that.

[cuban leaf]

Sorry. I said that it was an article but I forgot to post the source. I confess that after my divorce in 1998 I’ve posted this article a lot. Men come out of the woodwork each time to say, “that is almost exactly what happened to me!”

The source: http://www.fredoneverything.net/Divorce.shtml

He has some equally frank, effective, and non-PC articles regarding the black experience in America.

[cuban leaf]

My ex was part of a spat of women that divorced their husbands over a five or six year period. Interestingly, they all used the same attorney.

When I fought the same attorney to get full custody of my 15 year old daughter (five years later), I represented myself against the same attorney. Not only did I win, but she was threatened with contempt several times in the courtroom. It was clear to me that she was trying to get a reaction from me in court. Never happened.

She is beyond sleazy.

On a side note, my ex moved from Seattle and lives in Arizona in a trailer that, well, kinda reminds you of Raising Arizona.

[Academiadotorg]

OK now I’m even more depressed

[Talisker]

Yep. But try to tell that kind of thing to someone who doesn’t already know about it and they think you’re paranoid.

I think these packs of drugged, drunk, ferocious, utterly hypocritical and staggeringly cruel women - and there are now literally millions of them - is THE elephant in America’s living room. They are the power behind the abiding madness of the Left.

What these poor fools don’t realize is that they have been led to completely, utterly, destroy their lives solely for their votes, and that their precious feminism has only ever been a front for international communism at the most barbaric level. Oh - and that every one of them is completely dispensable.

It’s a profound moral collapse in every way, by women too frightened and vicious to reverse themselves. Which is a good thing for Hillary, because if these women ever really grasp what’s been done to them by Cankles & Co., they’d rip that bitch into chunks.

[ItsOurTimeNow]

Bookmark for later

[gogeo]

"Women and children have borne the brunt of the transition that took place in California’s legal regulation of the family between 1970 and 1987,” Herma Hill Kay, a professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, stated in 1987.

Bovine fertilizer!!!

Children yes.

[gogeo]

No mention of child support in that...

[cuban leaf]

No mention of child support in that...

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No need. It’s a given. ;-)

He discusses it in his other articles on the subject.