No-fault divorce

[Tahuti]

A paper published in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, written by Douglas Allen, on the economics of same-sex marriage, argues that the introduction of no-fault divorce led to a six-fold increase in just two years after a century of rather stable divorce rates. Also, the law increased the rate at which women entered the workforce, increased the number of hours worked in a week, increased the feminization of poverty, and increased the age at which people married.[11]

Stephen Baskerville, a political scientist at Howard University, makes the following arguments against no-fault divorce:

* rewards wrongdoers
* reduces the need of marital binding agreement contracts at the public's expense
* helps women take custody of their children at the husbands' expense in many cases where the man has done nothing wrong

He also adds that a ban on divorce will not work, because people will separate themselves and be in a permanent state of adultery, or they will create a hostile home environment for the children.

Any thoughts? I suppose the usual 'progressive' comments will be made.

 

[Kennigit]

What of all the made up (mutually agreed upon) bogus claims that people had to jump through to get a divorce pre-nofault divorces?

quite laughable a point can be "rewards wrongdoers". Oooooh, so scary, if only any shred of evidence pointed to it. I'm sure you can work into any prenuptial agreement that a party at fault (e.g. adultery, etc) cannot just walk away with their fingers in their ears yelling "no fault divooooorrcce! no fault divooooorce!"

 

[El_Machinae]

What's the better alternative?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I don't know what reason my parents gave the court for wanting to divorce. I'm just glad they did.

 

[Tahuti]

What's the better alternative?

Well, I would support having divorces individually approved by courts, with some statutory 'faults' that grant automatic approval.

 

[metatron]

A paper published in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, written by Douglas Allen, on the economics of same-sex marriage, argues that the introduction of no-fault divorce led to a six-fold increase in just two years after a century of rather stable divorce rates. Also, the law increased the rate at which women entered the workforce, increased the number of hours worked in a week, increased the feminization of poverty, and increased the age at which people married.[11]

Stephen Baskerville, a political scientist at Howard University, makes the following arguments against no-fault divorce:

* rewards wrongdoers
* reduces the need of marital binding agreement contracts at the public's expense
* helps women take custody of their children at the husbands' expense in many cases where the man has done nothing wrong

He also adds that a ban on divorce will not work, because people will separate themselves and be in a permanent state of adultery, or they will create a hostile home environment for the children.

Increased divorce rates:
Not a bad thing.

Women entering workforce:
Not a bad thing.

Increased number of hours worked:
Function of the former. (i.e. women going from petty jobs to half time jobs to full time jobs)


Feminisation of poverty:
a) Due to all the above being incomplete.
b) Often they were likely poor in the bad marriage too, just not on paper.

"Rewarding wrongdoes":
There's no rewarding going on. The state merely doesn't legislate and punish private moral behavior. And it is correct in not doing so.

The other stuff:
Dubious on the merits. And wrongheaded on the ideals. Generally marriage as we know it is a dubious institution that society should rid itself of sooner better than later.

"Because babies" and custody and whatever:
That can be fixed.

Permanent state of adultery:
Not a bad thing.

 

[JollyRoger]

Pro se divorce is what needs to be outlawed.

 

[Tahuti]

Increased divorce rates:
Not a bad thing.

Single-parenting is not something that should be encouraged. It should only be an option when the likelihood for abuse is very great.

Women entering workforce:
Not a bad thing.

Its not a bad thing, though I should women's absence from the workforce be necessarily a good thing? Having more women in the workforce is something that shouldn't be done for its own sake.

Increased number of hours worked:
Function of the former. (i.e. women going from petty jobs to half time jobs to full time jobs)

This essentially amounts to further domestication of humans. It is a case of cognitive dissonance how leftists like you view mindless work culture as bad (and rightly so), only to have a die-hard capitalist ethic when it comes to women entering the workforce.

Feminisation of poverty:
a) Due to all the above being incomplete.
b) Often they were likely poor in the bad marriage too, just not on paper.

Tricky one.

"Rewarding wrongdoes":
There's no rewarding going on. The state merely doesn't legislate and punish private moral behavior. And it is correct in not doing so.

It is pretty vague, so I give you that.

The other stuff:
Dubious on the merits. And wrongheaded on the ideals. Generally marriage as we know it is a dubious institution that society should rid itself of sooner better than later.

That's a polite way of saying you want social atomisation (you probably will deny it, or even don't know what I'm saying here, though you will come to think the same way as I do once you know).

"Because babies" and custody and whatever:
That can be fixed.

How?

Permanent state of adultery:
Not a bad thing.

I'd rather have adultery galore than that people view marriage as something that can be broken at will, so I agree with you here.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, all of those consequences/benefits would also be available through people not just getting married for the hell of it. In my opinion getting married isn't some sort of 'blessed union', it's an agreement to form two individuals into a combined unit, generally to some end. I freely admit that my marriages were a result of the extremely weak reasoning; "why not?" Since there was no particular reason that we should have, there was also no particularly good reason not to undo them.

Perhaps if we had known we had to face greater complications in the undoing stage we wouldn't have done it in the first place. As it stands I'd be perfectly content to get married on a whim tomorrow. It's not like its binding or anything. Of course I am now bound into an economic unit with someone else anyway, without benefit of a court to referee any dissolution that may occur in the future. Fortunately we are both at a point where word has superseded law in that regard.

 

[Tahuti]

My rationale for a marriage would be to found a family with the woman I'd marry to. So I don't assume an opening for divorce is needed anyway. I certainly wouldn't marry simply to enshrine a prolonged relationship.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

My rationale for a marriage would be to found a family with the woman I'd marry to. So I don't assume an opening for divorce is needed anyway. I certainly wouldn't marry simply to enshrine a prolonged relationship.

When I said 'to some end' I was thinking that 'founding a family' was certainly the most common one and possibly the only sensible one. My family was founded for much the same reasons as the marriage I was in at the time; why not? While maintaining that family unit was a reason to stay married for as long as we did the entire process isn't viewed as a tremendous success by anyone involved.

 

[Darkflight]

Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, based on findings in their research, argue that domestic violence and female suicide decline in states that legalize no-fault divorce.[7] Specifically, they report that "states that adopted no-fault divorce experienced a decrease of 8 to 16 percent in wives’ suicide rates and a 30 percent decline in domestic violence."[8] They also argue that their research proves there is no permanent effect of no-fault divorce laws on divorce rates.[7]

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College, states that "in the years since no-fault divorce became well-nigh universal, the national divorce rate has fallen, from about 23 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 to under 17 per 1,000 in 2005."[8] She adds that "once you permit the courts to determine when a person’s desire to leave is legitimate, you open the way to arbitrary decisions about what is or should be tolerable in a relationship, made by people who have no stake in the actual lives being lived."[8]

Lawyer L.M. Fenton states "Feminist holdouts against New York's new bill [which allows no-fault divorce] don't understand how family law affects women today," adding "It also mystifies me that spouses could still, even in 2010, be forced to stay married to someone who refused to let go."[9] She adds that, "Fault-based grounds usually include mental cruelty, but true mental cruelty has a psychological component that can make it very difficult for the abused spouse to articulate that abuse. More to the point, the abused spouse may be terrified to describe the relationship on paper and testify about it in a court. And of course, a controlling partner will always choose the path of most resistance to whatever it is that the other spouse wants."[9]

A 2010 New York Times editorial states that "New York is the only state where a court must find fault before granting a divorce unless the spouses have lived apart for a full year under a formal separation agreement — a proven formula for inviting false testimony, endless litigation and generally making divorce far more painful than it needs to be.[10]" New York is the last State to legalize no-fault divorce.

Any thoughts? I suppose the usual 'conservative' comments will be made.

/sarcasm

On a more serious note, everything has positives and negatives associated with it. No-fault divorce is a logical consequence of societies that value personal freedom. We have to deal with the consequences and create systems that minimize the negatives of those consequences. Our social structure is constantly developing as new ideas and discoveries are made and the winners are those who are capable of adapting to the changes.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Any thoughts? I suppose the usual 'progressive' comments will be made.

I have a thought or two. They may even be 'progressive'.

What are the usuals you were expecting?

 

[History_Buff]

If we allow no-cause marriage, why shouldn't we allow no-fault divorce?

 

[Snorrius]

Any thoughts?

Well, it is kind of obvious the rate of divorce will go higher if people able to do it easily. Whether it is good or bad depends on what we are interested in. For example, if we need to increase number of divorces then it is good. If we need to keep it low then it is bad.

 

[metatron]

Single-parenting is not something that should be encouraged. It should only be an option when the likelihood for abuse is very great.

No.
(failure to provide an argument, so two letters will do)

Its not a bad thing, though I should women's absence from the workforce be necessarily a good thing? Having more women in the workforce is something that shouldn't be done for its own sake.

How is it "done"?

They just do it. Because they're human beings who need and want [stuff] so they earn money for that.
That's not "done" by any sort of group action or a movement or anything. It just happens to be in absense of the authoritarian and cruel norms that kept it from happening before.

This essentially amounts to further domestication of humans. It is a case of cognitive dissonance how leftists like you view mindless work culture as bad (and rightly so), only to have a die-hard capitalist ethic when it comes to women entering the workforce.

No dissonance. No ethic. No culture (or rejection of one).
Just acceptance of reality. For groups of humans to live organised and plentyful lifes work needs to be done.
For individuals to lead good lives in a (semi-) market economy they need money. Most people get it by doing some of said work and partake in the revenue from that via a wage or a profit. That women do this doesn't make this fundamental function of human life new or indicative of any particular ideology.

I.e. there's a decent chance that there's projection going on here:
The status quo is sustained by individual motivation, game theory, basic facts of human life.
The status quo ante was sustained by dissonance and faux "ethics" and faux "culture".
Not the other way around.

That's a polite way of saying you want social atomisation (you probably will deny it, or even don't know what I'm saying here, though you will come to think the same way as I do once you know).

1. You will in fact have to tell me what you mean by "social atomisation" (i can guess, sure), because this term is used to mean several different things in different context (some usage is incorrect but still common).
2. I don't know whether the latter comment is just smugness or a veiled insult.
3. Based on my preliminary guess the answer to the question would be: Yes, and i'm not being effin polite about it.

I'd rather have adultery galore than that people view marriage as something that can be broken at will, so I agree with you here.

Well, tangentially.
I consider sex between one person - married or not - and another person - married or not - not a bad thing.
The overlap with your position is rather marginal.

If we allow no-cause marriage, why shouldn't we allow no-fault divorce?

Thread winner.

My rationale for a marriage would be to found a family with the woman I'd marry to. So I don't assume an opening for divorce is needed anyway. I certainly wouldn't marry simply to enshrine a prolonged relationship.

See above:
Until you have presented arguments to that end, we shall consider it not evident that "founding" a "family" is a cause for "marriage".

 

[Snorrius]

This essentially amounts to further domestication of humans. It is a case of cognitive dissonance how leftists like you view mindless work culture as bad (and rightly so), only to have a die-hard capitalist ethic when it comes to women entering the workforce.

The problem with leftist are that (1) their views are mostly based on dogma (2) their views are incompatible with reality.

The first one is not really big problem. No one have full understanding of all what is happening and all laws of nature, so dogmas often serve as shortcuts. The second one is more serious. Western societies have learned how to neutralize leftist poison, so a leftist from Western country is more or less safe as there are safeguards which prevent leftist madness to be actually tried in real Western life.

Unfortunately some less lucky societies upon which these dogmas was forced ("democracy", "universal suffrage") but took them on face value were crushed. The result we can see in post-colonial Africa, post-Arab Spring countries, Ukraine etc.

 

[Agent327]

Interesting that noone seems at yet to have noticed the obvious:

increased the age at which people married

Solves a lot of problems.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, I would support having divorces individually approved by courts, with some statutory 'faults' that grant automatic approval.

How do you force someone to stay in a failed marriage?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

How do you force someone to stay in a failed marriage?

Parental Warning: the language in this next clip is too strong to be hosted on this prestigious website. Therefore I can only post the link.

At least ... I'm fairly sure I'm allowed to