Tag Archives: Topic: Divorce

The Salt Lake Tribune: Two bills before the Utah Legislature this session are intended to strengthen the institution of marriage.

NY Daily News: The lesbians who became the poster couple for gays seeking to marry in California are now doing what countless straight couples have done before them — they’re splitting up.

WSJ.com: It’s More Common Than Adultery and Potentially As Toxic, So Why Is It So Hard to Stop Nagging?

AZ Policy Blog: Another study has been released on the harms of divorce. This one from the University of Arizona shows that divorced men and women may die earlier than married individuals.

The Salt Lake Tribune: One man has sued his wife’s lover for $1.5 million in damages, claiming the extramarital affair ruined his life and caused his wife to run off with her lover to Idaho.

A family court judge had no business ordering a man to grant his ex-wife a ritual Jewish divorce, known as a “get,” which he never agreed to, a state appeals court held Wednesday.

The Marriage Economy: ‘I Couldn’t Afford To Get Divorced’ : NPR (includes audio): As unemployment rises, the divorce rate goes down: For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate goes down by 1 percent.

LiveScience: Many committed couples aren’t marrying because they fear divorce, a new study indicates, though many other reasons for and against marriage abound in young adults from different social classes.

Juan Williams at TheHill.com: The Census Bureau reports that 29 percent of white children are considered in or near poverty, along with 64 percent of black children and 65 percent of Hispanic children. There is a link between poverty and a rising number of out-of-wedlock babies born every year, with 24 percent, 38 percent and 42 percent of white, black and Hispanic woman-headed families, respectively, living in poverty. These harsh facts are an ugly consequence of American family breakdown and political inertia in a time of congressional fights for political advantage over budgets and tax breaks.

Fox News: In other words, Pew’s 51% of unmarried Americans includes a very large number of “not-yet-married” Americans. In fact, what’s striking about Americans is that unlike folks in other developed countries, they still get married if you just give them some time.

Plaintiff Jeff L. Thigpen, as Register of Deeds of Guilford County, North Carolina, and as a citizen of North Carolina and the United States, objects and finds it morally and constitutionally repugnant to administer a system which requires all persons entering into marriage to have licenses that will be recorded; to oblige pastors, priests, and rabbis who are performing marriage ceeremonies to perform them pursuent to licenses issued by the state; and to require either the religious or civil solemnization of marriages.”

The Volokh Conspiracy: That’s the result of Mussa v. Palmer-Mussa (N.C. Ct. App. Dec. 6, 2011) (2–1 vote) . . .

OneNewsNow.com: Hiram Sasser of Liberty Institute tells OneNewsNow the couples are trying to twist state law to suit their own agenda. “These are two men who claim they want to get a divorce, and the proper remedy in this state is just to declare the marriage void. It’s the same result as if the marriage never happened,” Sasser explains.

Telegraph: The number of couples divorcing has risen for the first time in almost a decade, with some experts suggesting that the recent recession could be to blame.

This understanding no longer exists in our culture, and some argue that when Americans began divorcing in high numbers, redefined marital sexuality via contraception use, and reduced marriage to mere commitment, it set the stage for our current same-sex marriage debate.

Religion Clause: In Mussa v. Palmer-Mussa, (NC App., Dec. 6, 2011), a North Carolina appeals court held that the marriage of defendant Nikki Palmer-Mussa to Juma Mussa was void because at the time of the marriage Nikki was married to another man.

Cal Thomas at Townhall: Ultimately, what voters must decide is this: Does a presidential candidate’s personal flaws rise (or fall) to a level that inhibits his ability to do the job of president? Put another way, if you are about to have surgery, do you care if the doctor is a cad, or do you care more whether most of his patients are alive and well?

Religion Clause: : In In re the Marriage of John and Angela Bell, (CA App., Nov. 18, 2011), a California appellate court upheld a trial court’s order in a marriage dissolution case preventing the father from continuing taking the couple’s young children to Mormon religious services and Sunday School without the mother’s consent.

Telegraph: A growing number of British couples are divorcing in their 60s, official figures show.

Nichols, Joel A., Marriage and Divorce in a Multicultural Context: Table of Contents and Introduction (2011). MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN A MULTICULTURAL CONTEXT: MULTI-TIERED MARRIAGE AND THE BOUNDARIES OF CIVIL LAW AND RELIGION, Joel A. Nichols, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2012; U of St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-36. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1957847

Tulsa Beacon: “I respect the views of those who argue that no-fault divorce creates less havoc than the alternatives, but I question that orthodoxy,” McCullough said. “There is very little in the divorce process that is even remotely connected to the interest of the children.”

William J. Doherty and Leah Ward Sears at The Washington Post: Still, many are skeptical about whether we can lower the divorce rate without trapping more people in bad marriages. This skepticism is fueled by two common assumptions: Divorce happens only after a long process of misery and conflict; and, once couples file for divorce, they don’t entertain the idea of reconciling.

Maggie Gallagher at Public Discourse: A new proposal for reducing unnecessary divorce gets to the heart of the problem: the current system seeks to meet a divorcing couple’s every need—except for time and education on reconciliation.

The American Independent: In a move to address increasing numbers of divorce in the state, the Senate Judiciary Committee has taken up legislation which would change state law to delay the amount of time between the issuance of a license and the date a marriage can be performed.

USATODAY.com: Just as he’s navigated the past 75 years with Josephine at his side, 97-year-old Michael skillfully situated his 96-year-old wife at a table.

The Express Tribune: The government and the Hindu community were unable to break their deadlock on Tuesday over the divorce clause in the Hindu Marriage Act. The clause has proved contentious since the bill was drafted in 2008, with the government defying Hindu leaders who believe divorce is not part of their religion’s culture.

Glenn T. Stanton at Baptist Press: Their data indicates that people with cohabiting experience who marry have a 50 to 80 percent higher likelihood of divorcing than married couples who never cohabited. A Canadian sociologist explains . . .

The Church Report: Poor New Jersey — derided for ‘Jersey Shore,’ aggressive driving and talking too fast. But when it comes to happily ever after, the Garden State is No. 1.

Catholic Culture: A desire for divorce is the cause of much of the tension between Muslims and Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, according to a newly published article in the Catholic Near East Welfare Association’s ONE Magazine.

OneNewsNow.com: An new analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau suggests that the Bible Belt deals with more marital problems than anywhere else — but one researcher says that’s not a reflection of Christianity.

Religion Clause: Under Egyptian personal status law, the Coptic Orthodox Church controls divorce of couples where both are members of the Church. Al-Ahram this week reports that hundreds of Copts who are seeking a divorce plan to gather in front of the Ministry of Justice to collectively resign membership in the Church.

USATODAY.com: Instead, the report says, Dutch entrepreneur Jim Halfens has created the “Divorce Hotel” for couples capable of ending their marriage without lawyers during a three-day mediation process.

Gregg Herman at Wisconsin Law Journal: But, before we go any further, a disclaimer: It is not my purpose to opine as to whether this legislation should be enacted by a state. Certainly, all divorce lawyers, from strictly a business point of view, should support such legislation. As the joke goes, the leading cause of divorce is marriage. This article does not seek to editorialize, but only to outline on the legal ramifications and discuss the pros and cons of the different means of ending relationships.

MSNBC.com: It may not be a crime to be poor, but it can land you behind bars if you also are behind on your child-support payments. Thousands of so-called “deadbeat” parents are jailed each year in the U.S. after failing to pay court-ordered child support — the vast majority of them for withholding or hiding money out of spite or a feeling that they’ve been unfairly gouged by the courts.

The Washington Post: A new report says cohabitation has replaced divorce as the biggest source of instability for American families. Brad Wilcox, the report’s author, chatted about why this is.

The eventuality of euthanasia as the ‘final solution’ for the damaged offspring of the Boomers to be ‘rid of’ the ‘ME’ generation is real and near at hand.

Can there be any doubt?: fighting abortion also means fighting for marriage, and against the culture of “anything goes” sexual promiscuity that has lead to the deaths of millions of our children. We need to build a culture of life.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers.

The Enid News and Eagle: This week Oklahoma learned it is No. 1 in yet another significant category. The Sooner State, it seems, is No. 1 in divorce

We physically abuse our children at staggering rates, we pump them full of antidepressants and other pharmaceutical drugs and we send them off to public schools that more closely resemble prison camps every single day.
Meanwhile, the economic decline of the America is hitting children far harder than it is hitting the adult population . . . The following are 30 signs that America has become a horrible place for children….

WSJ: Children of divorce are more likely to be in poverty and to live with their mothers, according to a new Census report on marriage released today.

Mail Online: A U.S. population census has named North Dakota as the top American state to live in for a secure and happy marriage.

AP: ingles, take note: With marriages at an all-time low, states in the South and West rank among the highest for couples hearing wedding bells. But many of these states also have higher rates of divorce.

LifeSiteNews.com: The government could save literally billions simply by taking modest steps to fight rampant divorce, according to prominent divorce-reform advocates.

Nathan A. Cherry at Engage Family Minute: I did find some common ground with Ms. Krasnow when she said “You can leave each other…But once you have children, you can’t leave the marriage… it becomes bigger than you.” The best thing, the things worth fighting for are always bigger than we are. Anything smaller than us is not worth our time.

As more and more U.S. couples decide to have children without first getting married, a group of 18 family scholars is sounding an alarm about the impact this may have on those children.

NYTimes.com: American children are more likely to have parents who never married than parents who are divorced. That is one finding in the latest report from the National Marriage Project, which is based at the University of Virginia and which conducts research on marriage and family in the United States.

Independent.ie:
MANY children from broken homes are born “losers” and so deprived of love that they grow up to be dysfunctional adults, according to a Catholic bishop. Bishop of Elphin Christopher Jones said that during his 17 years working in social services in Sligo he had seen the damage wrought on children as a result of marriage breakdown.

Religion Clause: In Rosenstein v. Rosenstein, (TX App., Aug. 11, 2011), a Texas appeals court held that in a divorce action, the trial court violated the mother’s Establishment Clause rights when, in an amended decree, it awarded the father exclusive possession of the couple’s children on four Jewish religious holidays, and on every Sunday morning.

Andrew Cherlin and W. Bradford Wilcox at the Brookings Institution: This policy brief reviews the deepening marginalization of marriage and the growing instability of family life among moderately-educated Americans: those who hold high school degrees but not four-year college degrees and who constitute 51 percent of the young adult population (aged twenty-five to thirty-four). Written jointly by two family scholars, one of them a conservative (W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project) and the other a liberal (Andrew J. Cherlin, professor at Johns Hopkins University), it is an attempt to find common ground in the often bitter and counterproductive debates about family policy. We come to this brief with somewhat different perspectives. Wilcox would emphasize the primacy of promoting and supporting marriage. Cherlin argued in a recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round, that stable care arrangements for children, whether achieved through marriage or not, are what matter most. But both of us agree that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes. We also agree that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds. Thus, we conclude by offering six policy ideas, some economic, some cultural, and some legal, designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans. Finally, unless otherwise noted, the findings detailed in this policy brief come from a new report by Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America.

Religion Clause: In Harrison v. Tauheed, (KA Sup. Ct., Aug. 5, 2011), the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed a trial judge’s decision to award custody of a 5-year old boy to the child’s mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, over the objections of the child’s father who also sought custody.

Vicki Larson at The Huffington Post: But that might have been the problem; childfree couples divorce more often than couples who have at least one child, according to researchers, despite numerous studies that indicate marital happiness plummets in the first year or two after the birth of a child and sometimes never quite recoups.

Rebecca Hagelin at Townhall: While a pessimistic view of the other person and the marriage worsens the relationship, cultivating a positive mindset towards your spouse—focusing on their strengths and gifts-will, says Neff, “remind you of why you’re in that relationship in the first place.” And that’s good for every marriage.

Vancouver Sun: That’s the latest news from the land of Gen X parenthood. Apparently, these children of the divorce boom of the 1970s would rather put chocolate syrup in the baby bottles than put the children through a family break-up.

Ryan Messmore at First Things: Just as important as public efforts to fight for marriage may be the need to train couples to fight well within it.

AP: The Internal Revenue Service is making it easier for some “innocent spouses” to escape responsibility for the tax debt of their husband or wife.

AP: Maltese will no longer have to travel abroad to divorce, following Monday’s overwhelming vote in favor of finally allowing couples to end their marriages at home on the heavily Catholic island nation.

NPR (includes audio): As thousands of gay and lesbian couples are planning weddings in New York — and celebrating their hard-fought right to marry — others around the nation are fighting for the right to divorce.

Rachel Alexander at Townhall: Child custody and support laws have become more onerous over the last 50 years due to fewer parents staying together and women becoming equally as capable as men at earning a living outside the home. Instead of reflecting these changes, the laws have lagged behind, continuing to favor mothers over fathers.

Research shows the positive economic effect of two-biological-parent families on our society. Single parenthood and other alternative family structures not only hurt our economy, they hurt our children, those who care for them, and those for whom our children will care later in life.

The Spiritual Herald: New York’s approval of same-sex marriage is just the first round in what will be a lengthy and fractious heavyweight legal battle that will wind up in the laps of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court next year. ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero, who is gay himself, spelled out a robust list of lawsuits the organization has filed in states across the nation.

In a snapshot summary of her memoir released on Tuesday, In Spite of Everything, Susan Gregory Thomas gives a firsthand account of what remains of children and parents after the devastation of divorce. Thomas presents a vivid portrait of the children of divorce in her neighborhood who, with her, wandered as “sad-eyed, bruised nomads.”

LifeSiteNews.com: he New York Times launched what one prominent Catholic professor has called a “peculiar” attack on natural family planning (NFP) last week by sharing the tale of a young Evangelical couple that had championed the practice and then recanted, only to get divorced three years later.

WSJ: A new study exposes a significant disadvantage for children of divorce: Kids whose birth parents divorce get less financial help with college costs, even if their parents remarry, the study finds . . . led by Ruth N. Lopez Turley, an associate professor of sociology at Rice University . . . published recently in the Journal of Family Issues.

Telegraph: Lesbian couples are twice as likely as gay men to separate, according to new figures showing a 44% rise in the number of civil partnerships that were dissolved last year.

But Americans are a roving sort, and people who marry and move to places hostile to their union could find, in disunion, a legal limbo . . .

Tarasen, Nick, Untangling the Knot: Finding a Forum for Same-Sex Divorces in the State of Celebration (2011). University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1872963

Newser: A LGBT groups says the divorce involves a female couple who married on April 20. The 46-year-old and 25-year-old are splitting due to an alleged infidelity

The Washington Post: Women who had sex for the first time when they were teens are at higher risk for divorce, with 31 percent divorcing within five years of marriage and 47 percent within 10 years of marriage, a new study says.

This breakdown of the American family has dire implications for American society and the U.S. economy. Halting and reversing the sustained trends of nearly four decades will not happen by accident. The federal, state, and local governments need to eliminate marriage penalties created by the tax code and welfare programs and instead use existing resources to better encourage and support family life.

A man who had his sperm frozen in case he became infertile was astonished to learn that his ex-wife had tricked an IVF clinic into twice making her pregnant. He then had to pay £100,000 towards the upbringing of the son and daughter he had known nothing about.

Daily Mail: But as soon as the divorce process started, the children suffered a range of problems that persisted, a report in the American Sociological Review [June 11] said . . . ‘Children of divorce experience setbacks in maths test scores and show problems with interpersonal skills and internalising behaviour,’ lead researcher Hyun Sik Kim, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

Charisma: The Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute’s study shows how intact married-couple families outperform remarried families, divorced families, single-parent families and cohabiting families in the economic areas of: employment status and income; net worth; poverty and welfare receipt; child economic well-being . . . Click here for the full report.

CNA: Citizens of the island of Malta have voted to legalize divorce, making a choice that the country’s Catholic bishops have warned will lead to family breakdown and a loss of religious identity.

David Lapp at FamilyScholars.org: James says while they never really articulated their fear that marriage would ruin their good relationship, he thinks they did have it in the back of their heads. “In the back of our heads”–it’s a telling phrase.