Insane Divorce Laws. This country has lost its mind when it comes to extreme overpayment to ex-wives. AOL today hilites a story about a divorce ruling in my city, Newark, NJ:

New York Giants star Michael Strahan was ordered to pay his ex-wife $15.3 million — more than half his net worth — in keeping with the couple's prenuptial agreement.

Under the agreement, Jean Strahan was entitled to 50 percent of their joint marital assets and 20 percent of his yearly income from each year they were married. * * *

In addition to the $15.3 million, [the Judge] awarded Jean Strahan hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support.

Prenuptial agreements should be ruled absolutely and invariably illegal, for attempting to void the state-mandated standards for division of assets in divorce. A prenup is a form of personal nullification of state law. Marriage is a governmental contract — as all the concern nowadays about gay marriage shows — and the terms of that contract are set out in state law. It is not for any individual or couple to say, "We don't care what the law is. Our private preferences trump the law." No, they really don't.
+
The law sets out what people owe upon divorce. It is not for private parties to defy the law.
+
But even aside from that, the idea that a woman who has just been granted $15.3 million needs to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support too is just inexcusably absurd! The judge who granted such a preposterous demand should be dragged from the courthouse, tied to a lite stanchion, and flogged to death.
+
The divorce laws of this country are inexcusably unfair to men, and must be changed. In the alternative, men should seriously consider whether (a) they should ever get married or should only enter into relationships that have a written contract that says that upon termination of the relationship, each party goes his or her own way with no legal nor financial claim of any kind against the other except for the return of personal property brought into the relationship and equitable distribution of property acquired during the relationship; and (b) if they do get married and prenuptial agreements are permitted, ALL men should write strong prenups with exactly those terms: you stay with me or get nothing but what you had before you met me.
+
That's what gay men do. We form a relationship, and if it ends, it ends. We don't try to take each other to the cleaners. We just take our own things, move out, and move on.
+
Straight men who have children should demand a total change of laws such that whoever pays for the children gets to say where they live and how. If women want the kids, then women have to pay for them. You get to control their lives and their attitudes toward their father? Then you pay for them. You don't want that responsibility? Let the father have them. It makes no more sense for a father robbed of his children to have to continue to pay for them, all the while they are being poisoned against him by a bitter ex-wife, than for a father to be robbed of his house, but still have to make the mortgage payments, or for a person whose car has been stolen (by a stranger) to have to continue making his auto-loan payments!
+
The castrated losers who wrote the present divorce laws of the United States have produced horrendous problems of instability, bitterness, and recrimination between ex-partners. Now and then we hear of an aggrieved husband who comes to the perfectly logical conclusion that it makes better sense to have his wife killed than let her destroy him thru divorce. We may soon have widespread murder-for-hire as the solution to our unjust divorce laws, an American version of the old Italian movie, Divorce, Italian Style. Perhaps, someday soon, "Divorce, American Style" will mean the mysterious death of a wife who wanted to use the antimale divorce laws of this castrated country to ruin her husband.
+
Perhaps this violent society will see change in its vicious and catastrophically destructive divorce laws only if large numbers of women start dying shortly before they would have filed for divorce, or during bitter divorce proceedings. With all the unsolved murders in this country (about 1/3 of all murders are never solved), a careful killer has a good chance of getting away with it.
+
Any man afraid of being entrapped by cops posing as hitmen can find thousands of mystery novels and TV shows to teach him how to do the job himself (or with his new girlfriend) and what mistakes to watch out for in order not to get caught. Hell, O.J. was caught but still got away with it.
+
This country has a long history of vigilantism. When you can get no justice from the courts, you just have to do it yourself. And when the laws are unjust, you don't obey them but strike back at the tyrants who passed oppressive laws. If that means that men need to kill judges and legislators in large enuf numbers that the laws are rewritten, that's one way to go. If it means that men must fite for their rights by killing women who would rob them, that's another way to go. After all, what's the difference between shooting a mugger and shooting an ex-wife who tries to rob you? In dollar figures, shooting the mugger is less justified, because he's likely to take only what you have on hand, say, $100 and your watch. But a wife could take half of everything you own, and more. So which one should be shot for attempted robbery?
+
At end, the human race is a violent species, and prefers a quick, violent solution that seems just, over a long nitemare of suffering at the hands of immovable injustice.
+
If divorce cannot be made fair and equitable, maybe we should just abolish it and make the words "Till death us do part" mean something. Or maybe we should just abolish the institution of state-controlled marriage altogether and let people work out their own private contracts for division of assets upon the dissolution of relationships, without any interference from the state whatsoever. After all, that's what gay men and lesbian women have to do, and manage to do quite nicely. If marriage becomes more destructive than remaining unmarried, and some people are denied the rights of marriage, perhaps it makes sense to abolish the institution altogether.
+
Marriage for all, with equitable divorce, or marriage for none. No human institution is sacrosanct, and when almost half of all marriages end in (bitter) divorce, maybe it's time just to throw in the towel and get rid of the institution altogether.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,017 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:58 PM