The purpose of this blog is to bring together the many factors to explain the cumulative effect known and referred to as the Marriage Strike.
Consider this:
On one hand, the Federal government is spending billions of your tax dollars to promote marriages while on the other hand, the State governments have passed legislation to encourage the dissolution of marriages with no-fault divorces and liberal alimony entitlements.
No-fault divorce laws combined with the liberal financial benefits normally granted to one of the spouses provide a great "incentive" for the breakup of a marriage. Divorces can be had with as little as a declaration of "irreconcilable differences" from one of the spouses. The ease with which this can be accomplished combined with the promise of at least half of the assets, pensions and retirement funds, child support if there are children and a lifetime of alimony welfare support payments are the incentive for a dissatisfied spouse to terminate the marriage with the other spouse picking up the bill. The divorce rate hovering around 50% and the number of unmarried households outnumbering the married households supports this view.
In the wake of these no-fault laws comes the legal profession and divorce industry to feed off the divorces and misery caused by a marriage turned sour and which profits them to the tune of billions of dollars annually. Not only does the legal profession profit, but also there is an incentive for the States to facilitate this progress because they profit from this dissolution process by taking advantage of the grants offered to them in their course of overseeing this misery. In addition, the U.S.A. is spending $46 Billion every year on programs caused due to broken families.
Reflect on the fact that legislatures are composed largely of lawyers who make the laws affecting your marriage and your life. These laws are administered by judges who are all attorneys promoted or elected to that position. Considering the hefty legal fees that they charge and the resulting profits to be made from the adversarial nature of divorces, you can see that the legal profession is a self-perpetuating system overseen by the state’s bar associations and it is to their advantage to encourage all these laws as a matter of job security for themselves.
Ask anyone who has gone through the trauma of a divorce and you will find that not only has a large portion of their finances been devoured by legal fees, but one of the spouses has been placed under a financial hardship for the rest of their lives. Oftentimes being divorced becomes a matter of FINANCIAL SUICIDE for one of the spouses.
We need to stop the legal systems that has grown into a symbiotic "professional" industry which has emerged to "process" divorce, support and custody issues in a complex comparable to the military-industrial one. Read the article “The Hidden Hardship in Family Law” where $8 Billion was paid to family law lawyers in 2001.
