From: matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: misc.legal
Subject: Re: Males Doing it to Themselves
Summary: So-called "no-fault" divorce hangs men out to dry.
Keywords: feminist wish-fantasies; mesomorphic thugs
Date: 29 Jul 92 19:53:02 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.

In article <22557@hacgate.SCG.HAC.COM> tucker@shiva.UUCP (George Tucker) 
writes:

>He still has not explained why men are presumed guilty in CA divorce 
>courts.  No fair claiming it is no-fault since it isn't officially a
>criminal case - anyone who has been there knows better.  [George Tucker]

If we look at marriage as a contract, it ought to be that traditional
principles of contract law apply to it.  Thus, a party who lives up
to his promise in the contract ought not to suffer because of the
other party's breach.  That is, the courts ought to do what they can
to put the non-breaching party in the position he would have been 
had the other party not breached the contract.  Moreover, once the
contract is over, the non-breaching party is surely no longer held
to perform his promises toward the breaching party, whereas a breaching
party may well have to continue to perform his promise as part of
making the non-breaching party whole.

The problem with the divorce laws is that when a man promises to do
such-and-such for his wife, and she promises to do so-and-so for him,
the courts will hold him to his promise even if she is the breacher
and he is blameless.  Moreover, they will do nothing to put him in
the position of receiving whatever services were due him under the
original contract: she gets out of having to perform her promises,
even if she was the breacher.  To me, that seems quite unfair.

Under the older laws, neither party could get a divorce without the
other party's consent, unless he had grounds for divorce -- that is,
unless the other party had breached the contract by such actions as
infidelity or cruelty or abandonment. If a husband was blameless, and
his wife left him, she wound up with *nothing* in the way of alimony,
and (before the 1920's or so) he got to keep his children.  Conversely, 
if a husband beat up or cheated on a good wife, the courts would
throw the book at him -- as I believe such a man deserves.

I read somewhere that one of the first sociological studies ever
performed, 'way back at the end of the previous century, was by
a French sociologist who found that in countries where wives can 
get divorce on demand without cause, the suicide rate among men 
is higher than in countries where they cannot.  I believe that 
this comes about as a result of despair when a blameless man is
nevertheless punished by having to continue performing his side 
of a bargain that his ex-wife has breached.  I believe that the 
older system, where marriage was "for keeps," was a better system 
-- especially for children.  And therefore, I hope that State
legislatures will recognize that the move toward "no-fault" 
divorce was a mistake, and reinstitute the older system.

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
                                        (matt@amsaa.brl.mil)

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