Note: I will be on vacation with limited Internet access until August 23rd.
No-fault divorce is one of the biggest bugaboos of the manosphere, and with good reason. But you may be surprised to know that there is one state that has resisted legalizing it, even when the remaining forty-nine as well as the rest of the West hopped on the gina tingle-fueled express train to oblivion. That state is none other then…New York. Yep, it’s not Tennessee, not Texas, not Alabama or any other state filled with rock-ribbed, God-fearing conservatives, but a Swirling Nexus of Moral Degeneracy and liberalism that has remained stuck in the woman-oppressing misogynist past. But those days are over, as the Empire State has finally entered the twentieth century:
New York just made breaking up easier to do, passing a no-fault divorce law that stands to reduce long, cutthroat court battles over who’s to blame when marriages fail.
The new law permits couples to split without assigning blame for the marriage’s collapse.
This is the sort of thing that instills homicidal urges in me, makes me want to rage against the bottomless stupidity of modern man. Marriage is not supposed to be something taken lightly. “‘Til death do us part” isn’t just a dramatic phrase, it’s supposed to be what you DO when you get hitched – stay with said person until you croak. Hence, in a sane world you’re required to prove that the other party was at fault in divorce proceedings because you’re supposed to have a good reason for ending it. As “Chateau” (seriously, he’s not fooling anybody) wrote recently, women are abusing no-fault divorce to end lifelong marriages because the poor widdle babies are getting bored with their hubbies:
A multitude of factors likely contributes to the urge to spousally purge of the modern American wife. The Chateau has discussed the Four Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse before as triggers or exacerbating conditions for the rising divorce, single momhood, and infidelity rates that will herald the denouement of the Grand American Epoch, and now we can throw in a couple more factors –
The death of shame and the glorification of status.
We now exalt that which we used to shame into invisibility. Pathetic single moms are paraded as exemplars of tough-as-nails fortitude and moral virtue. Infidelity is de rigueur, an exciting life transition that self-actualized women find empowering. And of course, taking your husband for all he’s worth in divorce, regardless of marital fault, is practically its own sacrament — the Sacrament of Separation Theft.
The title of the news article says it all – “Divorce Easier as New York Law Ends Need to Lie”. If you have a legitimate reason to end a marriage, you shouldn’t have to lie. And no, “he doesn’t make me feel like a woman anymore” doesn’t cut it, honey. If he busts his ass at work, treats you with respect and otherwise behaves like a decent human being, you have no cause to divorce him. You should’ve thought before you said “I do.”
“There is a human cost and a financial cost†to a system demanding fault-finding, Robert Ross, supervising judge of the matrimonial division in Nassau County, New York, on Long Island, said before the bill became law. “It’s hard to know what impact a new law will have, but we do know that a grounds trial, and the expense and delay associated with it, is not a good thing.â€
Of course there is, you empty robe. It’s not SUPPOSED to be cheap or easy to end an arrangement with so much significance. The minute getting out of marriage became as easy as getting a passport is the minute marriage lost all of its sanctity.
The passage of a bill July 1 by the state assembly sent the measure to Governor David Paterson, who signed it yesterday, according his office’s website.
The measure will take effect in 60 days and will govern divorces filed then or later.
Previously, New York was the only U.S. state without no- fault divorce. Spouses disagreed on terms of a divorce couldn’t dissolve their marriage unless one proved the other committed an act such as cruelty, adultery or abandonment.
The result was protracted for some couples, with trials over who was to blame for the dissolution of a marriage, and, sometimes, false claims to make the allegation fit the law.
This story will go unnoticed in the conservative blogosphere. Not a single conservative will protest it or even acknowledge that it happened. Meanwhile, they’ll continue complaining about and protesting gay marriage despite the fact that this is a far bigger blow to so-called “family values.”
And you people wonder why I don’t take most conservatives seriously?
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One of the contentions of the Steveosphere and alt-right blogs is that as democracies become more ethnically diverse, their political cultures devolve into tribalistic competition as each group clamors for a slice of the welfare pie. Nowhere is this more obvious then in Canada. I’ve had a theory for years that the presence of the Bloc Quebecois in federal Canadian politics keeps either of the major parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, from being able to form a majority government, leaving Canada in a state of perpetual low-level chaos.The Bloc isn’t so much a political party as it is an ethnic grievance lobby that exists primarily to funnel Anglo taxpayer dollars to La Belle Province, but in every election they’ve contended since their founding in 1991, they’ve won most of the ridings in Quebec. Being the second most populous province after Ontario, securing support from the Québécois is absolutely essential for any party to form a majority in Parliament, and no non-Bloc party has been able to do it since Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives in 1988. Jean Chretien’s Liberals did form a majority government from 1993 to 2004, but that was only because the right-wing opposition split their votes between two parties – the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party (and its successor, the Canadian Alliance). It’s telling that in the first election held after the Progressive Conservatives and Alliance merged into the current Conservative Party, the Liberals dropped to a minority government. All the attempts by the other federal parties to suck up to the Québécois haven’t kept the Bloc from sweeping the province in every election.
Now Hugh MacIntyre of The Shotgun has articulated what I’ve been thinking – diversity is toxic to democracy:
The Bloc Québécois makes it nearly impossible for a national federal party to form a majority government. With a lock on around 50 seats neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals are likely to win enough ridings to gain complete control of Parliament. So Canada is stuck with minority governments and the resulting constant threat of elections and instability.
MacIntyre notes that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives’ attempts to woo moderate Quebecois nationalists away from the Bloc have been a total failure:
The second strategy is to try and win the support of “soft-nationalists†away from the BQ. This is the strategy that the Harper government attempted in the first 2 years of power. They called Quebec a nation within Canada, and funnelled ever more money into Quebec provincial coffers. But when Election Day came Quebec voters did not award the Conservatives. Instead they voted for the BQ again.
So evidently the so called soft-nationalists aren’t in the mood to be wooed. Which makes sense, the BQ are best able to lobby for Quebec in a minority Parliament, so why would they vote for anyone else? What does the Liberal Party or the Conservative Party have to offer that the BQ can’t give the nationalist voter?
Going after the nationalist voter with more Quebec subsidies has proven to be a bottomless pit strategy anyway. There is no amount of funding that will be enough.
Basically, minorities in a democratic country will always vote for their ethnic interests, which are always represented by socialist parties, and triangulation attempts by conservative parties will never succeed because the minorities will always get a better deal from the leftists. Hey you Republican idiots who are trying to court the Latino vote by supporting amnesty for illegal aliens, are you listening?
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Finally, I may have beaten up on the Randroids already this week, but this satirical article (trust me, I double-checked this time) about raising your daughter to be an Objectivist is just too funny:
When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.
To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.
The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly.
Go read the rest.
Hat tip: TrollKing.
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Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though the Republicans have a clue, and are destined to go the way of the Whigs.
The Ayn Rand parody – funny, but, one thing it overlooks is that, as a child, if you share your toys with other children (like your parents and teachers encouraged you to), you pretty much aren’t getting your toys back (at least not in one piece).
Will the no-fault-no-accountability “her way or the highway” divorce decree also be retroactively granted to couples whose men have been married for years or decades?
Also, a single father could probably raise an objectivist daughter by teaching her to reject her emotional and impulsive reactions to the world but he would have to dismantle her female instinct and replace it with cool-headed male objectivity to do so.
Let me understand this, men in the US still get married?
Can’t they read or do they not get out much to meet other men and talk about reality and sports over beers?
Sheep get sheared.
FB, your theory about Canadian politics is exactly correct, because, prior to the Bloc’s existence, majorities were the rule, and minority governments exceedingly rare in Canadian history.
Now, minority governments appear to be the new status quo.
However, there IS a silver lining:
(a) Since no-one can form a majority, it limits what governments can actually do, which of course, small-c conservatives and libertarians alike can agree, is a good thing (“That government governs best which governs least.”, yada yada.)
(b) It broke the political stranglehold the Liberals have generally had through Canadian history (they always flattered themselves as “Canada’s natural governing party”, and indeed, have governed more than not, over the last half-century; now, the Liberals are in disarray; all their talent is gone, and they haven’t had a competent leader since the early part of the decade.
Deleted scenes from Atlas Shrugged.
The best thing ever at McSweeney’s (and the most relevant to the manosphere) is this.
The big reason NY kept its fault-based divorce system for so long was to keep lawyers in business. They keep old legal procedures because they are hard to navigate. In other states there are how-to guides that tell laymen how to settle estates. Not in NY. The rules are much too rococo.
Hey, this post references Canada, appears to be factually accurate, and is written by an American…how? No American in world history has ever uttered a single accurate statement about Canada, yet you seem to have gotten the gist of it, good job.
However: Hugh MacIntyre is a twenty something left wing student who supports the Liberal parties of Canada and Ontario, hates Conservatives and conservatives, is currently backing a prospective Toronto candidate for mayor who makes Harvey Milk look butch in comparison, and is beyond militant on gay issues; the Western Standard got bought out by narcotrafficante-friendly nihilists closely associated with narcotrafficante Marc Emery and is supportive of Obama, the courts forcing gay marriage on states that have voted against it, public health care, feminism, multiethnicism, illegal immigration, and pretty well every left wing cause you can name. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, libertarian. It is statist, hardcore. They once – once – put up a post mildly critical of Obama and the readership – basically left wing potheads who think we need high taxes to fight the “Xtians” – complained.
Ideologies are not hats we don at whims, or balaclavas behind which we hide, they are badges we earn, and we earn the badge of libertarianism by attacking feminists and ethnics and homosexualists and anyone else who would use the state to impose their will against the wishes of the people, something the frightfully PC Western Standard gang has never done. Calling out Quebeckers for voting along ethnic lines doesn’t count, btw, they were here before us for one thing, so hardly can be called ethnics; there is also a grandfather clause allowing Canadian leftists to bash Quebec without being unPC.
The biggest problem is that fault-based divorce didn’t stop any of the splits that would have happened under no-fault divorce. Couples who both wanted to split simply invented a legal fiction where one spouse “caught” the other cheating; a wife who wanted out would invent an impossible to prove allegation of abuse. NF divorce was largely invented to smooth the way for mutual dissolution without the need for a transparently manufactured “cause,” but has been corrupted into a mechanism which allows easy unilateral disgorgement. A proper solution would would allow NF mutual divorce while putting a difficult burden of proof and cause on unilateral splits – or force the filing party to forfeit (very occasionally) his or (in reality) her share of marital assets. Of course, this would make it harder for actual victims of DV/abuse to disentangle themselves, so we know the reaction from the gender feminist camp on that proposal. Oddly, rabid feminists tend to hate NF divorce – they think it prompts wealthy middle-aged men to dump their aging wives for younger, prettier girls. In the words of an interesting thinker, lzzoolllzlzlzlzlzlooozozllzz.
WARNING TO POSTERS TO THESE COMMENT THREADS.
Discover magazine do not protect you, they protect criminals and impostors, the comment at number 46
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/08/14/gellers-limp-spoon/comment-page-1/#comment-292062
was not made by me. If you read their privacy policy page they say this :-
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It is easy for anyone to impostor you on these comment boards and the webmaster does nothing about it. Anyone can use your name, use your email address, though your ip address will not be attached to it as you did not make it, but the impostor could be using a proxy server to publish here and mask its own genuine ip address. This can cause big problems for you if someone who impostors you decides to make some unpleasant comments connected to your name.
They need to attend to their privacy policy and introduce an email verifications facility before approving posts. They do not, they just publish them willy nilly even if you are not the one to have posted a comment. They then refuse to help you to discover the identity of the criminal. Identity fraud is a crime and they do nothing about it.
I have referred the matter to my lawyers and the UK police.
There are also issues with the new law regarding the details on maintenance (alimony and child support). Many judges find the maintenance provisions vague and unworkable. A committee has been appointed to research maintenance standards in New York, though a report is not due until late next year. This may cause issues for judges and divorcees. See also: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2010/08/23/new-york-finally-adopts-no-fault-divorce/
New York was actually a fairly early state to have effectively no fault divorce. You simply had to claim “irreconcilable differences” and remain separated for a year. The year long separation mostly became an opportunity for divorce lawyers to drag things out which is always more expensive in legal fees, which the higher earner generally pays for both in NY under court order.
The real issue in divorce has long been does fault affect the money split and the answer to that in NY has long been no. Conceivably alimony in close cases, depending on the judge. NY in theory has an equitable contribution law with respect to th splitting of marital assets but that’s mostly paid little attention to unless it’s the man who was totally supported while not doing childcare or exemplary household duties.
However NY does tend to support prenups if they’re well done up and both sides were legally represented before signing — and they weren’t a last minute pressure thing. Ideally you should get one before becoming engaged, with a not so short engagement. Of course if you’re living together, a prenup which mimics living together in the event of a breakup will be much easier to get her to agree to, since she’ll be the one pushing for marriage. Or should be.
Children are the only legit reason for marriage these days, but can also be had and given the dad’s last name outside of marriage. Do a cohabitation agreement. Check out the example of Matthew McConaughey.
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