Restoring Marriage
By
Stephen Baskerville
Maggie Gallagher is right that a dialogue on marriage and child poverty is long
overdue [Commentary, March 7]. Yet she offers no more concrete method for
restoring the married family than those she criticizes. If we believe that
eliminating the marriage penalty and promoting marriage “education” will
exert more than a marginal impact on the rates of divorce and out of wedlock
birth, we are burying our head in the sand.
Gallagher’s own book, The Abolition of Marriage, cites figures showing that
80% of divorces are unilateral and describes divorce as a “shift in power . .
. in favor of the unfaithful” spouse. It also involves a shift in power
in favor of the state, which encourages divorce because it allows the state
to insert its power into the private family, foremost by seizing control over
the children. “No-fault divorce gave judges, at the request of one-half
of the couple, the right to decide when a marriage had irretrievably broken
down,” she points out. Judges are not only availing themselves of this
right; they are offering lucrative financial and emotional incentives to
parents, usually mothers, to request the divorce. These incentives include
virtually automatic child custody and the power to expel, plunder, and
criminalize the father. By rewarding the spouse that files for divorce
judges can increase the business of their courts, as Dickens predicted, and the
scope of their power. They can also return enormous earnings to the
attorneys, psychotherapists, and others who fall within their patronage and have
a professional interest in increasing the volume of divorce litigation and
fatherless children.
The rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth have little to do with tax laws
or lack of education about the harm it does to children and everything to do
with government officials who have a vested interest in forced divorce and
father eviction. The divorce industry has rendered marriage, in effect, a
fraudulent contract. It is hardly surprising that those profiting from the
fraud are perverting the instruments of justice and creating an authoritarian
machine, centered on secret courts, to enforce their regime. G.K.
Chesterton pointed out that the destruction of the family means the destruction
of freedom, and we now see the same courts that are ripping apart families are
increasingly ripping up the Bill of Rights, as any parent who has ever been in
family court can testify. Until marriage is made an enforceable contract,
there is little point in preaching to young people to put their trust in it.
Young men in particular who are lured into this scam can lose their children,
their homes, their freedom, and (in view of the skyrocketing suicide rate among
divorce fathers) even their lives. It is hardly surprising that fewer and
fewer are being taken in.
More than anyone else, the people who must stand up and demand that marriage
be made an enforceable contract are fathers. This does not
necessarily require “turning back the clock” to fault-based divorce.
It does require the recognition that legal marriage confers constitutional
rights on fathers (and mothers) not to have their children taken away and turned
into wards of the state, in the absence of legal wrongdoing by their parents.
When the state becomes involved in its citizens’ private lives by promoting
matters as personal as marriage and fatherhood, it is because we are not
confronting the real problem. It is not necessary for government to
promote marriage. It is only necessary for government to stop ripping it
apart.
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Stephen Baskerville, PhD
Department of Political Science
Howard University
Washington, DC 20059
703-560-5138
202-806-7267
