Marriage - Just a Piece of Paper

Marriage -  Just a Piece of Paper

The third great attack on marriage was no fault divorce. 

Once one becomes serious in thinking about how society has gone wrong, no fault divorce comes very clearly into focus. Even though nearly everyone knows or has met someone who has been divorced and has seen the devastation caused. No fault divorce is supported by most without much thought. Who wants two people who don’t want to be married to stay married by force they argue? 

But then I think of the long view of history, for nearly the whole of human history a divorce was hard to obtain and life went on. Why did it become necessary to create a regime whereby divorce is so easy to obtain? The answer is Bolsheviks and Lawyers. The first no fault divorce was instituted in 1918 by the Bolsheviks in what became the Soviet Union.  In the Western world, California under the so called Conservative, Governor Ronald Reagan was the first to institute no fault divorce in 1969.

Who campaigned for it? Lawyers did, as they believed that most people seeking divorce lied to obtain it. If the law was changed they wouldn’t have to lie. No fault divorce spread around the world and today is the default position of nearly every divorce law. It wasn’t ordinary people who marched in the streets for such a law, we didn’t write petitions or stage sit-ins or anything else, most people were happy as the law was, but when has that mattered to those who think they are our betters!

Of course no fault divorce had it’s problems, instead of couples going through a rough patch and trying to fix things up, many regarded it as a “get out of jail free” card. A way to end the “problem”, which then set in motion a whole set of new problems, money, property, child custody, child support. Then we have the human wreckage of divorce, trust issues, the belief that nothing is permanent (particularly relationships), anger, despair, frustration, assault, suicide, even murder. I’m not sure how that is better than a flawed marriage. 

They turned marriage from a sacrament into a commodity, from something sacred to something disposable. They created the belief that marriage is just a piece of paper.   

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