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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (6699)	2/27/2001 1:25:46 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

There is a disconnect in your response. As a family law lawyer, I see many marriages where the parties have no idea what they want from marriage, what their goals are, what their finances will be, how they will handle conflicts, etc. So they get married, difficulties arise, but they have no shared agreement on how their marriage should work and no tools for resolving the conflicts, so too many times the outcome is domestic violence and divorce. This is good?? When anybody in the country can become an ordained minister of the Universal Live Church and legally marry poeople (true -- see www.ulc.org, send your name in and become an ordained minister legally entitled to marry people in many states, including mine) things are out of control. It is easier to get a drivers license than a marriage license. You don't even have to show that you are legally sane to get married. Keep in mind that a large number of children in this country have never lived in a stable, healthy family and have no idea what a healthy marriage entails. Their observation of the way husbands and wives interact is too often by threats, bullying, and violence. We can't cure all this by a marriage class, but it can help. For example, our county requires that all divorcing parties who have children attend a one-day seminar/workshop on "Helping Children through Divorce." All my clients who have gone through this have said it was eye-opening; even those most hostile to attending it, including one who seriously debated going to jail for contempt rather than attending, found it excellent. And several said they wished they had had this information years earlier. Divorce is far too often devestating to children. Studies are starting to show that the children of divorced parents do worse in school and have higher rates of domestic violence and divorce in their own marriages, not to mention being raised far more often in poverty. If this were a disease, we would consider it a public health crisis and Hillary would be clamoring to include benefits for it in every health care plan. But as it is, even concerned people like you and Karen shrug your shoulders and say that we shouldn't even try an ounce of prevention to save children and families from this social devastation. From my side of the fence, dealing with the consequences of people who entered marriage with no clue about their legal rights, ways of communicating, issues of "fair fighting," conflict resolution resources that don't include battering or killing, and the like, what we're doing isn't working, and is hurting a lot of people, many of them children, in the process.