The Polygamy case in TX-Defining what marriage means.

[Darius11 12]

If you have not been folowing the case here is an artical
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120787642184106823-g162YSNtmm9KT0vLab1SYERuY4w_20080510.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top




Listening to the radio and Michael Graham brings up a good point.

Why are these people being arrested?

I agree that the underage marriage is illegal but if we were dealing with adults should their definition of marriage be respected?


If yes Why?

If no DO you support Gay marriage? If yes what’s the difference in allowing one group to define marriage and not allowing another?

My personal opinion is this: If we are dealing with adults I don’t care how they decide to define marriage.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." - Kurt Cobain

[beowulf 1]

Polygamy is illegal whether they want it to be legal or not. They broke the law. If they want to challange the law then fight it in court.

[Thanatos340 1]

Long as everyone involved is an INFORMED Adult. No problem.

Polygamy is its own Punishment if you ask me.

[Darius11 12]

Quote

Polygamy is illegal whether they want it to be legal or not. They broke the law. If they want to challange the law then fight it in court.

The same can be said about Gay marriage, Anal sex is even illegal in some states.

So I am trying to figure out the logic of people who support gay marriage but are against other forms of marriage involving adults.

You just don’t see the same people who support gay marriage raising up to support these people.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." - Kurt Cobain

[rehmwa 2]

Adults should be able to have any kind of relationship and/or specialized legal contracts of partnership all they want.

Marriage is a religious term, so hijacking the word seems, to me, to be a big waste of energy for little return.

I'd just as soon not see the government involved in it at all.

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[Darius11 12]

Quote

Polygamy is its own Punishment if you ask me.

Agree 100% man

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." - Kurt Cobain

[beowulf 1]

Quote

Quote

Polygamy is illegal whether they want it to be legal or not. They broke the law. If they want to challange the law then fight it in court.

The same can be said about Gay marriage, Anal sex is even illegal in some states.

So I am trying to figure out the logic of people who support gay marriage but are against other forms of marriage involving adults.

You just don’t see the same people who support gay marriage raising up to support these people.

And the Gays are fighting it in court.

[lawrocket 3]

A couple of things:

1) Marriage is a legal privilege conferred by state law. Consent to enter into marriage is not enough to constitute a marriage. In every state, I believe, there is the requirement for a license and a solemnization.

Thus, without a license of solemnization, you don't get a marriage.

2) This is done because legal marriage confers certain rights and presumptions under law. Thus, if the law does not consider it a "marriage" you don't get those rights or presumptions.

Conclusion - I believe that "marriage" should NOT be individually defined. Call it a "spiritual marriage" or "religious marriage." But don't call it a "marriage.'

p.s. I support conferring the rights and responsibilties of marriage to same sex couples. But that should be up to the state legislatures.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[thirdworld19 0]

I would be curious to know why people - whoever they are - get married? As LawRocket points out, the marriage that everyone seems to be talking about is the legal definition. Why not just live together? Nothing illegal about living together. Why does anyone get married? Tax benefits? Insurance benefits? I'm sure everyone has their reasons - just curious...

[labrys 0]

joint parenting;
joint adoption;
joint foster care, custody, and visitation (including non-biological parents);
status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions where one partner is too ill to be competent;
joint insurance policies for home, auto and health;
dissolution and divorce protections such as community property and child support;
immigration and residency for partners from other countries;
inheritance automatically in the absence of a will;
joint leases with automatic renewal rights in the event one partner dies or leaves the house or apartment;
inheritance of jointly-owned real and personal property through the right of survivorship (which avoids the time and expense and taxes in probate);
benefits such as annuities, pension plans, Social Security, and Medicare;
spousal exemptions to property tax increases upon the death of one partner who is a co-owner of the home;
veterans' discounts on medical care, education, and home loans; joint filing of tax returns;
joint filing of customs claims when traveling;
wrongful death benefits for a surviving partner and children;
bereavement or sick leave to care for a partner or child;
decision-making power with respect to whether a deceased partner will be cremated or not and where to bury him or her;
crime victims' recovery benefits;
loss of consortium tort benefits;
domestic violence protection orders;
judicial protections and evidentiary immunity;
and more....

Owned by Remi #?

[Nightingale 0]

Quote

Polygamy is illegal whether they want it to be legal or not. They broke the law. If they want to challange the law then fight it in court.

No, they didn't. The law is against having more than one LEGAL spouse. The men in those communities typically do not legally marry their second "wife", but have a church ceremony only. Since there is no law about multiple adults living together, and the church ceremony has no legal standing, there is no crime provided all parties are over 18.

[Nightingale 0]

Personally, I don't think marriage should be recognized by law at all. The government simply has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults. Marry in your church or in front of your community, but it shouldn't confer any kind of special status whatsoever.

[thirdworld19 0]

Quote

joint parenting;
joint adoption;
joint foster care, custody, and visitation (including non-biological parents);
status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions where one partner is too ill to be competent;
joint insurance policies for home, auto and health;
dissolution and divorce protections such as community property and child support;
immigration and residency for partners from other countries;
inheritance automatically in the absence of a will;
joint leases with automatic renewal rights in the event one partner dies or leaves the house or apartment;
inheritance of jointly-owned real and personal property through the right of survivorship (which avoids the time and expense and taxes in probate);
benefits such as annuities, pension plans, Social Security, and Medicare;
spousal exemptions to property tax increases upon the death of one partner who is a co-owner of the home;
veterans' discounts on medical care, education, and home loans; joint filing of tax returns;
joint filing of customs claims when traveling;
wrongful death benefits for a surviving partner and children;
bereavement or sick leave to care for a partner or child;
decision-making power with respect to whether a deceased partner will be cremated or not and where to bury him or her;
crime victims' recovery benefits;
loss of consortium tort benefits;
domestic violence protection orders;
judicial protections and evidentiary immunity;
and more....

So it would appear that the majority of reasons center around financial benefits? Does anyone else have other reasons?

[Nightingale 0]

Quote

So it would appear that the majority of reasons center around financial benefits? Does anyone else have other reasons?

Beyond financial and legal benefits, there are no reasons to have legally sanctioned marriage.

[rehmwa 2]

Quote

Beyond financial and legal benefits, there are no reasons to have legally sanctioned marriage.

there are no "tangible" reasons beyond those

I hear lots of subjective ideas outside those tangibles, which I think are a waste of discussion time and not pertinent in terms of government sanctioned marriage.

For gov sanc'd stuff, I only want to know what it's costing us as taxpayers - or saving - where it's not equal in either way to just individuals. And why they think there's a payback

and how they measure it

and is it real? or just assumed

etc

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[funjumper101 15]

I saved this article few years ago. I haven't found anything better. I think that the state and the feds should be out of the business of marriage completely. The rights and presumptions under law that are conferred by "marriage" should be re-defined as "civil unions" for all couples, same or opposite sex. The "marriage" part of the equation involves religious and moral issues. The legal side has nothing to do with it.

Begin quoted text>>>

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Studying marriage over the last several years has been a lot like adjusting to marriage itself. No matter how well you think you know your partner beforehand, the first years are full of surprises, not only about your spouse but also about yourself.

I have been studying family history for 30 years, but I began focusing on marriage only in the mid-1990s, when reporters and audiences started asking me if the institution of marriage was falling apart. Many of their questions seemed to assume that there had been some Golden Age of Marriage in the past.

My initial response was that marriage is not undergoing an unprecedented crisis, but has always been in flux. For thousands of years, people have been proclaiming a crisis in marriage and pointing backward to better days. The ancient Greeks complained bitterly about the declining morals of wives. The Romans bemoaned high divorce rates. The European settlers in America began lamenting the decline of the family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they stepped off the boats.

Furthermore, many of the things people think are unprecedented in family life today are not actually new. Almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before. There have been societies and times when nonmarital sex and out-of-wedlock births were more common and widely accepted than they are today. Stepfamilies were much more numerous in the past, the result of high death rates and frequent remarriages. Even divorce rates have been higher in some regions and periods than they are in Europe and North America today. And same-sex marriage, though rare, has been sanctioned in some cultures under certain conditions.

On the other hand, some things that people believe to be traditional are actually relatively recent innovations. That is the case for the "tradition" that marriage has to be licensed by the state or sanctified by the church. In ancient Rome, the difference between cohabitation and legal marriage depended solely upon the partners' intent. Even the Roman Catholic Church long held that if a man and woman said they had privately agreed to marry, whether they said those words in the kitchen or out by the haystack, they were, in fact, married. But in practice, there were many more ways to get out of a marriage in the early Middle Ages than in the early modern era.

However, the current rearrangement of both married and single life is without historical precedent. When it comes to any particular marital practice or behavior, there may be nothing new under the sun. But when it comes to the overall place of marriage in society and the relationship between husbands and wives, nothing in the past is anything like what we have today, even if it may look similar at first glance.

The forms, values, and arrangements of marriage are indeed changing dramatically all around the globe. Almost everywhere people worry that marriage is in crisis. But I have been intrigued to discover that people's sense of what "the marriage crisis" involves differs drastically from place to place. In the United States, policy makers worry about the large numbers of children born out of wedlock. In Germany and Japan, by contrast, many planners are more interested in increasing the total number of births, regardless of the form of the family in which the children will be raised. So while federal policy in the United States encourages abstinence-only sex-education classes, Japanese pundits lament the drop in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour "love hotels."

There are some common themes, however, under all the bewildering differences. Everywhere marriage is becoming more optional and more fragile. Everywhere the once-predictable link between marriage and child rearing is fraying. And everywhere relations between men and women are undergoing rapid and at times traumatic transformation. In fact the relations between men and women have changed more in the past 30 years than they did in the previous 3,000, and a similar transformation is occurring in the role of marriage.

My effort to understand the origins and nature of that transformation forced me to change many other ideas I once had about the history of marriage. For example, like numerous historians and sociologists, I used to think that the male-breadwinner/full-time-housewife marriages depicted in 1950s and 1960s television shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, the kinds of marriages that actually predominated in North America and Western Europe during those decades, were a short-lived historical fluke. I changed my mind.

It is true that 1950s marriages were exceptional in many ways. Until that decade, relying on a single breadwinner had been rare. For thousands of years, most women and children had shared the tasks of breadwinning with men. It was not unusual for wives to "bring home the bacon" -- or at least to raise and slaughter the pig, then take it to the market to sell. In the 1950s, however, for the first time, a majority of marriages in Western Europe and North America consisted of a full-time homemaker supported by a male earner. Also new in the 1950s was the cultural consensus that everyone should marry, and that people should do so at a young age. The baby boom of the 1950s was likewise a departure from the past, because birthrates in Western Europe and North America had fallen steadily during the previous 100 years.

I became convinced, however, that the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet family was not just a postwar aberration. Instead it was the culmination of a new marriage system that had been evolving for more than 150 years. I now think that there was a basic continuity from the late 18th century through the 1950s and 1960s. In the 18th century, people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage, and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners on that basis. The sentimentalization of the love-based marriage in the 19th century and its sexualization in the 20th each represented a logical step in the evolution of that new approach.

Until the late 18th century, most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and transitory as love. The more I learned about the ancient history of marriage, the more I realized what a gigantic marital revolution had occurred in Western Europe and North America during the Enlightenment.

That led me to another surprising finding: From the moment of its inception, that revolutionary new marriage system already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the 20th century. As soon as the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage was first raised, observers of the day warned that the same values that increased people's satisfaction with marriage as a relationship had an inherent tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution. The skeptics were right to worry about the dangers of the love match.

After examining the gains and losses associated with the destabilization of marriage, I realized that my historical studies had taken me to the very place I have ended up in my personal life. Like many women who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I went through a number of stages in my attitude toward marriage. As a teenager, I thought getting married meant living happily ever after. During boring classes in junior high school, I doodled hearts in my notebook, coupling my initials with those of whatever boy I currently had a crush on. I would write out my first name in front of his last, trying to see how they looked when prefixed with the magical title "Mrs."

But in college, my interest in getting married took a back seat to the excitement of campus life and my involvement in the outside world. Around that time I also became more critical of my parents' marriage. My dad, whom I loved dearly and who was a wonderful father, was not a wonderful husband. He could be impatient, demanding, and occasionally condescending toward my mother (though never to his daughters). Even as a self-centered 18-year-old, I saw that when my mother finally left my father, after 19 years of marriage, there was a dramatic improvement in her self-confidence. My mother's experience, combined with a few heartbreaks of my own, made me wonder if I might be better off staying single, and my ambivalence about marriage was reinforced by the historical and anthropological research on male-female relations that I was encountering in my studies.

I worried that being married would rob me of my hard-earned independent identity. When I finally decided to tie the knot, it was with enough trepidation that my husband-to-be announced to our assembled friends and families, only half in jest, that his sister would stand beside me throughout the wedding ceremony to prevent me from bolting. For the first year of marriage, the word "husband" came out of my mouth in a self-conscious stutter, as in "My huh-huh-husband will be over later."

With time, however, the word began to roll easily and frequently off my tongue. For one thing, it is nice to have something less cumbersome to call my partner than my "significant other" or my "live-in boyfriend." I have also come to see the word as a public signal to friends and family that I am in a committed relationship, and as an invitation for them to take an interest in our well-being as a couple. But I doubt that I'd be as satisfied with being married if my friends and family had veto power over our parting.

The historical transformation in marriage over the ages has created a similar paradox for society as a whole. Marriage has become more joyful, loving, and satisfying for many couples than ever before in history. At the same time, it has become optional and more brittle. Those two strands of change cannot be disentangled.

For thousands of years, marriage served so many economic, political, and social functions that the individual needs and wishes of family members (especially women and children) took second place. Marriage was not about bringing two individuals together for love and intimacy, although that was sometimes a welcome side effect. Rather, the aim of marriage was to acquire useful in-laws and gain political or economic advantage. Only in the last 200 years, as other economic and political institutions began to take over many of the roles once played by marriage, did Europeans and Americans begin to see marriage as a personal and private relationship that should fulfill their emotional and sexual desires.

But those changes had negative as well as positive implications for the stability of marriage as an institution. No sooner did the ideal of marrying for love triumph than its most enthusiastic supporters started demanding the right to divorce if love died. Once people came to believe that families should nurture children rather than exploit their labor, many began to feel that the legal consequences of illegitimacy for children were inhumane. And when people started thinking that the quality of the relationship was more important than the economic functions of the institution, some men and women argued that the committed love of two unmarried individuals, including those of the same sex, deserved at least as much social respect as a formal marriage entered into for mercenary reasons.

For 150 years, four things kept people from pushing the new values about love and self-fulfillment to their ultimate conclusion that people could construct meaningful lives outside marriage, and that not everything in society had to be organized through and around married couples. The first impediment was the conviction that there were enormous and innate differences between men and women, one of which was that women had no sexual desires. That crumbled in the 1920s, as people rejected the notion of separate spheres and emphasized the importance of sexual satisfaction for women as well as men.

The second thing that held back the subversive potential of the love revolution was the ability of relatives, neighbors, employers, and government to regulate personal behavior and penalize nonconformity. The influence of those individuals and institutions was eroded by urbanization, which allowed more anonymity in personal life, and the development of national corporations, banks, and other impersonal institutions that cared more about people's educational credentials and financial assets than their marital status and sexual histories.

The third factor was the combination of unreliable birth control and harsh penalties for illegitimacy. Then, in the 1960s, birth control became reliable enough that the fear of pregnancy no longer constrained women's sexual conduct. And, in the 1970s, reformers abolished the legal category of illegitimacy, successfully arguing that it was unfair to penalize a child whose mother was unable or unwilling to wed.

Women's legal and economic dependence on men, and men's domestic dependence on women, was the fourth factor that had long driven people to get and stay married. But during the 1970s and 1980s, women won legal autonomy and made huge strides toward economic self-sufficiency. At the same time, the proliferation of labor-saving consumer goods like permanent-press fabrics, ready-made foods, and automatic dishwashers undercut men's dependence on women's housekeeping.

As those barriers to single living and personal autonomy gradually eroded, society's ability to pressure people into marrying, or keep them in a marriage against their wishes, was drastically curtailed. Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. Like that huge turning point, the revolution in marriage has transformed how people organize their work and interpersonal commitments, use their leisure time, understand their sexuality, and take care of children and the elderly. It has liberated some people from restrictive, inherited roles in society. But it has stripped others of traditional support systems and rules of behavior without establishing new ones.

The marriage revolution has brought personal turmoil in its wake. But we cannot turn the clock back in our personal lives any more than we can go back to small-scale farming and artisan production in our economic life. It would be wonderful if we could pick and choose what historical changes we will and won't accept, but we are not that lucky. Just as many people found new sources of employment in the industrial world even after the factories had displaced old ones, many people will be able to carve out satisfying and stable marriages on a new basis. But many others will live their lives and construct their personal commitments outside marriage.

Promoting good marriages is a worthwhile goal, and we can help many marriages work better than they currently do. In today's changing world, one-size-fits-all advice books and glib formulas for marital success are of little value. But sociologists and psychologists have found a few general principles that seem to help most kinds of modern marriage flourish. Because men and women no longer face the same economic and social compulsions to get or stay married as in the past, it is especially important that they begin their relationship as friends and build it on the basis of mutual respect. As men and women marry later, they come to marriage with a lot of life experience and many previously formed interests and skills. It's no longer possible to assume that two people can merge all of their interests and beliefs.

Accepting differences does not mean putting up with everything a partner dishes out. It is certainly not the same thing that psychologists meant in the 1950s, when that advice was directed only at the wife. Today acceptance in a relationship must be a two-way street. And in a world where marriages are no longer held together by the compulsion of in-laws and society or the mutual dependence of two individuals who cannot do each other's jobs, continuing emotional investments in a marriage have to replace external constraints in providing ballast for the relationship.

Another important principle that flows from the historical changes in marriage is that husbands have to respond positively to their wives' requests for change. That is not female favoritism or male bashing. For thousands of years, marriage was organized in ways that reinforced female subservience. Today, even though most of the legal and economic bases for a husband's authority over his wife and her deference to his needs are gone, we all have inherited unconscious habits and emotional expectations that perpetuate female disadvantage in marriage. For example, it is still true that when women marry, they typically do more housework than they did before marriage. When men marry, they do less. Women are more likely to bring up marital issues for discussion because they have more to gain from changing the traditional dynamics of marriage.

In the 30 years I have been studying family life, I have read many women's diaries, written over the past 400 years. I have been struck by how often entries focused not on the joy of marriages but on wives' struggle to accept their lot. Many women did write about their love and respect for their husbands, of course, but many others filled their diaries with reminders to themselves to cultivate patience, self-restraint, and forgiveness. One woman's refrain was that her husband's behavior was "the cross I have to bear," another's, the reminder that her husband had never beaten her, and that she should "be more grateful for what I have." Men's journals dwelled less on the need to accommodate wives' shortcomings, but they, too, reflected the frustration of living in a fixed institution in which there was no sense that problems could be worked through and relationships renegotiated.

What might I write if I had time to keep a daily diary? It would undoubtedly be infused by the greater sense of choice that my husband and I now have in comparison with the past. As with any marriage, there are times we have to search for patience and forbearance. But the choice to stay and work things out is a conscious one and a mutual process, not a unilateral resignation to accept the inevitable. My diary would record a lot more active delight in my daily married life than most journals of the past and a lot less talk about "resigning myself to my lot." Yet as a modern woman, I live with an undercurrent of anxiety that is absent from the diaries of earlier days. I know that if my husband and I stop negotiating, if too much time passes without any joy, or if a conflict drags on too long, neither of us has to stay with the other.

What is true for individual marriages is also true for society. As a result of centuries of social change, most people in the Western world have a choice about whether or not to enter marriage and, if they do, whether or not to stay in it for the rest of their lives. Married people may be able to reach out to friends and counselors for help, and our employers and political leaders could make it easier for us to sustain our relationships by instituting family-friendly work policies and social programs to help us juggle our many roles. But the most effective support systems for married couples, like subsidized parental leaves, flexible work schedules, high-quality child care, and access to counseling when a relationship is troubled, would also make things easier for those people who are constructing relationships outside marriage. Conversely, any measures that significantly limited social support or freedom of choice for the unmarried would probably backfire on the quality of life for the married as well.

We can certainly create more healthy marriages than we currently do, and we can save more marriages that are in trouble. But just as we cannot organize modern political alliances through kinship ties or put the farmers' and skilled craftsmen's households back as the centerpiece of the modern economy, we can never reinstate marriage as the primary source of commitment and caregiving in the modern world. For better or worse, we must adjust our personal expectations and social support systems to this new reality.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and is director of research and public education for the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families. This essay has been adapted from Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage.

[Nightingale 0]

Quote

For gov sanc'd stuff, I only want to know what it's costing us as taxpayers - or saving - where it's not equal in either way to just individuals. And why they think there's a payback

and how they measure it

and is it real? or just assumed

etc

What it's costing us as taxpayers:

The entire cost of the divorce court system.

A single divorce costs state and federal governments about $30,000. The 10.4 million divorces in 2002 are estimated to have cost the taxpayers over $30 billion. (Whitehead, B. and Popenoe, D. The State of Our Unions)

Just to put this in perspective, if the $30 billion/year rate was consistent from 2003-2008, that's $150 Billion, or around 1/4 the cost of the war in Iraq.

[rehmwa 2]

And that's just a single line item on the balance sheet.

...
Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants

[Shotgun 1]

Quote

A single divorce costs state and federal governments about $30,000.

How does a divorce cost the government that much?

When I got divorced, we paid the fee (I think it was around $400???). We spent about 5-10 minutes in front of the judge, and there was a little bit of paperwork involved. I can't see how this would have cost any more than what we paid for.

And if others have more difficult divorces, aren't they the ones paying for any additional fees involved? (I have no idea how that works. My own divorce is about the only knowledge I have of the system.)

[Shotgun 1]

Quote

Personally, I don't think marriage should be recognized by law at all. The government simply has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults. Marry in your church or in front of your community, but it shouldn't confer any kind of special status whatsoever.

I agree with this, but one question I have is: If marriage was no longer recognized by the law, how would that affect immigration laws? If I was in a relationship with a non-U.S. citizen, and I wanted my partner to be able to permanently live with me in the U.S., would I still be able to sponsor him to become a U.S. citizen?

[Nightingale 0]

Quote

Quote

Personally, I don't think marriage should be recognized by law at all. The government simply has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults. Marry in your church or in front of your community, but it shouldn't confer any kind of special status whatsoever.

I agree with this, but one question I have is: If marriage was no longer recognized by the law, how would that affect immigration laws? If I was in a relationship with a non-U.S. citizen, and I wanted my partner to be able to permanently live with me in the U.S., would I still be able to sponsor him to become a U.S. citizen?

Sure. You help him find a job, get the employer to sign the appropriate paperwork, and bring him over here on a work visa, and he can begin the process of becoming a citizen. Or, we start a special visa program where a person may sponsor another person towards citizenship, provided they can show that they have the means to financially support that person until they fulfill the citizenship requirements.

[Nightingale 0]

Quote

Quote

A single divorce costs state and federal governments about $30,000.

How does a divorce cost the government that much?

When I got divorced, we paid the fee (I think it was around $400???).

Your tax dollars are covering the rest. In a courthouse, there's the judge's salary. And the bailiff's salary. And the Court Clerk's salary. (edit: I forgot the court reporter's salary) You've got the state bar expenses to keep track of your lawyer. You've got the expense of a taxpayer paid for, court appointed lawyer for your kids in some situations. And then there's the county recorder and records clerks that have to keep track of who's married and who's divorced. On top of that, you have the financial overhead for buildings and maintenance. Then, you have the people in the federal government working on taxes and making sure that you're not claiming your now ex spouse. You've got the expenses at the records office to change your name back to your maiden name. You've got the expenses at the DMV to change your driving records to your new name... the list goes on.

Divorce isn't cheap.

[Shotgun 1]

OK. That sounds fair enough.

Though I'm sure there are a lot of other questions that would arise if we were to consider doing away with legal marriages. But I'll leave that can of worms alone now.

[Nightingale 0]

Quote

OK. That sounds fair enough.

Though I'm sure there are a lot of other questions that would arise if we were to consider doing away with legal marriages. But I'll leave that can of worms alone now.

I just didn't want to get into an immigration debate in a marriage thread.

[Shotgun 1]

Quote

Your tax dollars are covering the rest. In a courthouse, there's the judge's salary. And the bailiff's salary. And the Court Clerk's salary. (edit: I forgot the court reporter's salary) You've got the state bar expenses to keep track of your lawyer. You've got the expense of a taxpayer paid for, court appointed lawyer for your kids in some situations. And then there's the county recorder and records clerks that have to keep track of who's married and who's divorced. On top of that, you have the financial overhead for buildings and maintenance. Then, you have the people in the federal government working on taxes and making sure that you're not claiming your now ex spouse. You've got the expenses at the records office to change your name back to your maiden name. You've got the expenses at the DMV to change your driving records to your new name... the list goes on.

Divorce isn't cheap.

Why don't they charge a higher fee that would cover all of that stuff?

And in my case, there was really no reason for us to go to court except that it was required. We could have just as easily signed the papers in front of a notary public.