Archive for the ‘Marriage’ Category
Gambian President Puts Breaks on Polygamy . . . Sort Of
Gambian President Yahya Jammeh announced he was putting limits on widespread polygamy in his country — for the next three years, men will be allowed to have no more than three wives.
According to a BBC report Jammeh’s proclamation, however, the prohibition may not have much real effect,
“Pleas allow the young men to get married took” Mr. Jammeh [said] . . .
But the seriousness in his voice did not match the reaction of his audience who burst into laughter at his announcement.
The population is predominantly Muslim with more than 90% following Islam — and most Gambians are strict in their religious practices.
The BBC reporter suggests that the three wife limit is widely viewed as a measure designed to curry favor with the United States.
While other countries throughout the world have seen a fall in fertility over the past three decades, Gambia maintains extremely high fertility rates in part because of polygamy. Its TFR is 6.0, and in some parts of the country the male fertility rate is above 12.
Human rights groups also oppose polygamy, arguing that it generally exploits women and often leaves marriages in serious financial difficulties.
Sources:
Gambian freeze on polygamy. Demba Jawo, The BBC, July 22, 2003.
Modern methods of family planning and reproductive health services in The Gambia. Swiss Tropical Institute.
The Ultimate Military Dead Beat Dad Story
A few weeks ago I wrote about the problems faced by men who fall behind in their child support payments when they are called up from their reservist positions to serve in time of war. Writing at LewRockwell.Com, Carey Roberts points out the ultimate example of this sort of problem,
Take Bobby Sherrill, for example. He was working on a contract to the Kuwaiti military in 1990. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, they took Sherrill hostage. Four months later, he was released. When he came home to Fayetteville, NC, he expected a hero’s welcome. Instead, the child support goons arrested him for failure to pay child support during his captivity.
Frankly this is such an egregious example that I suspected it as some sort of hoax or urban legend, but a Lexis/Nexis search shows that, in fact, Sherrill was arrested the night after he returned to North Carolina for failing to pay $1,425 in child support during the months he was held prisoner by Iraqi forces.
More reason why courts need much more flexibility and the ability to use common sense in applying child support orders in the real world.
Sources:
The Deadbeat Dad’s Dilemma. Carey Roberts, LewRockwell.Com, June 10, 2003.
Child-support-law amendment comes to attention of Hill. Cheryl Wetzstein, Washington Times, April 27, 1999.
Families and the war. Dianna Thompson and Glenn Sacks, EnterStageRight.Com, November 25, 2002.
Canadian Supreme Court Strengthens Divorce Agreements
In a 7-2 ruling the Canadian Supreme Court reversed several lower court rulings in saying that divorce agreements should be respected unless truly unforeseen circumstances occur that require revisiting them.
The case before the Court involved Linda Miglin who succeeded in having lower courts revise a divorce agreement she had reached with her husband in 1994. The Miglins owned a successful lodge in which they had capital of about $250,000. The divorce agreement called for Eric Miglin to pay his wife $60,000/year in child support, employ her for 5 years at $15,000/year as a consultant for the lodge, and swap her interest in the lodge for the family home (which was worth roughly $250,000).
Eric Miglin fulfilled his obligations under the divorce agreement, but years later, apparently having difficulty finding a job, Linda Miglin asked a court to grant her $4,400 a month in spousal support even though the divorce agreement between the couple specifically ruled out any future spousal support.
Linda Miglin argued that she didn’t realize what she was signing away with the divorce agreement, a contention that the Supreme Court didn’t lend credence given that both parties were represented by lawyers whose job it was to defend their interests.
Lower courts ruled that since Linda Miglin’s circumstances had materially changed, that she was entitled to seek a change in the divorce agreement. The majority opinion of the Canadian Supreme Court disagreed with this, noting that it was inevitable that some unforeseeable material changes would inevitably take place after any divorce agreement,
Some degree of change in the circumstances of the parties is always foreseeable, as agreements are prospective of in nature. Parties are presumed to be aware that health, job markets, parental responsibilities, housing markets and values of assets are all subject to change.
The Supreme Court ruling essentially restored the older standard that the material change in question must have been unforseen but materially connected with the marriage.
Source:
Top court toughens divorce deal rules. Kirk Makin, Global and Mail, April 17, 2003.
Till Death Do Us Part: The Miglin Decision. Spring 2001.
Hey guys, let death do you part. Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail, May 3, 2001.
A contract is a contract — even in family law. Judith C. Sidlofsky Stoffman, GuelphMercury.Com, April 28, 2003.
Tags: Canada
Military Service Puts Some In Quandry Over Child Support Payments
The Christian Science Monitor ran a story in April about the odd predicament that some military reservists called up to serve in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom will find themselves in — namely, with legal problems stemming from falling behind in their child support payments.
The problem is simple — when reservists are called to serve, their salaries generally decline, but their child support payments do not. The Christian Science Monitor cites the case of reservist Mark Wetzel who served in Kosovo. Wetzel’s income fell by 13 percent but a judge refused Wetzel’s request to drop his monthly child support payment by a similar amount.
In some cases reservists only get a few days notice to report, but a request for an adjustment in the level of support can take months. In addition, some states have laws which limit how frequently such adjustments can be requested.
Dianna Thompson, executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, tells The Monitor,
People can’t pay what they don’t make. We’re not saying that servicemen should support their kids. But we can’t ask people to serve their country and not give them some protection. And when people get laid off through no fault of their own, we can’t punish them by giving them unrealistic child-support orders.
It is simple common sense that changes in income brought about by something as important being called up for military service should be reflected in reduced child support payments for the duration of such military service. Not that family courts have ever been particularly interested in what was sensible.
Source:
Military dads seek fair child support. The Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2003.
Avoid Deadbeat Parent Problems by Enforcing Visitation Orders/Joint Physical Custody
The Christian Science Monitor’s Marilyn Gardner wrote an interesting article about ‘deadbeat’ dads that acknowledged the problem with parents failing to pay child support but balanced it with a look at the obstacles that stand in the way of noncustodial fathers and mothers.
One of the interesting statistics Gardner cites is how the likelihood of a parent failing to pay child support increases when the noncustodial parent’s ability to visit the child is cut off by the custodial parent. Gardner writes,
Some fathers want an end to what appears to be a double standard in the legal system.
“They throw fathers in jail for not paying support,” [Fathers' Rights Foundation founder Ronald] Isaacs said. “But they don’t throw mothers in jail for denying visitation. If the courts would enforce visitation orders with the same vigor that they enforce child support, they would get a lot more money than they do by going after these few people.”
As Gardner notes, custodial parents sometimes have what they believe are very good reasons to violate court-ordered visitation. But those sorts of issues should be addressed by independent mediators and/or the courts, not the custodial parent. Courts should enforce visitation orders just as they enforce child support and other orders.
Going even further, courts should have a presumption of joint physical custody. Joint legal custody is already common, and several states have a presumption of joint legal custody. With joint physical custody, the child spends time living with both parents on an agreed upon schedule, typically with the child residing with one parent 70 percent of the time and with the other parent 30 percent of the time (50/50 arrangements are also common). This keeps both parents active in the life of the children.
Now obviously there are many circumstances in which joint physical custody is simply not possible or feasible, but courts should presume joint physical custody unless and until circumstances of the individual case suggest that a different arrangement would be better for the children involved.
Source:
Making ‘deadbeat’ parents a thing of the past. Marilyn Gardner, Christian Science Monitor, August 28, 2002.
Indian Agency Campaigns Against Child Marriages
The BBC reported this month that India’s National Commission for Women is trying to highlight he issue of child marriages in that country.
Thousands of children, including some infants, are married on Akha Teej, which is considered one of the most auspicious days in some Hindu communities. Despite official laws making it illegal for boys under 21 and girls under 18 from being married, child marriage is still widespread in some parts of India, especially in the rural areas of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.
In 1998 The New York Times reported on a survey that interviewed 5,000 married women in Rajasthan and found 56 percent had married before the age of 15.
According to legend, the practice of child marriage began to protect girls against rape from Muslim invaders. The Muslim invaders would take any unmarried women, so Hindus responded by marrying their children at very early ages.
Today, the practice continues in part out of fear that girls not married by the time they reach puberty will fall prey to sexual licentiousness and in part as a means of creating an elaborate social network among people who are extremely poor and where the right arranged marriage can mean the difference between survival and starvation if there is unexpected flooding or drought.
Source:
Child Marriages, Though Illegal, Persist in India. John F. Burns, The New York Times, May 11, 1998.
Move to stop Indian child marriages. Jyotsna Singh, The BBC, May 14, 2002.
Tags: India
Jordanian Woman Granted Divorce
The BBC reports that a Jordanian woman recently became the first to receive a divorce under a new law that allows women as well as men to seek divorce.
Jordan used to allow only men to seek divorces — a fairly common legal restriction in most Muslim countries.
The law was changed earlier this year, however, to allow women to file for divorce provided the women first forfeit any right to any sort of financial compensation (the woman who won her divorce had to forego a dowry she had received from her husband when they were married).
Source:
Jordan woman ‘wins right to divorce’. The BBC, May 13, 2002.
Tags: Jordan
Bonobos, Chimpanzees, and Maureen Dowd
In her endless quest to bring sexual politics into practically every discussion, the New York Time’s Maureen Dowd recently blamed men for the fact that only 49 percent of female executives making more than $100,000 have children (compared to 10 percent of men in that position who are childless). Dowd absurdly thinks that men should take a lesson from bonobos.
Before we get into monkey business, lets look at Dowd’s absurd logic. She cites a “60 Minutes” report in which a handful of women claimed that the second they told men that they attend Harvard Business School, the men are no longer interested in them. Harvard Business School student Ani Vartanian told Lesley Stahl,
As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that’s the end of the conversation. As soon as the guys say, ‘Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,’ all the girls start falling into them.
Of course anecdotes like this are manna to columnists like Dowd who seem positively allergic to anything even remotely smelling of actual data. Dowd implicitly argues that this is the reason female executives are childless without offering a shred of evidence.
She then goes on to urge men to be willing to date more “challenging” women, and, in the process, pauses to denigrate women who are not as “challenging” or “demanding.” According to Dowd,
Women who don’t have demanding jobs are not less demanding in relationships; indeed, they may be more demanding. They’re saving up all that competitive energy and critical faculty to lavish on you when you get home.
What a demeaning thing to say about women who do not attend Harvard Business School or pursue the high challenge careers that Dowd apparently thinks they should.
But it is when Dowd ends her column in a bit of comparative evolutionary biology between human beings and bonobos that Dowd really goes off the deep end. According to Dowd,
Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, live in equatorial rain forests of Congo, and have an extraordinarily happy existence.
And why? because in bonobo society, the females are dominant. Just light dominance, so that its more like a co-dominance, or equality between the sexes.
“They are less obsessed with power and status than their chimpanzee cousins, and more consumed with Eros,” The Times’s Natalie Angier has written. “Bonobos use sex to appease, to bond, to make up after a fight, to ease tensions, to cement alliances . . . Humans generally wait until after a nice meal to make love; bonobos do it beforehand.”
All of this, is offered as a way to achieve Dowd’s ultimate goal which is, namely, “If men would only give up their silly desire for world dominance, the world would be a much finer place.”
First, Angier’s claim that chimpanzees are “obsessed with power and status” whereas bonobos are “more consumed with Eros” is the absolute worse sort of anthropomorphism. Chimpanzees don’t sit around plotting how to obtain power, and bonobos aren’t thinking of ways to get laid. They’re both following scripts pre-arranged for them by their particular evolutionary path. Imputing to them these human motives is absurd and unworthy of even a beginning biology student.
More importantly, though, decades ago this sort of anthropomorphizing held up chimpanzees as a model for human behavior. Until it was discovered that chimpanzees organizing hunting parties and engage in plenty of other organized violence.
But in evaluating bonobos vs. chimpanzees Dowd, like a lot of people who cite bonobos, leave out what bonobos do not do. What they do not do is use tools to nearly the extent that chimpanzees do. Chimps, like human beings, are rather creative tool users — they will use sticks to fish, use tree branches as ladders to escape, and exhibit a whole host of other behaviors. Bonobos have never been observed using tools in the wild (though they do learn how to use tools in captivity).
One persistent theory about human intelligence and tool use is that it evolved out of the needs of organized hunting and other aggressive. To the extent that one can draw the sort of crude comparisons between non-human primates and human beings, the clear lesson is that following Dowd’s advice might indeed reduce conflict, but it would also reduce that which makes us human — our incredible manipulation of our environment.
Personally, though, I suspect the amount of comparative information that can be gleaned about human behavior from chimpanzees and bonobos is extremely limited. More often commentators such as Dowd simply use these non-human primates as a post hoc justification for their already pre-existing ideological views. That’s one difference between non-human primates and someone like Dowd — the primates do not intentionally prefer fallacious logic over reasoned argument (the bonobos and chimpanzees at least have a ready justification for not relying on solid data — what’s Dowd’s excuse?)
Source:
The baby bust. Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 10, 2002.
Is Virginia’s Proposed Marital Rape Statute a Good Idea?
Virginia’s legislature is considering altering its laws to make it easier for married women to file rape charges against their husband. Some critics of feminism are up in arms over this proposed change, but, in fact, passing the law would be the right thing to do.
The issue here is pretty straightforward. Under current Virginia law, a woman who wants to accuse her husband of rape must first meet two criteria — she must no longer be living with her husband or she must provide some evidence of a serious bodily injury. If she is still living with her husband or did not sustain a serious bodily injury, she cannot accuse her husband of rape.
The proposed law would eliminate those two requirements, giving married women the same rights under the law that single women have.
This seems like a pretty obvious change that probably should have been done a long time ago, but critics both in the Virginia House and on the Internet have criticized the bill on a number of grounds. Stuart Miller wrote a critique of the law, Martial Rape — What a “Can of Worms”! that presents two arguments against the marital rape statute. Lets look at those.
First Miller opens his critique with the bizarre view that a marital rape statute might discourage men from getting married. Since data show that married women suffer less violence from their partners than do non-married women, the law might actually increase violence against women by lowering marriage rates. It is also true that children living in married households are less likely to be abused by their parents than are children living in unmarried households. Does it follow, then, that we should decriminalize child abuse among married couples? Besides, I thought it was the radical feminists who were obsessed with groups rather than with protecting the rights of individual. Presumably women who are raped by their husbands would prefer to be treated like individuals rather than figuring in some grand collective calculus by Miller and others.
The second argument Miller offers is also an argument that was made in opposition to the law on the floor of the Virginia House — some unscrupulous women might use this law to file false rape charges against their husbands to gain leverage during divorce proceedings.
Certainly, if this law passes, some women will in fact do this. So what? The fact that some women might twist and abuse the law is hardly much of a justification for jettisoning the rights of women who do not abuse the system in that way. The solution to that problem is not saying that married women must jump through all sorts of extra hoops to charge their husbands with rape, but rather demand that more be done about the problem of false allegations.
Virginia’s current law is absurdly antiquated. That a woman in Virginia cannot file a rape charge against her husband if she is currently living with him and did not sustain a serious bodily injury boggles the mind. The Virginia legislature should pass this change to its statute on marital rape, and it should also pass legislation toughening treatment of men or women who file false allegations.
Source:
Marital Rape — What a “Can of Worms”!. Stuart A. Miller, Strike-The-Root.Com, March 3, 2002.
Domestic violence a priority. Pamela Stallsmith, Virginia Times-Dispatch, February 24, 2002.
Supreme Court Declines to Consider Odd Child Support Case
On January 7, 2002, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Morgan Wise who was ordered by a Texas court to pay child support even though DNA tests confirm he cannot possibly be the father of the boy named in the support order.
Wise’s case started in 1999 when his youngest son, Rauli, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that can occur when both father and mother carry a defective gene. Genetic testing showed, however, that Wise was not a carrier of that gene.
Further paternity tests showed that Wise was the biological father of only one of the four children born during his marriage to Wanda Fryar. The two divorced in 1996.
But as far as family courts in Texas were concerned, the paternity tests were completely irrelevant. Under common law that dates back hundreds of years, all children born within a marriage are presumed to be biologically related to the father, end of story. This may have made a lot of sense when it was literally impossible to prove paternity, but those days are long since past.
States vary widely on when paternity can be disputed. In some states, disputing paternity must be done within the first few years after a child is born. Other states have laws allowing fathers to introduce genetic evidence at any time to avoid paying child support for children whom they are not biologically related.
Jeffery Leving of the Fatherhood Education Institute argues that the Wise’s case represents a sexist approach to the obligations of parenthood. Leving writes,
What would happen if we applied the same twisted logic to a woman married to a man who fathered a child from an extramarital affair? Would we proclaim that because she was married to her husband, she is the legal mother of the child born of the affair and force her to financially support another woman’s child? We would do no such thing, yet there are men who are court ordered to pay in the analogous situation.
Leving notes that Ohio, Colorado, Iowa and Louisiana all have laws which allow men to be released from child support requirements if DNA testing proves they are not the biological father of the children named in support awards. Leving argues that the mothers in these cases should pursue the legitimate fathers of the children for child support, which certainly seems to make a lot more sense than forcing deceived fathers to continue to pay child support.
Sources:
In genetic testing for paternity, law often lags behind science. Tamar Lewin, The New York Times, March 11, 2001.
U.S. Supreme Court decision ignores men’s rights. Jeffery Leving, Fatherhood Educational Institute, January 15, 2002.