Monday, November 09, 2015

Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment; Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows that men are running away from commitment

Everyone knows that traditional marriage is a cruel institution that “traps” women in commitment, depriving them of the romantic love their noble hearts desire
writes Dalrock, satire dripping from his jaws.
Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment.

Modern women’s enthusiasm for divorce is hardly a well kept secret. [Not all modern women view divorce as empowerment, but a large enough majority does feel this way, which is why divorce empowerment is ubiquitous in entertainment aimed at women.]  If you are looking at media aimed to women, divorce empowerment is a staple.  This is quite literally a shameless obsession.  As new commenter Anna mentioned recently:
It’s crazy that every time that I find an article about marriage, it’s either about the actual wedding or divorce. As a 26 year old woman that has been married for 6 years, I’m well aware of the pressure for divorcing. There’s always a “5 ways to know that your marriage is over”. This is how I found your website and it all makes so much sense, even though I’m not a christian. I have no idea why society is leaning towards destroying its foundations.
Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows that men are running away from commitment.  This is especially important when it comes to conservative backing for child support.  In 2005 Phyllis Schlafly laid out what should be the standard conservative position on a government program designed to destroy families in Federal Incentives Make Children Fatherless:
The federal incentives drive the system. The more divorces, and the higher the child-support guidelines are set and enforced (no matter how unreasonable), the more money the state bureaucracy collects from the feds.
Follow the money. The less time that non-custodial parents (usually fathers) are permitted to be with their children, the more child support they must pay into the state fund, and the higher the federal bonus to the states for collecting the money.
The states have powerful incentives to separate fathers from their children, to give near-total custody to mothers, to maintain the fathers’ high-level support obligations even if their income is drastically reduced, and to hang onto the father’s payments as long as possible before paying them out to the mothers…
We can no longer ignore how taxpayers’ money is incentivizing divorce and creating fatherless children. Nor can we ignore the government’s complicity in the predictable social costs that result from more than 17 million children growing up without their fathers.
Yet Schlafly is an extreme outlier among conservatives on this topic.  Conservatives are the strongest backers of the child support system, and this is due to a deeply held belief that broken families are caused by men who aren’t willing to stick around and raise their kids.  This belief is so strong that conservatives end up taking very unconservative positions on the family.  Instead of opposing a law that creates perverse incentives to break up families, they enthusiastically support it.  Instead of supporting marriage, they support the system designed to replace marriage.  Instead of supporting an incentive based structure for production, they are wedded to a crushing soviet style quota system that discourages hard work.