Marriage between a man and a woman is part of the social compact human beings have made through thousands of years for the survival of the human race. Unfortunately, the most vulnerable members of society are routinely placed at risk because the time-venerated institution of marriage is seriously flawed. Maybe it’s time for a change. This article calls for a national ban on heterosexual marriage.
Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. This article was written to encourage readers to wake up and recognize marriage to be a dangerous façade that cripples children’s emotional development while institutionalizing gender bias in American society.
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Holidays are not happy times for Val (not her real name), who agreed to meet me at the Starbucks on Monroe, just a short walk down the boulevard from Park Avenue.
“So what are you doing for Valentine’s Day?” I asked her. She gave me a blank look.
Val, recently diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, is an unemployed mother of a young son, age 8. Val manages property for a free place to live, but she has fallen behind on the property tax payments and struggles with other bills. Her ex husband does not pay child support.
“You would think I’m clinically depressed,” she said, laughing. She quickly admits she sees a therapist. Though she receives treatment for her kidney infection, she was not prescribed an antidepressant. “Thank goodness I was able to qualify for Medicaid and food stamps, or I don’t know what we’d do.” Holidays are difficult for Val due to personal demands of single motherhood. She discusses the painstaking preparations she goes through to make them magical and memorable for her son.
“Halloween isn’t so bad, but Christmas and Easter are pretty difficult.” Birthdays are also tough. One strategy Val uses to help her avoid what she calls “the deep black funk” is to pick a different day to celebrate.
“It worked pretty well for visitation because Brandon’s dad gets him on his birthday, Easters now and then and every other Christmas. So, you know, Santa comes twice for Brandon.” Val smiles. Every kid’s dream. The other advantage is that Val can choose to skip the holiday entirely. This strategy doesn’t work on her own birthday. Val explains:
“Normally, I want to just go into a dark room for a few hours by myself until the feeling goes away. It’s just my way of celebrating, I guess, but it’s a little bit like what someone does to get over a migraine. Last year, though, I just felt so unhappy. I can’t describe how awful it felt, short of saying, I was fit to be tied.” The feeling went on for the entire day. There was crying and screaming. “I was lucky to have a good friend around to get through the day with me and not judge.”
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Several orthodox religions teach the obedience of the woman to the man in marriage. To couples in Christian church denominations, there is underlying pressure on the woman to stop working and take on the traditional role of wife and mother.
For nearly nine years prior to getting married, Tina had been a jazz singer. “I had just been discovered by an orchestra in Mannheim, Germany and we were about to go on tour, when my new husband moved me back to the United States. Then I was a nobody again with nothing. I was very depressed but I took my new husband’s advice when he said ‘Get off your lazy ass and go back to school.’”
She laughs about it. “He was verbally abusive in a really offhand way. It was just one of his qualities. Looking back, I’m not sure why he was attracted to me, but he seemed totally different before our wedding day.”
Financially coerced obedience of the woman to the man has been status quo among the devout for thousands of years. Tina says she lived like a single mother while her husband travelled for work, but no stigma was placed on her getting free childcare as long as she was married. Her husband left for six months just after she gave birth to her daughter. “My daughter was such a quiet, beautiful little baby and she was so good. Church sisters never minded watching her on days I went to class.”
Once she started school, Tina wanted to graduate, but her husband chose to transfer his job out of state. “Every career path he chose made it difficult for me to accomplish my goals. When he issued me that ultimatum, it was just insane because he was the one who wanted me to go back to school in the first place,” says Tina, concluding: “I don’t think he really wanted me to get my degree.”
Sex is part of marriage and family relationships, but church members, especially women, are strongly discouraged from straightforward discussion of sexual issues. This means that spousal abuse and incest can never really be addressed. Before her divorce, when Tina suspected her husband had been cheating on her with women in his office, other church sisters who had been her trusted friends started suggesting she get “mental help” and medication. Clearly, Tina’s marital dysfunction was labeled her problem.
“Even the bishop’s wife came to me one day with a bottle of pills telling me I should be taking antidepressants. Mother’s Little Helper,” laughs Tina. “I felt like I was in The Valley of the Dolls.” The infidelity was never formally addressed.
A woman who marries and is compelled to give up her entire career in obedience to her husband is financially devastated when the marriage ends and her husband stops supporting her and the children. After her divorce, Tina and her children had to move, too. First, they were wards of the church, receiving food from the Bishop’s storehouse. Then they became wards of the state.
“Aside from feeling accomplished as a person and being able to support my children, I want my kids grow up happy and learn to have friends. One reason I go to church is because it provides community.” But Tina stopped going to the Mormon church partly because family is defined there as a father, a mother and children.
“All the songs in Primary are about two parents. If the father isn’t present in the family, it’s like you don’t exist,” Tina said, explaining that it took the Bishop of her new ward three years to even ask her to give a talk.
“Other sisters helped out with my children when I asked, but at one point, the Bishop told me I had to pay them. So I was obedient and paid people out of my student loan money. These were married sisters who had husbands that worked or went to school. When I ran out of funds and stopped paying one sister, she complained that my payments were a second source of income for their family that they depended on. I wondered if she ever realized I borrowed money so her family could have a second income.”
Tina began to feel like she was living in a police state. If Tina needed a night to herself to go watch a movie, the Mormon sister watching her child wanted to know which movie it was.
“Then one day, I went to pick up my child after a class, and got a call afterward. It was one of the sisters I thought of as a friend. She said she and another sister had discussed it and decided to tell me I should be explaining things to my daughter about the human body. She just talked about the choice she and her husband made to tell their daughter the facts of life as if I was supposed to be obedient and just do what they said. Peer pressure, no questions asked.” Then, there was the sleepover. What took place was laughed off as innocent, but Tina had questions no one would answer.
Months later, when Tina was ordering food with the church storehouse, the Bishop mentioned that church sisters had widely discussed Tina’s daughter, and Tina began to realize that there may have been many incidents she was not told about.
“I gradually started going to two or three churches every Sunday looking for an environment that wasn’t so manipulative and oppressive,” Tina explained. She ended up switching to the new, larger church where she could fade into the crowd and worship God in anonymity. “People smile and wave, and that’s about as far as it goes,” says Tina. “Nobody knows me by name, and it feels good to be left alone.”
Society has almost completely broken down for Tina, who now can’t count on assistance from anyone either in or outside of the church. Her daughter made friends with a new girl, but an odd incident happened on a sleepover at her house a year later. Only this time, the mother of the other girl was willing to tell Tina exactly what happened.
“That was right after we had court-enforced visitation,” Tina explained. “My ex had threatened to kidnap the children because I was trying to sue for child support, so I tried to restrict the visit to New York State. Technically, I had not withheld visitation, but he sued me anyway. In Utah.” Tina had hired a lawyer, but things went horribly wrong. She was ordered to hand over the children for a visit or spend five days in jail. She laughs ironically. “Honestly, I considered just going to jail for five days, but I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.” Tina remembers going to a choir rehearsal. During the social break, she confided to another Soprano about her situation.
“So I said to her, ‘My kids’ father wants me to let them go out of state with him, what do you think I should do? Should I just do the jail time?’ The woman smiled at me blankly, turned around, and started talking to someone else,” said Tina. “It was like I hadn’t said a word. Looking back, I don’t know what I was expecting her to tell me.”
“I flipped a coin and let the kids go with their dad. Two weeks after they came back, the second sleepover incident happened. We don’t talk to the other family now, but I tried to do the responsible thing and get the kids into therapy.”
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Melanie used to have her own bank account, but fears of attorneys’ enforcement of liens on her property have forced her to find alternative ways to pay the bills.
“Some of my girlfriends go to Chester’s or Pay Day Loans,” she says. “It’s a way of life that’s hard to escape. You’re like a fugitive, but you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s rough to raise kids that way.
“I used to own a house,” she says. “My entire income last year comes from credit card debt that I settled and a class action settlement on my foreclosure from 2011.” Like Val and Tina, Melanie supports her daughter entirely on her own. Because her ex-husband is an active duty soldier, she has never been able to bring a case against him for child support.
“I went to the local Child Support office in my county, but they told me to hire a private attorney,” she explains. “I did a lot of research to pick the right one, and a few months later I borrowed money to sue my ex-husband in the state where he was living.” Melanie describes how every lawyer she talked to gave her different advice.
“I felt like I made the right choice, but it was four thousand dollars I couldn’t really afford. The attorney waited for fourteen months and then made me sign papers to non-suit the case, claiming my ex-husband didn’t really live in the state where he had lived since we separated, but in the state where he lived when he first signed up to be a soldier,” she explained. “It’s complicated.”
“My lawyer told me that if I didn’t non-suit the case, my ex would retaliate, that he would sue me back and really make me pay. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I felt I was being threatened not to sue for child support, which I was told my child rightfully deserved to get under the law.”
Melanie felt she had a legitimate complaint because her ex-husband’s earnings were many times greater than hers, so she sued again in the state her ex-husband claimed as his legal residence. The new lawyer told her he would work pro-bono, took a $500 check from her and then failed to show up at the court hearing.
“It was awful. I finally found a mutual friend who convinced him to reopen the case, but he never did. He started telling me I had to pay him $500 a month and then he made me wait month after month for him to do anything. He kept making excuses for why he hadn’t gotten my ex-husband served yet. Finally, I had to get my own process server. Meanwhile, the other attorney began getting court orders against me for my ex-husband’s legal fees defending his right not to pay child support. For over five years, the case itself was kept from being heard by a judge in three different states.
“After awhile, I started to get the feeling my lawyers were being persuaded to keep my child support case from ever going to court even while they were taking my money to file for a hearing. Outside agencies kept telling me, ‘Well, there’s no child support order in the Divorce Decree so you can’t get child support.’”
I asked Melanie why her divorce papers said Amy wasn’t entitled to child support from her father.
“Well, I couldn’t afford an attorney, so I used the JAG on-post attorneys where we lived. Before I signed it, I pointed out parts I disagreed with, but they said that since my ex-husband had more money than I did, a legal fight with him could take years and there was a chance I would lose my daughter forever. So I signed it because I felt I had no choice. I wasn’t mad at my ex-husband for divorcing me. I assumed that once the divorce was final, he would stop hating me and that eventually he would do what a father is supposed to.”
“What’s strange is the way my ex-husband originally interpreted the Divorce Decree to mean that if I sued for child support, I would forfeit custody. He actually threatened to kidnap our daughter back at one point telling me I went back on my agreement. His income has always been three or four times what I make, and the Divorce Decree doesn’t explicitly say that I promise never to sue for child support.”
Social reinforcement of the underclass status of women in America is complimented by a mercenary judicial system. Lawyers are incentivized to decide who wins based on which party has the most income and resources. The results are fixed fights in backwater family courts all over the United States, where ex-husbands get whatever they want and mothers lose their children forever.
“Amy’s dad asked her to sleep in his bed once while she was traveling with him. Right now, she’s supposed to go live with him when she’s twelve, and she overheard him telling her aunt that when he retires he’s going to move in with his parents and sue me for child support. Imagine that! And he’ll probably win, too.
“Amy’s dad is kind of funny about a lot of things,” said Melanie. “He told me when we first got divorced that if I didn’t have money for a lawyer then I didn’t deserve to be a mother. I thought it was a strange thing to say at the time, but now I guess he’s really making it stick.”
OlivierCrafting 