Divorce in America: Personal Pain, Political Principles

Just as an increasing divorce rate was one of many factors which destabilized the Roman Empire, so it is also causing political and economic problems in the United States. These problems have been accelerated by certain changes in the divorce laws in each of the fifty states.

Those who have sought to change these laws have often reasoned that a marriage, or the destruction of it, is a personal and private matter, and as such, has no effect on the body politic as a whole, and is therefore not properly an object of interest for the political process.

But they have reasoned wrongly: although a personal matter, divorce is not a private affair. It impacts society and economy. The effects touch many lives - people who knew neither husband nor wife in the case will bear some of the burden.

In an attempt which may have been well-intentioned, changes in divorce laws were introduced to make the process more humane. It was apparent that divorce proceedings in court were painful, complex, and sometimes ethically questionable. To this end, a series of laws were introduced under the heading of ‘no-fault’ divorce. The Washington Times reports:

One reason was that, in a fault system, a divorce required at least one spouse to prove that the other had committed adultery, abandonment or abuse. This meant hiring a private detective and/or collecting incriminating evidence for the court.

Or - and this happened far too often - couples who both wanted the divorce had to resort to manufacturing evidence - faking abandonment, for instance. This kind of fraud insulted the court, legal professionals complained.

And then there were the genuinely ugly divorces, in which both spouses hurled blame and evidence at each other. Everyone suffered, including the children.

Thus, the noble purpose of no-fault divorce was to remove the contentious, annoying legal requirement for couples to prove anything other than their desire to divorce. After all, the thinking went, if marriage was the union of two people, and one person wanted out, then the union was no longer viable.

Or so it seemed. But there were serious errors in this attempt to humanize the divorce process. First, there was an underlying assumption that it can be humanized; divorce is, in fact, a necessarily unpleasant thing. Even in those rare cases when it might be the morally correct thing to do, it cannot be anything but painful. On a deeply philosophical level, this corresponds to the notion that there is such a thing as a necessary evil. On a common-sense level, it is plain that any effort to re-arrange a family structure involves the disassembly of a human fabric, which is sorrowful, even if that fabric is to be eventually reconstructed into a better pattern.

Instead of making divorce humane - which it can never be - the batch of 'no-fault' divorce laws increased social disintegration and personal emotional pain by increasing the divorce rate:

“The key to understanding the problem is to recognize that the grounds for divorce did not go from fault to no-fault; they went from mutual consent to unilateral,” said Allen Parkman, University of New Mexico economics professor and author of books on divorce.

Under the fault system, “most divorces were negotiated and eventually [happened] based on mutual consent,” Mr. Parkman said. But once one person could legally end the marriage, “there was no longer any need for negotiations.”

Although divorce is a personal matter, it is not a private matter. The personal events have consequences for the entire community.

According to “Stolen Vows,” a 2002 book by Judy Parejko, the California lawmaker (James A. Hayes) who championed no-fault divorce was embroiled in a bitter divorce from his stay-at-home wife and mother of his four children. Removing fault didn’t help Mr. Hayes in his divorce, but it certainly crushed the “negotiating power” of other stay-at-home wives, Ms. Parejko wrote.

With the introduction of unilateral divorce proceedings, any incentive for a spouse to re-think his or her desire for a divorce was weakened. This leaves all spouses, and all marriages, in a riskier environment.

With marriages at risk, the economy is at risk, and with societal fabric lacking integration, the political process lacks integration. Just as divorce was one of many complex factors which weakened the Roman Empire, so it is also weakening America.

How to Fix the Economy

The brilliant presidency of Gerald R. Ford is instructive: we can learn much by studying how one of America's best leaders did things. When confronted by economic problems in the form of inflation, Ford saw that the best course of action was for the government to do less: economies can and do heal themselves, as long as they are not hindered by regulations and other types of interventions. Historian Yanek Mieczkowski recounts that in his

anti-inflation program, Ford unveiled on of his little-known but lasting legacies in government retrenchment: deregulation. At the Conference on Inflation, some economists had urged the president to reduce onerous regulations to control inflation, so early in his administration Ford set out on this mission.

Like every president, he needed cooperation from Congress to enact some of his measures. This proved possible, because leaders from both parties

conceded that Ford was on to something. They worried that some regulatory agencies acted favorably toward industries - not consumers - and realized that Ford capitalized on a perception that developed after the Great Society and Watergate, that government tends to foul things up.

The Ford administration reviewed various federal agencies, and various industries, and drew up plans to phase in deregulation in industries from trucking to airlines:

Ford's tax force developed ambitious plans for deregulation, covering almost every conceivable industry: chemicals, automobiles, food processing, communication, finance, and more. Many of his plans were implemented after he left office.

During Ford's presidency in the 1970's, but also for more than a decade after it, both the Congress and later presidents

showed the bipartisan support for his ideas: the airlines were deregulated in 1978; trucking in 1980; cable television in 1996. This was one of the unsung successes of the Ford presidency; he envisioned an economic environment with more freedom and laid the groundwork for later deregulation.

In his state of the union message, he linked deregulation to lower taxes: taxes are, after all, a form of regulation, even if they are primarily merely a form of confiscation. He explained that

the way to a healthy, non-inflationary economy has become increasingly apparent. The government must stop borrowing so much of our money. More money must remain in private hands where it will do the most good. To hold down the cost of living we must hold down the cost of government.

To put this theory into action,

a tax cut emerged as the best policy alternative. It would avoid government pump priming, give consumers more money to spend, and provide a quicker jolt to the economy than government spending. Philosophically, a tax cut was compatible with Ford's belief in returning money to the people. He was also concerned with "tax drag." Inflation not only took money from Americans through higher prices, but also acted as a tax increase. Price rises outstripped the pace of salary and wage increases, so that while real income dropped, inflation nonetheless pushed wage earners into higher tax brackets, forcing them to pay a double penalty of higher prices and higher taxes.

Although it is tempting to give all the credit to Ford (and the blame to both Nixon and Carter, who dabbled in regulation and intervention), it must be remembered that Congress ultimately holds the purse strings. Deregulation and tax cuts need both the executive and legislative branches to succeed.

By reducing regulations - keeping the government from meddling with the economy's natural processes to heal itself and return to equilibrium - and lowering taxes, Ford removed the obstacles to prosperity, and laid the foundation in the 1970's that would be the basis for the strong and healthy economy of the 1980's. Ford's energizing of the economy would be temporarily dampened by Jimmy Carter, but like a healthy body returning itself to homeostasis, prosperity emerged after Carter left office.

Nixon's Biggest Mistake

Although the Watergate scandal was the incident which ultimately removed Richard Nixon from the presidency, it may not have been his worst blunder. While the scandal did damage the public psyche and created high levels of cynicism and distrust toward the government, he risked even greater damage to the country by means of certain economic policies. History professor John Robert Greene explains:

Virtually uninterested in economics, Richard Nixon nevertheless had reacted to the inflation of the early 1970's in a novel fashion. Acting on the advice of his secretary of treasury, John Connally, Nixon broke from the conservative laissez faire economics practiced by past Republican administrations, and on 15 August 1970 he froze wages, prices, and salaries for a period of ninety days. Renewing the freeze through April 1971 had helped little.

It became clear that this type of interventionist policy was a failure. The cure for inflation, like any other economic malady, would prove to be an approach of simply letting the organism work itself out. Like a plant or an animal returning to homeostasis, a national economy returns eventually to equilibrium if allowed to do so. Any regulation by the government, at best, delays the return of prosperity, or at worst, prevents it entirely.

On the Side of the Winners

The man, who was supposed to bring victory for Germany with his “wonder weapon,” the V-2, experienced the end of the war in comfortable peace. In the town of Oberammergau he enjoyed, under the watchful eye of the SS, the spring weather in the company of his colleagues from the military experimental station at Peenemünde: “We sat on our mountain, and below, through the valley, moved the Allies.” Wernher von Braun had already been prepared for a while to go over to the enemy. On May 2, 1945 - the radio had just announced Adolf Hitler’s death - he sent his brother on a bicycle into the valley to the American troops. “My country had lost two world wars,” he wrote. “This time I would like to be on the winner’s side.”

The victors would grant him this wish. Yesterday’s enemy became a friend and helper, and so the history of Wernher von Braun is not only about the opportunism of the individual, but rather also about the opportunism of a great nation: after 1945, the American brought more than a thousand German scientists - rocketeers, aviation engineers, and biologists specializing in space flight - into the country; an operation which began under the code name ‘Overcast’ and which was carried forward for more than twenty years as ‘Project Paperclip.’

Wernher von Braun would lead his German scientists to create both America’s military missile program and its peaceful civilian space exploration missions. As NASA’s leading engineer and researcher, his triumphs would extend from manned landings on the moon to unmanned spacecraft reaching Jupiter, Neptune, and beyond. And it all began with a bicycle ride through the beautiful mountain countryside of southern Germany!

The Abuse Stops Here

A nation which demonstrates weakness, or which shows that it lacks the will to defend itself, will not long endure. During one period of history in 1975, the United States risked such a fate, until courage and nerve of President Gerald Ford demonstrated to the world that we were willing to protect the lives of our citizens.

Professor John Greene at Cazanovia College, explains that American flirted with passivity at the same time that the barbaric government of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge was becoming ever more aggressive. The bloodthirsty thugs who took illegitimate control of Cambodia's government had not only proved that they were willing to murder millions of their country's own citizens, but they had also captured an American ship, the Mayaguez; they assumed that America's lessened posture, in the wake of its humiliation in Vietnam, meant that the United States would not dare to defend itself:

This was not the first hostile action of the new Khmer Rouge government in the weeks following American withdrawal from Cambodia and Vietnam. Ten days prior to the Mayaguez incident, they had seized and released several Thai fishing boats; eight days earlier, they had fired on a South Korean ship and unsuccessfully attempted to board her; six days before, several South Vietnamese craft had been confiscated, and five days before, a Panamanian ship had been stopped and detained for thirty-six hours. Nor was it the first seizure of an American commercial vessel. Over the preceding twenty-three years, Ecuador had seized twenty-three vessels and had beaten and shot at numerous American crews. Rather than react in a hostile fashion, previous administrations had paid fines to secure the release of the ships.

America had turned onto a dangerous path: allowed pirates or hostile regimes to capture our ships, and then paying ransom money to get them back. This pattern of activity only encourages more piracy and more attacks on our ships.

To change this pattern would require boldness. President Gerald Ford is the leader who decided that America should stop taking abuse and stand up to protect the lives and freedom of its citizens.

Mere hours after the capture of the Mayaguez, President Ford ordered the U.S. Marines to land on a small island owned by Cambodia, and at the same time ordered the Air Force to begin bombing over Cambodia. Quickly, the Khmer Rouge released both the ship and its sailors.

President Ford had demonstrated that he would take decisive action, and that he would not allow Americans to be bullied. The United States gained, or regained, some respect among the nations of the world.

Obtaining Full Civil Rights for African-Americans

The general outline of the struggle by the Blacks for civil rights in the United States during the 1950's and 1960's is well known: Martin Luther King, voting rights, desegregation, and bus boycotts. But in addition to these general notions, more specific facts can shed light on the details of the process by which African-Americans gained full access to the rights first delivered to them a century earlier, immediately after the Civil War: in the late 1860's and early 1870's, Blacks had more access to voting and other civil rights than they would have in the 1930's or 1940's. Things had actually regressed rather than progressed. When the Democrat party gained control of the federal government, in the forms of Woodrow Wilson and FDR, segregation was introduced into many social institutions. (Wilson actually discouraged Black students from applying to universities.) It would not be until the late 1940's that progress toward civil rights would resume: Eisenhower began integrated the Army, forcing Truman to finish the process. When Eisenhower moved from being a general to being a president, he continued the integration process: he ordered the famous 101st Airborne unit to integrate the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas - when the governor of the state, a member of the Democrat party, had refused to integrate the school, and had in fact sent the state's police to keep Black students out.

The Republicans carried the move toward from integration from the 1950's into the 1960's: when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was presented to Congress, Cengage's history textbook tells us, it was clear to President Johnson that

the Democratic Party would continue trying to block it. Consequently, he and his allies in the U.S. Senate courted crucial Republican support for curtailing a

Democrat-led filibuster. Finally, the Republicans defeated the Democrats, passed the Civil Rights Act, and ensured that African-Americans in the south would have their full civil rights. Martin Luther King's dream was fulfilled by his friends, the Republicans in Congress. Despite the anti-Black sentiments of the Democrat Party, the Republicans won, ensuring equality for all Americans.

Flying Spies Save Lives

During the Cold War (1946 - 1990), aircraft flying around the world gathered data about potential threats to the lives of Americans, and this data helped defense planners design ways to protect us. The Washington Times reports that

Beginning with the first manned U-2 flight in 1956 and culminating with satellite missions that produced detailed images of the vast Soviet landmass, the "eyes in the sky" closely monitored Soviet missile and atomic programs, permitting arms-limitation agreements that truly benefited all of mankind.

Sometimes we think of military intelligence as part of war, but it is much more about keeping peace. Rather than win a war, it is better to make sure that the war never happens in the first place, and that's largely what happened between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much of the airborne surveillance was organized by President Eisenhower,

whose repugnance at the thought of a nuclear war led him to push for the overflight programs even though he realized the risk of provoking a confrontation with the Soviets. As Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, later summarized, “For the first time, American policymakers had accurate, credible information on Soviet strategic assets ... It was the greatest bargain and the greatest triumph of the Cold War.”

Eisenhower knew that a nuclear war would be unspeakably horrible, and that the full power of military intelligence could save the human race from this frightfulness. Keeping millions of families peacefully safe, however, had its price.

The flights were highly dangerous. Crew members, chiefly drawn from the Air Force and Navy and their signal units, were briefed on the perils involved. According to a National Security Agency historian, “Of the 152 cryptologists who lost their lives during the Cold War, 64 were engaged in aerial reconnaissance.” Families of the downed airmen were never told what happened to them, only that they had been on “secret missions.”

Of course, out of all the spy pilots shot down, not all of them died. The most famous pilot was captured alive: Francis Gary Powers. He airplane was attacked by Soviet defenses on May 1, 1960. He was taken prisoner as he parachuted to safety. Although the Soviets pretended to be shocked and offended by the fact that the United States was taking photographs over their land, they were in fact even more active in spying on us: their network of on-the-ground spies in America exceeded any activity we managed to organize in Russia.

The Cold War is now over, and we were saved from having to face a nuclear war by the sophistication and bravery of military intelligence gathering.