Since I don't have any personal experience of it, it has been eye opening to hear, on a few occasions, the views of those whose parents divorced when the were children. It hurt, a great deal. Some are desperate to get married and create the family they were denied. Others have no interest in forming a family.
Under current New York State law, two parents can divorce if it is in their mutual interest and they can agree on the terms, regardless of any concern about the children. Under a new reform just passed by the State Senate, either party will be able to demand a divorce whenever they believe that breaking up the family could provide a better deal (sexual, financial, fun and enjoyment of life). The premise is that if a couple would otherwise make home life so terrible anyway, including the lives of any children, there is “no fault.” The bill is here. Read it over, and show me where in the bill there is any provision concerning itself with the interests and needs of any children. Or any provision that instructs the courts that regardless of whether the children would be worse off if the marriage continued or ended, the parents had failed as such, and thus had a greater obligation going forward to put the children first to offset that damage.
I don’t see it, and I’m not surprised it isn’t there. The only place I see the world “children” mentioned is in provisions designed to assure the spouse stuck with them would continue to have as high a material standard of living. That is, a provision to assure the material well being of the adult, not the material, social or educational well being of the children.
Is this not consistent with everything else Generation Greed has done? Including the sort of public policy issues I have more knowledge of, as described here. No body of such people would ever pass legislation that assigned actual responsibilities to self-interested adults. In fact, this just extends my view of the ideological interests between the two parties that I described when I ran against the state legislature in 2004.
“Aside from lobbyists who are just out for a dollar, politics appears to be driven by two different concepts of the word "freedom" that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, one good and the other (for lack of a better word) evil. The good freedom might be called freedom of identity, or of lifestyle. For a brief period after World War II, many Americans believed that if you didn't look like, act like, think like, and live like everyone else, then you shouldn't be accepted. The idea of America as a land of social conformity is mostly gone, but politicians can still get elected by manipulating 35 year old resentments with tribal appeals to groups of people, and the invocation of "values" issues on which they have no intention of changing anything. Sadly, tribal politics determines how many people vote, among those who vote at all. They are suckers. “
“The evil idea of freedom is freedom from responsibility, which has both a "liberal" and a "conservative" version, depending on which responsibilities one does not want to meet. Liberal Democrats have sought to attract votes by telling the poor and not so poor, the old and not so old, the sick and not so sick, and others that they do not have personal responsibilities to work and earn their own living, or to take care of their family members. To knowledgeable critics, their excuse for irresponsibility has been "social realism, " the assertion that this is the way people live today (because they are free to live that way) and government programs, paid for by someone else, must limit the damage. And they have cultivated a sense of entitlement to assistance, causing recipients of public benefits to feel anger at anyone who dares to make demands on them in exchange.”
“Conservatives and Republicans have sought to attract votes by telling the better off that they do not have social responsibilities to their communities, to the less well off, to the rest of the world, and to the future, particularly with regard to taxes and debt, but also with regard to the environment. To knowledgeable critics, their excuse for irresponsibility has been "economic realism, " the assertion that the affluent are self interested and mobile, and if you make demands on them for the benefit of others, or for the benefit of the future, they will take their assets and go elsewhere, leaving you worse off than before. They also cultivate a sense of entitlement, telling the affluent that their position of privilege is the result of their own moral superiority, not social advantages or luck or (as the business scandals show) worse, and that they do not owe anything to anyone in exchange for it.”
It is no surprise that legislation to encourage the acceptance of personal responsibilities by those who were born different, homosexuals, remains bottled up, while legislation to make it easier to avoid personal responsibilities to children moves forward.
Not that the state legislature has a problem with imposing social responsibilities, as long as people their own age are excluded. They want more services and benefits for themselves, but don’t want to pay for them. So they run up debts without referendums and assert that younger generations have a “moral obligation” to repay. Default on those debts? No way. After all affluent seniors hold them, because they are triple-tax free.
They pass one pension enhancement after another for those cashing in and moving out, arranged as a contract among themselves that is somehow legally constitutionally binding on younger generations – who will be far worse off in old age – to pay for. No matter how much it costs in taxes. No matter what services must be decimated to pay for it. And they the provide lower wages and benefits to future public employees, due to “circumstances beyond our control.”
They tell younger generations that they must pay more for Social Security and accept a later retirement age. Then they spend the resulting surplus on themselves. Then they say another “reform” is required to raise taxes, cut benefits, or both, but that those at or over 55 – themselves – must be exempted from any sacrifice. After all, they are counting on what they have promised each other, while the younger folks can adjust. “Children are resilient,” and will be (or have to be) even in old age, Generation Greed believes.
Well speaking of old age benefits, there are some social conservatives (Heather MacDonald for example) who have asserted that the creation of benefits such as welfare broke up the nuclear family, because men and women had an alternative to working together in marriage. What those conservatives were unwilling to assert was that the provision of old age benefits broke up the extended family for the same reason. Perhaps people used to feel a need to live out model of family obligation to inculcate those values to their children. So that when they were old and once again in need, their children would respond in kind, whether it was beneficial to themselves or not. Now, since they can have the government seize resources from their children by force, in taxes collected under the threat of being jailed if they are not paid and shot if going to jail is resisted, reciprocal care for the children when they are young is no longer required.
So the State Senate does not want, in perhaps the most important change to family law in 50 years, to assert any additional obligation, or assumption of responsibility to make good on any harm, for easy-divorcing adults toward their children. Fine.
Then here is what should be in the bill.
Adults have absolutely no obligation at all, none, to care for, or include in their lives, older parent who had divorced when they were children, or who were absent in a single parent family situation.” You didn’t put me first when I was young? Then I’m not going to screw up my life to help you when you are old. That should be allowed. In fact, that attitude should be encouraged.
And those divorcing parents should be informed that as we head for an institutional collapse as a result of the consequences of Generation Greed, they had better not count on any social support in old age either. Because individually, some of us owe our parents a great deal. But collectively, we owe them less than perhaps any older generation in U.S. history.