Posts Tagged ‘divorce’

Your Marriage Is All About The Kids

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

According to Andrew Haines, writing in Ethika Politika, the blog of the Center for Morality in Public Life, without children, the whole point of marriage vanishes.  That is, you and your spouse don’t actually love each other; you’re just in it for the good genes.  While this is not a new theory (in fact, it is so old as to have been thoroughly debunked over and over again), Haines’ take on it is a novel one; he seems to be saying that if two people who cannot have children together are allowed to get married, everyone else’s marriage will fall apart.

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Divorce and Love and Kids

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

Someone I know is getting a divorce.  I suspect that most of us, these days, can make that claim most of the time.  The percentage of marriages that end in divorce within 10 years ranges from about 1 in 4 to almost half, depending on the age of the bride.  There are many reasons why couples split — abuse, dishonesty, and infidelity are common — but I’m not so interested in whether or not a particular reason is valid or sufficient.  I’m more interested in why those reasons exist in the first place, especially when there are kids involved.

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Adoption Not Final In North Carolina

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Imagine adopting a child and being that child’s parent for nearly a decade and then being told, oops, you’re not the parent after all.  Now imagine that the reason for this is that the child’s birth mother, with whom you were raising the child, didn’t give up her parental rights.  That’s the ruling handed down by the North Carolina Supreme Court on Monday.  Apparently, if an unmarried man wants to be a father to his partner’s child but isn’t the biological father, the mother has to give up her parental rights.

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Court Rules: A Promise Is A Promise

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

Be careful what you promise your kids — you may have to follow through.  When I was a young adult, my father told me that if I lost enough weight to fit into size 30 jeans, he would buy me a car.  I got close, but never made it before he passed away.  Someday, though, I will lose the weight and then I’ll visit my father’s grave and say “you owe me a car!”  Of course, I realize that it would take a miracle to get him to pony up my new ride.  For Dana Soderberg, on the other hand, all it took was a lawyer.

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