Ever wonder what life would be like if the government had no say so in divorce court or parental rights? Ever wonder what entity would recognize your marriage if marriage licenses were not distributed by the states? Well let us look at a more civilized and actually freer society if these things were so.

For census and for medical reasons, the U.S. Government ordered the issuance of marriage licenses for couples after marriage, which is understandable in any heavily, populated country. Keeping tract of who is living with whom and what children belong to who is necessary in large societies. Furthermore, with the outbreak of certain diseases in history, society found it necessary to immunize and protect couples and any children from those diseases.

The federal government gave these powers to the states and the states conveniently enforced them by allowing judges to marry couples right in the courtrooms. However, this is as far as the government and state authorities should have ventured into the lives of married people. Yet, the power of the states has exceeded far beyond any reasonable legal authority and has crept deeper into the lives of couples. Into employment status, living rooms, child rearing practices, and even into bedrooms, the state governments have gone too far.

Take the most popular issue of married life, divorce, and imagine this. Imagine that instead of a couple airing their business before a judge, who has legal authority to determine the rest of the couple's life, the couple goes before a mediator or religious leader to abide by and agree on mandated social rules and procedures. Procedures approved by a "jury of community peers."

For example, instead of the judge presumptuously awarding the wife with alimony and afterward sentencing the husband to court orders, the presiding mediator, following the rules of community procedure and who would better know the couple's situation, pronounce judgment according to the actual situation.

Many husbands and fathers have been tight-caste into positions of deadbeat and neglectful by the courts based on the old common law of the traditional family. The woman should get the alimony because she is the weaker vessel and dependant on the man as provider. Well no one has to proclaim how times have changed. Women themselves proclaim loudly how times have changed and they should be treated as equal to men and more independent than dependant. Thus, the alimony laws should be changed to meet the times.

Imagine for a moment that the state government turn over the decision of child rearing of wed and unwed couples to the community mediator who decides along with the actual couples themselves, how they will raise their child. No child support orders, alimony payments, income garnishing, or estate claiming by the government. But the decision would be based on what the couples work out for themselves not what the state decides.

There are actual countries that practice divorce and child custody laws this way. Such as Sweden, who has lower divorce rates by far than America, lower juvenile crime, lower child poverty rates, and lower court cost than America does. This is because they allow the couples to work their problems out with a community mediator instead of the state governments. This is what is called "personal responsibility."

Because the state has interfered into the lives of families, many fathers and husbands have suffered at the hands of court orders that seek nothing more than to collect money and not for the actual well being of the child. Many fathers and husbands have been stripped of their rights as parents, and stripped of opportunities to spend quality time with their children based on court orders that allot too small amounts of time for visitation. This destroys parent-child relationships more than anything does.

A couple could actually work out a broken marriage better than the courts if they were given the opportunity to do so. If this is not the case in America, it is because Americans have been trained to depend on the courts to decide their lives for them. No one has a mind of their own anymore that they can use to think for themselves and use in the best interest of the children.

State government laws and practices are biased simply because they are based on laws written when women were dependant and they have not changed these laws to meet the times. Hundreds of thousands of men have wound up in jail or in the poorhouse because they could not meet court orders. It can be safely assumed that many of these men were not naturally negligence fathers and husbands but were frustrated to an extreme.

The news media refuses to report the many cases of child kidnapping by parents because they do not want to confront the real problem. That they are too lazy to modify the laws on the books and are too afraid of the modern day feminist too do so.

If married couples remember that they do have the option of working through their problems themselves, without the help of money-hungry lawyers and biased courts, they could possibly have a better future for themselves and for their children. Leave the government out of your bedroom.

© 2003 by C.R. Hamilton