WND column

De Facto Marriage

It is no secret that marriage has been on the decline in the United States even as illegitimacy is on the rise. The problem is obvious: No-fault divorce combined with abusive child support and post-marital support laws has increased the incentive for women to end marriages while simultaneously driving up the cost of ending them to men. As economics would predict, providing incentives for ending marriages to women has increased the percentage of women ending them, while increasing the potential cost of marriage has decreased the number of men willing to take the risk. As is the case with so many government actions, the laws intended to revise marriage, beginning with the California Family Law Act of 1969, were predicated on static human behavior and failed to take into account their own influence on how men and women would subsequently behave