Let's end disposable marriage
Special
to CNN By Leah Ward Sears
Editor's note: Leah Ward
Sears stepped down this week as Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme
Court. In 1992, she became the first woman -- and youngest person --
appointed to Georgia's highest court.
Story Highlights
Leah Sears: My brother despaired at the effects of divorce
She says America's disposable marriages are hurting parents and
children
She says it's become too easy for people to walk away from their
marriages
updated 7:41 a.m. EDT, Thu July 2, 2009
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN)
-- After Tommy's sudden death, we found among my brother's personal
effects a questionnaire he had completed in 2005 for a church class.
The very first question was a fill-in-the-blank that went like this:
"At the end of my life, I'd love to be able to look back and know
I'd done something about ....."
"Fathers," Tommy wrote.
When asked to identify something that angered him that could be
changed, Tommy wrote, "Re-establishment of equity and balance and
sanity within the American family."
My brother was born to be a father, and he grew into a good and
loving one. Tommy was tall and handsome, smart, witty and fun. A
graduate of the Naval Academy and a Stanford-educated lawyer, he
married and fathered a little girl and boy who were the center of
his life.
Tommy felt that one of the worst problems in our country today was
family breakdown and
fatherlessness. He railed against intentional unwed childbearing and
the ease with which divorce was possible. He didn't like that we
have become a society that values the rights of adults to do their
own thing over our responsibility to protect our children.
As a judge I have long held a front row seat to the wreckage left
behind by our culture of disposable marriage and casual divorce that
my brother so despised.
No-fault divorce was a response to a very real problem. The social
and legal landscape that preceded it largely prevented casual
divorce, but it often trapped people in abusive marriages. It also
turned divorces into even uglier affairs than they are today,
forcing people to expose in court damaging information about their
children's other parent. That system was intolerable, and we should
never go back to that.
But no-fault divorce's broad acceptance as an unquestioned social
good helped usher in an era that fundamentally altered the
seriousness with which marriage is viewed. It effectively ended
marriage as a legal contract since either party can terminate it,
with or without cause. This leaves many people struggling to remake
their lives after painful divorces that they do not want. It also
left many parents cut off from, or sidelined in, the lives of the
children they love.
When Tommy divorced, as in so many cases, a bitter struggle over
resources and the children ensued. My brother came to believe that
the legal system turned him into a mere visitor of his children.
Tommy eventually accepted a job as a lawyer for the State Department
and went to Iraq (and later to Dubai) in order to make the money
needed to support his children. Being in a war zone, under terrible
conditions without the children he loved, was unbearable to him.
On November 5, 2007, my phone rang before daybreak. A U.S. Foreign
Service officer was on the other line. Was I the sister of William
Thomas Sears?
I knew before I was told what had happened. Tommy had died. But the
cause took my breath away: My brother had taken his own life.
I know I'll never understand fully all that factored into his
decision to kill himself. No doubt Tommy was wrestling with more
demons than he had ever admitted to me or knew himself. But as a
divorcee myself and, for a number of years, a single parent, I know
the immense pain of divorce and its aftermath. The limitations the
law placed on Tommy's right to raise his own children after his
divorce magnified my brother's pain and was, I believe, more than he
could live with.
Tommy was only 53 when he committed suicide. That was more than a
year ago, and I am still learning to live without him and live with
the fact that this man I looked up to all my life chose to end his
own life.
Tommy's loss has catapulted me even farther down a path I was
already on. This may sound like heresy, but I believe the United
States and a host of Western democracies are engaged in an
unintended campaign to diminish the importance of marriage and
fatherhood. By
refusing to do everything we can to stem the rising rate of divorce
and unwed childbearing, our country often isolates fathers (and
sometimes mothers) from their children and their families.
Of course, there are occasions when divorce is necessary. And not
everyone should marry. But it has become too easy for people to walk
away from their families and commitments without a real regard for
the gravity of their decision and the consequences for other people,
particularly children.
Removing no-fault divorce as a legal option may not be the right way
to move forward, and the solutions we need may not be entirely legal
in nature. But answers must be found. The coupling and uncoupling
we've become accustomed to undermines our democracy, destroys our
families and devastates the lives of our
children, who are not
as resilient as we may wish to think. The one-parent norm, which is
necessary and successful in many cases, nevertheless often creates a
host of other problems, from poverty to crime, teen pregnancy and
drug abuse.
The loss of my brother has changed my life, as these losses so often
do to people. This summer, after 26 years, I'm hanging up my robe as
a judge to return to private practice.
I will spend some of my time teaching a course in family law at the
University of Georgia Law School. And I have accepted a fellowship
at the Institute of American Values in New York -- a private,
nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that contributes intellectually
to strengthening families and civil society in the United States and
the world.
At my request, the fellowship is named after my brother. As the
William Thomas Sears Distinguished Fellow in Family Law, perhaps now
I can truly do "something about fathers" -- a mission I'm on for
Tommy and a critical calling for all of us.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Leah
Ward Sears.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/07/02/sears.family.divorce/index.html
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