pre-marital divorce...

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Aug 02, 2007

Pre-marital divorce could soon be a legal reality in Rhode Island.

The test case involves two women whose partnership was given the legal status of marriage in Massachusetts. Now a court in neighboring Rhode Island is weighing the question of whether they can be divorced in that state, although their marriage is not legally recognized. The question sounds nonsensical, but the answer has important legal ramifications.

We've learned over the past 30+ years that when the law embraces one absurdity (e.g. that a human being inside the womb is not a human being), other absurdities soon follow, as the courts do logical somersaults to protect the original error. If a man can marry a man-- a proposition that every previous generation would have recognized as lunacy-- then what's to prevent a woman from divorcing a man (or another woman, why not!) to whom she was never married.

And why stop there? Why can't you divorce a man you've never met? Here's my advice to ambitious female readers: try to divorce Bill Gates, and see if some addled judge will require alimony payments. File the suit in Massachusetts; the courts there are so confused, you never know...