IN the late 18th century, the French statesman and philosopher Louis de Bonald argued that legal divorce would lead to the unraveling of social bonds and injustice for fathers. His predictions are haunting today, but as dire as they were they did not foresee the extent to which government would someday profit from divorce. In the case of Bryan Sheffield, the state of Nebraska is demanding that he pay $11,000 in child support payments again because the payments were made directly to his wife and not to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, which receives federal funding based on how much child support it collects. This is merely one of many thousands of similar cases, in which family courts and state agencies, often to the detriment of fathers, encourage and manage family breakdown to their own benefit. You can read more about Sheffield’s case here. Notice that no court prevented his wife from moving with their children more than a thousand miles away from their father, who picked up and moved too to be closer to them.

Notice also that Sheffield’s wife divorced him because he was “very controlling and demanding.” In explaining why legal divorce necessarily leads to women divorcing their husbands more often than the other way around, Bonald wrote in his book On Divorce, first published in 1801:

Reciprocal divorce gives the wife jurisdiction over the husband, by attributing to her the power to judge and condemn him, whether she herself provokes the divorce or whether she merely ratifies it. Thus, because the woman is weaker, she uses this usurped power more often.

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