GENDER EQUALITY IN THE WORLD OF CELEBRITY DIVORCE !!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source : mensdaily


By Robert Franklin, Esq. | May 8, 2009

As this article makes clear, family laws that for decades benefited women almost exclusively, are now turning around to bite them (Daily Record, 5/5/09). When the chief earner is someone like, say, Madonna, the payout to an ex-husband can make your knees weak. Guy Ritchie apparently walked away with £60 million of her money. Britney Spears paid Kevin Federline an unknown but reputedly large chunk of change plus $20,000 per month in child support.

While it's impossible to feel sorry for the likes of Madonna or Spears, these cases can raise some questions about money and marriage. I've written before that, in a gender-equal world, the institution of spousal support should only exist on the margins. If one spouse truly is unable, for physical or psychological reasons to support him/herself, then the other spouse has a legitimate obligation to provide the basics of a decent, non-lavish lifestyle. The same should hold true for divorces between couples who are advanced in years.

But everyone else needs to meet their own needs. If, over the course of a marriage, one spouse has elected to not work or develop saleable workplace skills, that is his/her problem and no one else's. If we're all going to claim to be adults, we need to act that way and be treated that way, by each other and the law.

Child support should reflect the relative time spent in actually parenting the child(ren). Truly equal parenting should reduce child support to zero with father and mother sharing expenses for things like medical costs, insurance, clothing, etc.

Division of marital estates is more vexed. In principle, marriage should be treated as an equal partnership with earnings during the marriage considered to be earned for both regardless of who earns them. So if Mel Gibson has to pay his ex $400 million or so, it's his tough luck. She's been with him for going on three decades, so it's at least defensible for her to get half of the earnings over that time.

It's tempting to look at who earned what, but the more the law separates spouses into distinct entities, the more they'll tend to see themselves that way. If the law treats them as a unit, maybe they'll act like one.