So, in response to yesterday’s post, I have been asked what are some of the other reasons that cause men to become disinterested in dating and marriage. I have a list as long as my arm. But here’s another one for today. Today’s reason is that the legal is system is biased against men. There many examples of the bias, but I’ll focus on sentencing.

The study I want to talk about today is called “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases“, and it’s published in the peer-reviewed journal “American Law and Economics Review”.

The abstract says this:

This paper assesses and decomposes gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Decompositions show that most of the unexplained disparity appears to emerge during charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding. The approach provides an important complement to prior disparity studies, which have focused on sentencing and have not incorporated disparities arising from those earlier stages. I also consider various plausible causal theories that could explain the estimated gender gap, using the rich dataset to test their implications.

The key sentence there is “It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables.”

I also found this paragraph interesting:

The estimated gender disparities are strikingly large, conditional on observables. Most notably, treatment as male is associated with a 63% average increase in sentence length, with substantial unexplained gaps throughout the sentence distribution.

This anti-male discrimination becomes apparent to men when they are going through the divorce process.

About 70% of divorces are initiated by women, and most of them for frivolous reasons (reasons that were not recognized as valid in the law prior to “no-fault-divorce” being enacted). The reasons are also not recognized in the Bible. Throughout the divorce process, men encounter anti-male bias. This begins with the common use of false accusations against the man, in order to get sole custody, which provides the woman with greater child support payments from the man. These false accusations are usually not based on any evidence, such as police reports. They just emerge during the divorce proceedings and are used to eject the man from the home, and get the woman sole custody of the kids. In 90% of cases, the woman gets sole custody of the kids. And this is despite the fact that single-father homes have similar outcomes for children as married two-parents homes. The results of single-mother homes are disastrous for children in many areas, including poverty, crime, mental health,  sexual activity, etc. But the court system insists on doing what is worse for children by separating the father from the child. Even the meager visitation rights that fathers get are not enforced.

Failure to pay alimony and child support can land men in prison. And the laws are enforced very unfairly there, as well. Consider this case from Canada:

A wealthy businessman will have to pay more than $50,000 a month in spousal support for 10 years to a woman with whom he had a long-term romantic relationship even though they kept separate homes and had no children together, Ontario’s top court has ruled.

Seeing this, many men today have declined to participate in dating and marriage. And I could come up with dozens more reasons like this one. Based in peer-reviewed studies. It’s not one reason deterring men from marrying, it’s dozens of reasons. In every case, society has decided that men are expendable. And sadly, the church has largely ignored the root causes of men’s retreat from dating and marriage. The church simply has nothing at all to say to men who are faced with these risks, costs and disincentives.

When I explain these problems to pro-marriage conservatives, they confess to never having heard about any of these issues. They say “I just like the idea of people falling in love and having lots of cute babies”. They haven’t really bothered to think about the calculations that men run before deciding what to do with women. Maybe it’s time for Christian leaders to do a little more homework about these issues. Maybe there is something Christian churches can do to make marriage a bit more appealing to men.

We are already seeing this happening in conservative states like Florida and Tennessee. In Florida, there are new laws requiring that child custody be 50-50 in most circumstances. This acts as a deterrent against women who want to file frivolous divorces just to get child support from wealthy men. Florida also banned permanent alimony, which is another positive step to make marriage more fair for men. (Although many women in Florida were furious about it). In Tennessee, it is now a misdemeanor to claim child support payments from a man who is not the biological father of the child.

These are the kinds of policy solutions that will bring marriage back. But I’ve never heard Christians talking about these issues. All I ever hear from pious Christian leaders is that men need to “man up”, as if manning up makes the threats from feminist laws and courts disappear. It doesn’t work, but it does signal virtue, which seems to be the goal of many pious Christian leaders. We’re going to have to do better than virtue-signaling if we want to reverse the decline of marriage. It’s not going to be solved by shaming and blaming men.