Bigamy is a disaster. And it could be a sleeper in our community.

Quick divorces have become even faster, easier and more affordable with the advent of the Internet. But a comment by a former lawyer on an article entitled Quickie divorce: it worked for me questioned the legality of a Dominican Republic divorce granted to a UK couple living in the US.

The fact that the author also got wrong the name of the website where she arranged her own fast divorce led me to wonder… if international law is as far behind in divorce as it is in most arenas, just how many of those granted such quick divorces are unkowingly bigamists?

This cross jurisdictional divorce-granting concerned me when I commented on the UK-Russian dilemma raised when Russian billionaire and Chelsea soccer club owner Roman Abramovich settled what is reportedly the biggest divorce settlement in history.

But what about the human cost? Search engines note a strong interest in the term ‘[tag]bigamy[/tag]‘ and there are more than a million web sites carrying tales of human misery caused by what appears to be wanton bigamists.

One consideration is that many of them appear to be deliberately calculating individuals. But pure chance usually uncovers their deceit and there’s no reason to suspect it would be any different for people involved in unintentional bigamy. And the human consequences could be just as catastrophic.

“There is no way anyone can imagine the pain and devastation left behind in the path of a bigamist,” Randy Bish victim of Julia Bish, notes on the Fight Bigamy blog. “The potential for damage is overwhelming. Overnight, … lives are turned inside out.”

US crime rate statistics from 1898 to 2005 show no cause for alarm, although the rider on them offers no comfort. It notes that the figures are for crimes reported to police, and bigamy, even more so than domestic abuse, is unlikely to have people rushing forward to report it.

Those two peaks in the reporting of bigamy, incidentally, align with the years around the two World Wars. Bigamy in the 1800s was slightly higher than it is today but on a smaller population base.

Jail terms for bigamy obviously don’t work. Only a week ago bigamist ‘Bishop’ Anthony Owens was jailed again in Georgia. A year prior – when he was in prison serving a two-year sentence for bigamy – the ‘bishop’ promised he wouldn’t marry another woman before he divorced his other eight wives.

And bigamy laws anyway are open to debate. For instant, the Texas Penal Code includes in the definition of bigamy that an individual commits an offense if:
(1) he is legally married and he:
(2) lives with that person in this state under the appearance of being married.

” For purposes of this section, ‘under the appearance of being married’ means holding out that the parties are married with cohabitation and an intent to be married by either party.”

Now doesn’t that open a can of worms for those innocents who just wanted a quick and easy divorce?

 

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Quick Divorces Slash Some Pain

Filed under: Divorce • Marriage

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