A man has veto power to decide who his wife doesn't have as friends, but the courts view that as abuse.
That's because it is abuse, Davie. It's the same thing cult leaders do to keep people afraid and isolated and under their wing.
Literally, a wife can slack off and shirk her wifely duties and a husband has no recourse of action.
Of course he does, he can get a divorce. He could try actually living with his intended for a year or two before getting married to see if they have the same ideas about their living situation. He could do the damn dishes himself and stop whining. (Does anyone else miss the days when "be a man" meant "pull your weight and don't sweat the little stuff", not "be a misogynistic neanderthal"?)
Yet, she can easily obtain a free (government pro-bono paid) lawyer simply be alleging “abuse,” drag him into court, and the judge will crucify him.
Ooooh boy DJS, now you're on my turf. (I do paralegal work for a family law firm in the lovely, not-at-all-desolate state of New Mexico, so I suspect I know more about civil court than Davie does, although I'll defer to his greater knowledge of being convicted on criminal grounds.)
First, the court here doesn't appoint lawyers for civil cases, period. If you bring a criminal complaint and it's substantiated of course the county prosecutor will handle things, but for a divorce proper you're on your own. There is a clinic for free advice, and frankly if a divorce is very straightforward the parties can handle it on their own, but otherwise private lawyers are the rule.
Courts never require a couple to undergo a mandatory year of counseling before considering a divorce.
This is because the court doesn't care. In New Mexico, as in most states (New York used to be an outlier, but I think they finally realized which century it was a few years ago) you can obtain a no-fault divorce, meaning the court neither knows nor cares. Here, if you do have a substantiated abuse claim, they prefer that you get a no-fault divorce, split the assets 50-50, and then sue your ex for all they're worth.
The reason why is because the banksters can't steal your home if you call off the divorce.
I've seen a number of messy divorces, in all kinds of financial situations, and I've never seen one where "the bank" ends up with the family home. In some cases, if the parties absolutely cannot agree on who gets it, the judge may order it sold (on the open market, for fair value) and the proceeds split, but in most cases it remains with one party or the other. They do caution people that it might be difficult to make payments if both spouses were working and it was a relatively expensive home, but that's not especially common and that's the risk inherent in owning an expensive home to begin with.
CPS can't steal your children if mom and dad have a happy marriage.
Take this from personal experience - CPS can't take the children if mom and dad can't stand to be in the same room as each other and one of them flees to a different state to avoid thinking about it. They can step in if the two can't coparent effectively (the #1 issue being bitching about the other parent to the kids, and #2 issue being using the kids to passive-agressively bitch at the other parent), but intervention is a last resort if all efforts at counseling and mediation fail. Even then the children will remain with one parent, with visitation with the other to the extent that it's practical. If not the parents, other relatives are evaluated before they will even consider foster care or adoption.
So yes, in an ugly divorce you can get your kids taken away, but only if you personally really, really work at it. There have been parents where I myself would have smacked them and told them to get lost, but the courts are thankfully more restrained than I.
Of course, if you follow DJS's advice on marriage, where the husband is the leader of his own little 4- or 5-person cult (I assume no marriage in DJS-land is complete without children), then you're likely to have all sorts of trouble with the law vis-a-vis your rampant abuse of your various family members and the torts springing therefrom, which will give you a wonderful opportunity to learn all about the criminal and civil legal systems up close. Remember to wear a suit and always be polite to the judge.
@Doubting Thomas:
Rebuke doesn't have to mean hit; its dictionary definition is "to criticize harshly; reprove". Oddly, its immediate antecedent did mean "beat back; repel", from the Old French "buchier" meaning "strike, chop", itself from "busche" meaning "wood". So the intended image, I gather, is something like chopping away at the weeds or bushes that encroach out of a woodland, but somewhere along the line it became metaphorical rather than literal. Blame the Normans, I guess.
Of course, with DJS, it probably does mean "hit" because he's a vile little snot with no sense of propriety who relies on overbearing tactics to get what he wants.
