Why you should almost never sign

a separation agreement

Don’t sign anything. If your lawyer pressures you, sign off on your lawyer. Your consent should appear no where in the records.

Hardly a soul in the system really cares whether justice is done, whether you agree to the conditions of your divorce or custody. That’s why they rise to the top like curdled milk. So stand your ground.

You are only required to dish out money that the court orders. You don’t have to dance for the judge or play an instrument. This isn’t a music contest.

This tip applies as well to visitation. If the mother (not the judge) wishes to give you visitation to make her life easier, you don’t need a 250 page charter of multi-cultural holidays rubber-stampeded by the court and drawn up by YOUR lawyer so he can pocket thousands. It’s an neurotic’s calendar. Beware! Christian holidays are unconstitutional. See the Supreme Beings decision in Christ Almighty! vs. Peter Pan 423 U.S. 818 (1999).

If she doesn’t want you to have visitation, you won’t get it even if the judge branded it on her with a hot poker. Don’t bother going back to court and complaining. Judges have no obstacles between the ears. That passage is like a six lane freeway at 3 am on a weeknight. Save your money.

New York’s Court of Appeals tells us separation agreements are just a variety of contract. Really?

B.P.C. before political correctness all contracts were enforceable as intended by the parties. Courts grudgingly interfered with grownups who freely bound each other even with rope if that was their sexual preference. Unlike interpreting the Constitution, rarely did they care even about fairness. If the parties thought it was fair when they signed their names to it, the deal stood on its own.

Courts particularly refused to interfere after one party performed his duty and paid for the other party’s plastic surgery. What were the judges to do? Order her to get ugly again? The court would be fronting for her.

The phrase "opting out" corresponded to making a will. You did it so the state wouldn’t substitute its likes and dislikes to divide your property (called dying intestate). A separation agreement was only another name for a contract, only a specialized contract to get out of NY Domestic Relations Law. It also protected intimate relationships from media snoopers. Today, the fight of what "is" means helps fill up newspaper front pages.

Opting out sounds too good to be true. That’s why it is. You and your former loving spouse think you can tailor your divorce without interference from outsiders, except, of course ever-present lawyers. But black robed judges like executioners dangling rope, accountable to no one, are just waiting to hang you. Their courtroom is the local office of the Inquisition.

Judges and lawyers practice the Professor Corey Method© of family law. For some of the best examples of legal pomposity and circular reasoning read a couple of New York Court of Appeals family law decisions. But read them as failed attempts at humor in trying to imitate the style of the unforgettable Professor Irwin Corey, D.D (Doctor of Double Meaning), Phd (Licensed Holistic Farmer), D.O (Doctor Osteopathy and Other Quackeries), D.P. (Doctor of Poison Control and Psychiatry) .

If you live in another state, the Tropea site will direct you to your very own Tropea.

The family law empire hates men. Period. Just like Mohammedans hate Christians, not you in particular, but all Christians, even those who couldn’t write one sentence on Jesus. Jews they hate for other reasons. They don’t need photographs.

Realize that family law is microwave food. It’s already prepared before you come. Just heat and eat. And don’t think you’ll be invited to the table.

Let the judge impose his judgments of divorce. It may be the frying pan. But its still better than jumping into the fire at the system’s beck and call. Let him know you are ashamed this is what passes for impartial law now.

Psychological

In most cases it’s better to do nothing and let the court do its worst. Don’t bring the rope to your own lynching. You are defending against a "family" breakup by the state. Once either spouse files for divorce the state has free rein to walk right all over your your brain with their psychiatrist, your house with an interior director, appoint a trustee to run your business and change everything forever.

You will be "dumped as a father" whoever is at fault. All parents make mistakes. If that were the criterion, the state would raise all children. It uses divorce just to move unnoticed like the hour hand toward that end. Don’t help it speed up the clock by winding your divorce into a cyclone. The less everyone in the system has to do, the more likely they are to fall asleep out of boredom, the fewer financial incentives they have for stretching your lives out on their rack, the sooner they’ll drop the whole thing.

Cheating may be so widespread that no individual can stop it. The stock market is an example. But you don't have to play the game. The establishment hasn’t a clue why street-smart little people won’t get back in the market. Clinton made lying a fashion rather than a weakness we all suffer from. Now It is done in a flourish right out in the open from corporate America, to the media and the courts right up to the Supreme Beings. Your going to have to play the game. But play it on your own timetable when you are good and ready.

You don’t have to give up on custody or visitation. Just have faith that circumstances will rot away at the judge’s rickety monument to his ego and the psychiatrist’s and social workers tacky arrangements to prop it up with their saliva. But you have to let time take its course.

Recognize that for men who know what they want the Court is a milk stop on your destination, an obstacle to get around, not a sanctuary to walk into. For a moment, it is better to let your children be filched from you by the judge . 2

Think in the longest perspective. What will you tell your children later? That you willingly signed them away out of fear of a bigot and incompetent? If judges were component, they’d practice law on unsuspecting clients. Lawyers earn the highest per capita income in the New York area, four times what judges make. What is true in New York is true most everywhere else. Judges just get by. 3 That’s only one reason why there are so many corrupt judges.

Legal

If you agree to the terms because the judge or your own lawyer intimidates you (who told you to get a lawyer?) or, worse still, bamboozles you, how can you complain later? You can’t appeal. Anything you do "voluntarily" is unappealable.

Only women who as a gender are inherently weak need the protection of the court from men’s scheming. Women never scheme. This isn’t my argument. It is theirs! That’s how they get the juice out of a separation agreement and then when it comes time for them to perform they "collapse on the mercy of the court."

It is almost impossible for a husband to succeed in appealing his own separation agreement. While the feminists talk about the strength and equality of women, when it suits them they will argue that men have better business sense and overreach. Courts regularly buy that argument. It is almost impossible for women to argue overreaching when a judge determines the conditions of the divorce. 

When we men regain our equality under law, you may at least be able to get out of future performance of the terms of a one-sided imposed court’s judgment you clearly objected to. 

Financial

If your financial circumstances turn south, it is easier to get a downward modification if the original support or maintenance was jammed down your throat than if you took it with your mouth wide open. 

The New York Court of Appeals will refuse to hold your ex-wife to her side of the bargain in the separation agreement after you voluntarily gave her some advantage you negotiated in exchange for a reciprocal advantage. Don’t be surprised if lazy Rehnquist and the Supremes won’t hear your case. But they have time for every half-witted rag doll the ACLU drags in.

For further detail please read the Supreme Court’s hypocritical Domestic Relations Exception

The single most foreseeable event after a divorce is that one (or both) of the spouses will want to get out of a radius clause to remarry (the most expected consequence of a divorce) or relocate for economic reasons (often a ploy). That is one of the very reasons they entering into a separation agreement in the first plac: to put a lid the movement of the custodial spouse.  

Usually the fathers pays more support than the law requires. Furthermore, in Tropea, the cause of the divorce was the wife’s adultery with the man whom she wished to relocate. Tell me the court didn’t have this microwave dinner ready to be heated up before the parties submitted their briefs.

A full-time father who shared his son’s enthusiasm for baseball and Little League was already kicked down to uncle status. The boys were woven into the fabric of their father’s family. This sick Court turned up its caustic humor and jokingly wrote that moving with the mother who cared little for the boys was in the best interest of the children.

Sam Levinson was wrong. We don’t inherit our insanity from our children. We project our insanity on anybody’s children.

What I think is a joke today, the Court of Appeals steals from my stand-up routine tomorrow. They are capable of no illogic so great it leaves you any longer going "huh?". When you have the fate of a brain the size of a mustard seed it can move mountains of words and believe any arrangement possible. If you are not famiiar with the Bible you will miss the pun. The Court of Appeals would. Their education sounds like it stopped with playing the number’s racket.

[F]or verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Luke

1. Only the President can conduct foreign relations. But sometimes his domestic relations influence it. See war.

2. What can possibly happen to your children under the supervision of social services? Maybe they’ll be lucky and the State will forget where it put them.

3. Look who parks the Porsche. The lawyers. Judges have a special parking area to hide their scrap metal on wheels. But most of the time their cars are on the lift in a service station. They have to walk as far to the courthouse as the janitors.

4. Contracts are useful because they make the future predictable. We thus mutually forfeit rights to achieve stability, just what the court with surgical precision removed in Tropea.