Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
Divorce case recently appealed to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, sent back for more fact-finding on this question: were the parties even married? The Court of Appeals\u2019 reasoning infuriates me.<\/p>\n
When you fled to Thailand in 1975 to escape the Communists after the Americans abandoned Southeast Asia, and you got \u201cmarried\u201d to this guy that you met in a refugee camp, did you file a marriage certificate with the Thailand government? No? Well, then, the fact you\u2019ve lived together for 40 years, had six kids together, filed married tax returns and owned real estate in Minnesota is interesting trivia but really, lady, if you can\u2019t be bothered to fill out the proper forms, we have no sympathy for you at all. Shacking up with a guy \u2013 even with the tribal elders\u2019 blessing \u2013 doesn\u2019t give you the privilege to use the Minnesota divorce court. You can\u2019t get divorced if you were never legally married.<\/p>\n
Dude. It\u2019s a refugee camp. There IS no government. And if there were, you\u2019d be a fool to bring attention to yourself. No self-respecting government would issue a marriage certificate without a birth certificate, proof of residency, passport stamps showing legal entry, resident alien visa and payment of appropriate fees to every bureaucrat . . . none of which is possible in a war zone. You couldn\u2019t get \u201clegally\u201d married even if you wanted to. It\u2019s a REFUGEE camp.<\/p>\n
Oh, and your husband claims you were already married to another guy when he married you. Well, yes, the guy who stayed behind to cover our escape. No, I don\u2019t have a death certificate but I strongly suspect he was captured by the Pathet Lao so what do you think happened to him? No, I didn\u2019t serve him with a Divorce Summons; there was nobody crazy enough to go back to serve it so I could get divorced while I was struggling to survive IN THE REFUGEE CAMP.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s as if these judges lived all their lives in safe, comfortable First World suburbs where the biggest disruption in life is weak Wi-Fi signal; they literally cannot conceive of a place where there are no forms to complete, no pens to complete them, no office to file them in.<\/p>\n
Madness. <\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What happened to official Minnesota’s vaunted “cultural sensitivity?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Divorce case recently appealed to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, sent back for more fact-finding on this question: were the parties even married? The Court of Appeals\u2019 reasoning infuriates me. When you fled to Thailand in 1975 to escape the Communists after the Americans abandoned Southeast Asia, and you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,308,51,129,255],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-entitled-america","category-liberal-tyranny","category-unions","category-the-racket"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53256,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53255\/revisions\/53256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}