ABC News reports that Continental airline is claiming, through a lawsuit, that nine of its pilots divorced their spouses - all of whom were named as the beneficiary for their pensions. And then remarried the very same spouse once the cash started flowing to them.
Ahh, love re-found. Or, alimony on its head.
I would be happy never to hear the phrase "protecting marriage" again. At least until we, collectively, treat it like a thing worth protecting, the phrase should be banned.
According to the lawsuit, filed in Texas, the pilots and their spouses divorced to take advantage of a quirk in federal pension law that lets a former spouse who is a beneficiary in a pension receive all or a portion of the dough in the event the marriage goes ka-put.
The Continental suit alleges that even if the divorces were legal under the law - all the papers were all proper and so on - the divorces were "subterfuges or sham transactions in that the Defendant-pilots and their respective Defendant-spouses had no intention of disassociating as marital partners but obtained the divorce decrees ... for the purpose of providing the Defendant-pilots access to lump sum distributions of their pensions without having to retire or otherwise separate from active employment."
Even if the suit gets tossed, if the fact pattern is true, the pilots and their spouses make a major mockery of marriage. The institution bunches of people, in California and elsewhere, seek to "protect" for heterosexual couples. (Wanna bet all the pilots and their spouses fall into that camp?) They also mock the right to divorce - a terribly painful part of too many lives.
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