Divorce

If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments. I still don't know what those "tea bag" protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who's going to win American Idol. But it wasn't tax day that made them crazy; it was Election Day. Because that's when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority.

The Montgomery County man accused of drowning his three children, one by one, in the bathtub of an Inner Harbor Hotel filed an insanity plea yesterday - for the second time in an increasingly erratic defense. Several months ago, Mark Castillo's case began with an insanity plea. His lawyers then withdrew the filing as Castillo launched a series of hysterics, efforts to fire his lawyers, and a public request to plead guilty and receive the death penalty. Yesterday, the strategy came full circle as a calm, well-dressed Castillo stood by as his lawyer said she would renew the insanity plea.

Studio executive seeks divorce from 'Private Practice' star Walsh Private Practice star Kate Walsh, 41, is getting divorced after a year of marriage. The actress' husband, Alex M. Young, a top-ranking executive at 20th Century Fox, filed for divorce this week in Los Angeles. His petition cites "irreconcilable differences" but offers no details. The pair married September 2007, and the documents say they separated Nov. 22. A phone message left for Walsh's publicist Thursday was not returned.

The Democratic National Convention that begins today in Denver looks to me less like the coronation of Barack Obama than a soap opera wedding. The kind everyone tunes in to for the fireworks. Will the groom find out that the bride is pregnant with another man's child, or that her husband is not dead but in fact alive in a South American jail? You have to wonder what's going to happen when Obama turns the convention over to Hillary Clinton for the roll call of the delegates that she amassed in their overlong primary battle.

The quick conclusion to Clark Rockefeller's abduction of his daughter Reigh to Baltimore ended what could have been a protracted and potentially harmful voyage for the young girl. While abduction of any length poses an emotional and physical threat to a child's well-being, the lengthier the abduction, the greater the threat, regardless of whether the abductor is the father or the mother. I have spent the last year working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to study the long-term impact of abduction on children who were taken by a parent many years ago. The people I have interviewed are now ages 21 to 53 and were missing as recently as four years ago and as long ago as 40 years ago. They are men and women of different races and religions who were taken by fathers and mothers and grew up in hiding all over the United States and in Europe.

There's nothing Tabloid America resents like a quiet divorce. We want celebrity breakups public. We want them messy. We want to turn on the TV and see courthouse paparazzi scrums. We want to lean over the checkout counter for tawdry details. Cheating accusations? Yes, please! Good names muddied? If at all possible! Compromising photos? All that you got! So, Kevin Costner, thanks for nothing. Paul McCartney and Heather Mills? That's what we're talking about.

Bonnie Ashley has grouped together all seven of her ex-husbands. The Bethany Beach resident scanned their images on a sheet of paper that she often shows folks eager to know how she managed to get married and divorced 11 times - tying and severing the knot with two of the men three times each - and why the unions lasted anywhere from 45 days to just under five years. To hear the author of the self-published book Ex-Husband in Freezer describe each man is to know that she can reallllly pick 'em. Her marriage to husband No. 1 - she says as she pointed to the man in the upper left-hand corner - was doomed to fail.

Saying "I divorce thee" three times, as men in Muslim countries have been able to do for centuries when leaving their wives, is not enough if you're a resident of Maryland, the state's highest court ruled yesterday. Yesterday, the Court of Appeals rejected a Pakistani man's argument that his invocation of the Islamic talaq, under which a marriage is dissolved simply by the husband's say-so, allowed him to part with his wife of more than 20 years and deny her a share of his $2 million estate.

A report funded by a variety of "family values" groups made splashy headlines recently: "Single Parenthood Costs Taxpayers $112 Billion." The report lists two big reasons for these costs. One is increased welfare expenditures on poor families ($70 billion). The other is increased government spending to deal with the social problems caused by poor kids when they grow up ($42 billion). The report is only partially correct; it vastly overstates the cost to society of single parenthood and fails to point out that social inequality is at the root of those costs.