Love lies bleeding in family court

Here’s an idea: Before you get a marriage license, you have to spend a day in family court.

You have to take a day off from the goin’-to-the-chapel, band-or-deejay, you-n-me-4evah bliss of planning your walk down the aisle, and sit in the kind of courtroom where that aisle all too often can lead.

You would have to sit and listen to the ugly charges and countercharges. Watch the faces of a once-happy couple now barely able to look at one another. Hear a judge decide who gets to live with the children and who only gets to visit with them, and under what circumstances. Ponder not so much how a marriage can fall to pieces - that no doubt happens long before the trek to the courtroom - but how such intimate matters suddenly are out of your hands and in those of strangers.

I took a brief tour through shattered-marriage hell yesterday, prompted by the killings of the three Castillo children in a downtown Baltimore hotel room last weekend, allegedly at the hands of their father, who has been involved in a bitter fight with their mother over visitation rights.

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