ARMY TIMES, on May 10, 1999 printed the following Op-Ed column.

It is expected to also be published soon in Army Times and Navy Times. Mrs. Mozley is a PMI board member. We will have much more comment on this bill and its sponsors later on the website.

FSPA was deliberately crafted to give the military member much more than his fair share, and that is still the case.

In any forum other than Congress, claims of "unfairness" would have been laughed at and summarily dismissed as being totally without merit. And FSPA would, by now, have been amended equitably to ensure that the ex-spouse received a fair share. Service members are still working mightily to be the only category of spouses exempt from sharing their pensions in a divorce.

At Stump’s hearing last August, experts in domestic relations of the American Bar Association recommended yet again against all of Stump’s so-called "fairness" amendments - for the fourth time since 1978. Do proponents of these amendments think that if they invite these experts to testify often enough, these learned jurists will begin to be convinced that they have been mistaken?

One of the provisions of Stump’s bill is to limit payments even for child support. While other fathers in our country are going to jail if they refuse to pay child support, military members want to be excused from so onerous a burden as putting bread into their own children’s mouths.

Another Stump proposal is to revoke pension shares awarded as property upon the remarriage of former spouses. And to keep any ex-spouse from escaping, this would apply to all spouse remarriages, even those entered into before Stump’s "fairness" amendment became law.

Ninety-five percent of divorced service members remarry during that first year. Apparently, Stump thinks it’s OK for a service member to have a normal, married life, and not be penalized, but not their former spouse. In fact, a service member is rewarded because his second -- or maybe third -- spouse is instantly entitled to an array of taxpayer benefits solely on the basis of a marriage certificate to a retired military member.

On the other hand, a wife loses all their perks except their pension share if they remarry. Talk about discrimination! The ABA testified that such a scheme would lead to a large amount of litigation without any corresponding improvement in achieving equitable distribution of property and no apparent federal policy would be served by such a pre-emption of state law.

The end result would be to increase the number of military spouses who wouldn’t share in the benefits that their many years of work helped produce.

This amendment would only cater to the greed of divorced military members. Mr. Stump’s "statute of limitations" is a misnomer.

Attorney Marshal S. Willick, testifying for the ABA, said, "It is difficult to conceive of any set of facts that would make it equitable for one souse to continue receiving the other spouse’s rightful share of the property in the future, but that is exactly what the current proposal would allow."

Mr. Stump’s plan to compute a spouse’s share as of the date of divorce would enable a service member to continue serving without compensating the spouse in any way for delay of receipt of their share.

In sum, if we want children to be denied bread to eat; a spouse to be penalized for entering into an honorable marriage -- if we want to help a member steal from their former spouse, and if we want a spouse to be cheated out of a true pro rata share of the pension they helped to earn, Congress should accept Stump’s Orwellian definition of "equity" and pass his despicable amendments designed only to help service members evade duty to their spouses, children and society.

The impartial American Association of Retired Persons got it right when they concluded that of all government retirement benefits examined, the military system is the most inequitable for divorced spouses.