"..."Till death do us part... not till difficulties do us part," says State Sen. Josh Brecheen, R- Coal County. He's going after the number one reason Oklahomans are filing for divorce-- incompatibility. In his proposed bill, Oklahomans would have the option of choosing a "covenant marriage."
"When they choose the option of a covenant marriage, they will go through four hours of premarital counseling," says Sen. Brecheen. If you want a divorce from a covenant marriage, you and your spouse would be required to take six hours of counseling, spread out over a three-month period. "We're not saying they can't get a divorce. We're saying we're going to slow down the process and make it much more thoughtful," he adds. But, that's not all. If you still don't want to stay together after three months of counseling, you would have a one-year "cooling off" period, before you could be eligible for divorce. "This is light. Other states require two years in a cooling off period. This bill just says one," says Sen. Brecheen.
"My heart really goes to the kids," says State Sen. Rob Standridge, R-Norman. He says marriage in Oklahoma is easier to get out of than a Tupperware container, so he's also proposed a marriage bill. "My legislation would require 30-minutes of education," says Sen. Standridge. Under his bill, if you have children, a divorce would first require a 30-minutes pre-divorce education class to be taken individually, plus a four-hour post-divorce co-parenting class. "It's mainly about making sure the parents get along and that the children have the best co-parenting environment that they can have," says Sen. Standridge.
As these provisions make clear, redefining marriage redefines other core values our legal tradition has traditionally inscribed in marriage law:
Under a long-awaited bill allowing same-sex couples to marry, only infidelity between people of opposite genders would count as adultery in divorce cases.
It means that people in a same-sex marriages who discover that their spouse is unfaithful to them would not be able to divorce for adultery – unless it was with someone of the opposite sex.
Equally, it makes clear that straight people cannot accuse their partner of adultery if they discover they had a secret lover of the same sex.
It comes after Government legal experts failed to agree what constitutes “sex” between same-sex couples.
The bill also makes clear that gay couples would not be able to have their marriage annulled on grounds of non-consummation for the same reason.
Lawyers and MPs said the distinction over adultery created inequality between heterosexual and homosexual couples in the divorce courts and would lead to confusion.
They said it made it likely that adultery would simply be abolished as a grounds for divorce – either through Parliament or the courts. (UK Telegraph)
Maggie Gallagher writes in Town Hall about the scandal of Dinesh D'Souza:
"...Adultery is a grave sin for Christians, but it's the sin of giving yourself a partial excusal from the sacred marriage vow -- of unilaterally taking back the gift of your body that you gave at the altar. So how exactly, from a Christian point of view, does breaking the whole vow publicly and explicitly make it better?
I could cite chapter and verse, but let me instead just cite a few examples from the studies published just this year on the harm that divorce causes.
A 2012 study in the International Journal of Public Health looked at 6,928 adults in Alameda County, Calif.. Adults whose parents divorce experienced not only “lowered well-being in adulthood,” but reduced “long-term survival.”
A 2012 study by Leslie Gordon Simons (et al.) looked at more than 2,000 college students: “Results indicate that respondents from continuously married families were more committed to marriage, and this commitment reduced the probability of risky sexual behavior.”
So Dinesh, by choosing divorce, you may not only put at risk your teen's life, health and faith in marriage -- but even her faith in God.
”Parental breakup is associated with religious decline among ... youth characterized by high levels of religious salience,” according to a March 2012 study by Melinda Lundquist Denton.
If we were really close, I would plead with D'Souza: Don't do this. Don't do this to your daughter. Don't do this to the wife of your youth. Don't do this to those former students of yours at King's College, young and idealistic and hopeful about marriage, scared and scarred by divorce."
Scott Yenor reviews Elizabeth Brake's new book "Minimizing Marriage" for Public Discourse:
Elizabeth Brake’s Minimizing Marriage breaks new ground in the contemporary liberal critique of traditional arrangements. The object of her critique is what she calls amatonormativity—the belief that society should value two-person, amorous love relationships. Even same-sex marriage (SSM) advocates are too restrictive for Brake in that they would confer benefits on two people alone; SSM advocates are unwitting amatonormativists. Their defenses of marriage leave out “urban tribes, best friends, quirkyalones, polyamorists” and other diverse groups united by a common bond of caring. Brake argues for an almost complete disestablishment of marriage.
Brake’s argument for minimal marriage is both destructive and constructive. Rather than propose that we abolish marriage, Brake contends that we free ourselves of any demand that marriage have an approved form. Yet Brake’s minimal marriage does not abolish the function of marriage, though she thins out that function considerably. After attacking traditional normative beliefs about marriage, she constructs a new vision of marriage as an institution that fulfills, broadly speaking, the function of caring. States, in her view, should recognize and provide benefits to caring relationships.
For a long time advocates claimed divorce had no permanent effect on children. Now we're acknowledging this isn't so. We shouldn't dismiss warning signs accompanying redefining marriage:
My friend Judy Wallerstein, who died last month at age 90, liked to tell the story of how she was drawn into the rancorous national debate on divorce. It was 1970 and Judy, a psychologist, had just moved with her husband and three children from the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., to Marin County in northern California.
... Judy went to the Berkeley library to see what had been written about how children react to divorce. And found nothing.
Given her initial idea that divorce may not be so bad, it's ironic that Judy became best known as one of the nation's leading critics of divorce. The heart of her findings:
The effects of divorce on children are not transient. They are long-lasting and profound, persisting well into adulthood.
The quality of the post-divorce family is critical. Parents are told "don't fight" but the issue is much bigger. Beyond custody and visiting plans, children need to be fully supported as they grow up. Few are.
Age matters. Little ones, ages 2 to 6, are terrified of abandonment. Elementary-school-age children, 7 to 11, grow resentful when deprived of opportunities they would have had if their parents had stayed together. Preadolescents, ages 11 and 12, can be seduced by what Judy called "the voices of the street." Many teenagers, taking on the role of parent, become overburdened.
Stepfamilies are laden with land mines that no one sees coming.
Second Chances was a best-seller, but reaction to Judy's findings was harsh. Parents did not want to believe it. Rival academics attacked her. Through it all, she stood up to her critics. -- Slate
"...advocates now hope to lower divorce rates through laws that slow the process — with some exceptions — and encourage couples who are waiting to use opportunities to improve communication and relational skills and hopefully reconsider.
Divorce-reform advocates are battling a cultural bias created by 40 years of legal precedent, concerns about increasing governmental involvement in private lives and the cost of seeking help. But they say this needs to be discussed to avoid more unnecessary pain.
... A 2008 study on the costs of divorce and unwed childbearing estimated that family fragmentation costs taxpayers $112 billion annually for things like food stamps, housing assistance, child welfare services and the justice system.
In a 2005 article in "The Future of Children," University of Pennsylvania sociologist Paul Amato explained that if children were to grow up in stable two-parent families at the same level as 1960 before the massive increase in divorce, it would mean 1.2 million fewer children suspended from school, 538,000 fewer acts of delinquency and 71,400 fewer suicide attempts.
The Atlantic profiles the rise of gay divorce where states have redefined marriage:
"...Soon after New York passed the Marriage Equality Act on June 24 last year, Katie Marks andDese’Rae Stage began planning their wedding day. A licensed masseuse and a photographer, both 28, the couple had been dating since 2008 and were already planning to get married — in Boston over the Memorial Day weekend of 2012 — but the euphoria of the moment moved everything forward. “It was kind of one of those things, to be a part of history,” Des says. On July 30, the first Saturday that gay marriages could be performed in New York City, Katie in a magenta dress and Des in skinny jeans and pink Chuck Taylors joined 23 other couples at the Pop Up Chapel, a one-day wedding event in Central Park, as part of New York City’s first wave of legally married gay couples. By January, though, things had started to come apart. Des and Katie have since separated and moved out of their Washington Heights apartment. They're now one of the first married gay couples — if not the very first — in New York to divorce. “I feel like I’m the president of the loneliest club in the world,” Des says. “I was the first gay person in my group of friends to marry, and now I’m the only gay divorcée I know.”
... On the sort-of-bright side, [Shannon Minter, Legal Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights] adds, "I think we will continue to see people divorce. But nothing has humanized gay couples more than for straight people to realize gay couples need to divorce, too.”
... "We have 34 [gay divorce] cases right now in the office, compared to 150 [heterosexual] divorce cases,” says Raoul Felder, a New York divorce lawyer who has handled numerous high-profile breakups including Rudy Giuliani’s split from his wife of 18 years, Donna Hanover, while he was mayor of New York. [...] Felder added that gay divorces are currently "filtering down at a faster rate than heterosexual divorces.”
Liberal writer Richard Kim of The Nation welcomes David Blankenhorn's defection on marriage as an opportunity to argue for further destabilizing marriage. For anti-marriage activists like Kim, nothing will ever be enough:
"...The primary difference, of course, is that Blankenhorn and I fundamentally disagree about what marriage should mean—for gays and straights alike. As the founder of the Institute for American Values, Blakenhorn has attacked single mothers, championed federal marriage promotion as welfare policy, railed against cohabitation and no-fault divorce and opposed access to new reproductive technologies. One of his institute’s latest crusades has been against anonymous sperm donors because it leads to “fatherless” children, an abiding preoccupation of his. Suffice to say, I don’t agree with any of this. I think divorce can be a great thing—as anyone leaving an abusive marriage might confirm. And I think all the debates over which type of family produces the best outcomes for children ought to be meaningless as a matter of state policy. Gay or straight, single or married, let’s try to create the conditions in which all families can succeed. Blankenhorn sees an inner circle of honor and benefits that should be attached to marriage, and he’s now extended that circle to include gays and lesbians. I want to scramble that circle."
After an impressive 115 years together, two giant turtles at an Austrian zoo are refusing to share their cage anymore, the Austrian Times reported Friday.
"We get the feeling they can't stand the sight of each other anymore," said Helga Happ, director of the Klagenfurt-based zoo, where the turtles -- Bibi, the female and Poldi, the male -- have lived for the last 36 years. Before that, they called Basel Zoo in Switzerland home.
According to the paper, zoo staff realized something was amiss when Bibi bit off a chunk of her partner's shell. When the attacks continued, Poldi was moved to another cage.
Animal experts even attempted couples' counseling -- feeding the turtles aphrodisiacs and encouraging them to play games together. But so far, efforts have failed to bring the shelled lovers back together. -- HuffPo
Lauren Gores of NewsyPolitics filed a report on YouTube back in February about the poster child for same-sex marriage in California getting a divorce that we found interesting:
Charles Cooke, editorial associate for National Review, writes about low enthusiasm for same-sex marriage in places where it is legal, and about the high incidence of gay divorce:
"...Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too. According to UCLA’s Williams Institute, two-thirds of legally recognized same-sex couples in the United States are lesbian. (Solely on the “marriage” front, in Massachusetts’s first four years, this statistic was 62 percent.) While data in the United States are clearly limited, Scandinavian countries have been at this a little longer. Denmark was the first country to introduce recognition of same-sex partnerships, coining the term “registered partnership” in 1989. Norway followed suit in 1993, and then Sweden in 1995. Again, Stockholm University’s study seems to confirm the American trend. In Norway, male same-sex marriages are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual marriages, and female same-sex marriages are an astonishing 167 percent more likely to be dissolved. In Sweden, the divorce risk for male-male partnerships is 50 percent higher than for heterosexual marriages, and the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men. This should not be surprising: In the United States, women request approximately two-thirds of divorces in all forms of relationships — and have done so since the start of the 19th century — so it reasonably follows that relationships in which both partners are women are more likely to include someone who wishes to exit.
The debate over marriage does not necessarily hinge on its popularity among the eligible, and advocates of gay unions would no doubt assert that “equality” is not a numerical proposition as quickly as their opponents would aver that the very idea is a hopeless category mistake. But it is nonetheless worth noting that there is no particular groundswell — even in states and cities that have both legal gay marriage and significant numbers of homosexuals — and that, when gay couples do decide to get married, they are more likely than their straight equivalents to change their minds later." -- National Review
A Republican bill in the Alabama Senate would create a new twist to marriage in the state, one that would require pre-marital counseling and make it more difficult for a couple to divorce.
Sen. Phil Williams, R-Rainbow City, said his bill to create a covenant marriage is designed to decrease Alabama's high divorce rate.
... Williams' bill is modeled after Louisiana's covenant marriage law, which went into effect in 1997
... Williams, who blames no-fault divorces for making it easy for couples to split up, said covenant marriages are a choice for couples.
"It is hard to figure overreaching when all you are doing is providing an option," Williams said.
... The bill states for a couple to enter into a covenant marriage they must provide an affidavit stating they've received premarital counseling from a religious leader or a marriage counselor. That counseling must include a discussion of the obligation to seek more counseling in times of marital difficulties and a discussion of the exclusive grounds for terminating a covenant marriage.
A spouse could ask a judge to grant a divorce without first seeking counseling if there is proof the other spouse had committed adultery, abused the filing spouse or their children, committed a felony or had left the family home for more than a year and refused to return.
Otherwise, counseling is a mandatory step in the process.
Obed Bazikian is an intern for the Family Research Council and writes on Dr. Pat Fagan's blog about some surprising statistics about divorce:
[Andrew] Mrozek [of the Institute for Marriage and Family] references some interesting findings from The Institute for American Values. One study states that of couples who have filed for divorce, 40% of one or both of them have a desire to be reconciled. Among Minnesota’s divorced population, 66 percent wished that they would have tried harder to reconcile with their former spouse. An astonishing final study states that “two out of three unhappily married adults who avoided divorce or separation were happily married five years later”.
If the partners would make every effort to work out their differences, as the last study references, over 60 percent of potential divorces could be reconciled successfully and result in a happy marriage. That is exciting news. Marriage is hard work and requires a new level of self-sacrifice that most are not used to prior to their “I do’s”. But, if you stick it out, there are benefits on so many levels. The Marriage and Religion Research Institute’s 162 Reasons to Marry provides a detailed window into these different areas a committed marriage can profit not only yourself, but society. So if divorce is on your mind, seek a counselor and get help! There is hope for you and your marriage!
Maryland's highest court is scheduled to hear a case that could set a statewide precedent for same-sex divorce even before a gay marriage law takes effect.
The Baltimore Sun reports Maryland's Court of Appeals will hear the case next month of Jessica Port and Virginia Anne Cowan. The women were married in a California courthouse in 2008 when gay marriage was legal and returned home to Washington.
Two years later, Port filed for divorce in Maryland where she bought a home. A Prince George's County judge denied the divorce petition saying the women's marriage wasn't valid.
On the final day of the 2012 Legislative Session, the West Virginia State Legislature approved H.B. 4605 a bill creating a premarital education option to applicants for marriage licenses in the state. The measure is aimed at strengthening the more than 13,000 marriages and reducing the more than 9,000 divorces that take place every year in West Virginia.
“Our government should be doing everything it can to strengthen marriages in West Virginia,” said Jeremiah Dys, president and general counsel of the Family Policy Council of WV. “We are grateful that this legislature is encouraging men and women to start their marriages on secure footing by encouraging them to pursue premarital education.”
H.B. 4605, which now travels to the Governor’s desk for his signature, seeks to create a community partnership, with pastors, counselors, and social workers, to address the growing problem of divorce in West Virginia. Under the bill, the marriage license fee is increased by $20, but that increase is waived if the couple undergoes at least four (4) hours of premarital education.
...Research concludes that couples who undergo premarital education prior to their nuptials have a 30% less likely chance of ending their marriage in divorce. The state’s 9,000+ divorces cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $30,000 per divorce or an approximate burden to taxpayers in the amount of $230 million annually. If the state’s divorce rate is cut by just 2% annually, West Virginia stands to save over $5 million every year.
"..."Till death do us part... not till difficulties do us part," says State Sen. Josh Brecheen, R- Coal County. He's going after the number one reason Oklahomans are filing for divorce-- incompatibility. In his proposed bill, Oklahomans would have the option of choosing a "covenant marriage."
It means that people in a same-sex marriages who discover that their spouse is unfaithful to them would not be able to divorce for adultery – unless it was with someone of the opposite sex.
"...Adultery is a grave sin for Christians, but it's the sin of giving yourself a partial excusal from the sacred marriage vow -- of unilaterally taking back the gift of your body that you gave at the altar. So how exactly, from a Christian point of view, does breaking the whole vow publicly and explicitly make it better?
Divorce-reform advocates are battling a cultural bias created by 40 years of legal precedent, concerns about increasing governmental involvement in private lives and the cost of seeking help. But they say this needs to be discussed to avoid more unnecessary pain.
