"..."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.

"...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."

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.

"...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.”

"...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."

You can't say they didn't try.

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

"...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.

[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.

Americans believe overwhelmingly in the importance of marriage, and a sizable number continue to feel it’s too easy to get a divorce in this country.

Seventy-eight percent (78%) of American Adults rate the institution of marriage as at least somewhat important to U.S. society, and that includes 60% who consider it Very Important. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 17% don’t believe marriage is a very important institution, with three percent (3%) who say it’s Not At All Important.

A press release from the congressman's office:

Tonight, Congressman Alan Nunnelee (MS-01) will lead a special order on the floor of the House of Representatives emphasizing the importance of strong marriages. The effort is part of National Marriage Week, which aims to encourage many diverse groups to strengthen individual marriages, reduce the divorce rate, and build a stronger marriage culture, which in turn helps curtail poverty and benefits children.

“I’m proud to participate in National Marriage Week because strong marriages are crucial to strong communities and it is important that government policies support marriage,” Nunnelee said.

Mariam Bell, Policy Advisor for National Marriage Week, said in a statement: "In Congressman Nunnelee we find a champion of the family who is a person of both insight and steadfast action. As we celebrate National Marriage Week, both the Congressman and his wife Tori are a living example of partners walking together through life's journey, working together for a better community and nation. They understand how thriving marriages nurture children and families, our hope for the future. For the Nunnelees, a marriage is not for themselves only, but is a blessing they earnestly seek for others both by example, encouragement and through thoughtful policy advocacy."

... I would be among the first to admit that marriage as an institution was terribly weakened by both the no-fault divorce laws first passed in the 1970s and by a general willingness of our culture to separate marriage from childbearing. Neither of these factors had anything to do with homosexuality, and both dealt severe blows to the strength of American families. However, these are not reasons to further weaken marriage by defining it out of existence. (I am not the first to observe that words that mean everything mean nothing, and “marriage” is headed down that very road.) The enfeebled state of marriage today is all the more reason to fight to preserve it and hopefully to restore it to its former strength.

At the heart of the marriage argument is whether marriage exists primarily to satisfy the needs and wants of adults, or to provide the optimal environment for nurturing the next generation. If marriage is only for individual gratification, then there is no reason to restrict it to opposite sex couples. Marriage has always been the union of one man and one woman because children need one mother and one father.

Everybody knows that half of all marriages end in divorce, and couples often cite that statistic as an excuse for not tying the knot.

But it's not true.

"I don't know where the 50-percent myth came from," says Amanda Miller, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Central Oklahoma. "But the divorce rate isn't that high and it never has been."

It peaked around 40 percent in the 1980s and has declined since - meaning that, when couples get married, "the odds are on their side," she says.

... The Pew study has received a lot of national press in recent weeks, with most of the analysis concluding that the institution of marriage is in deep trouble.

Miller, however, takes a more nuanced view.

"Most people still believe in marriage and want to be married," she says. "They want to get it right the first time and avoid divorce, but they aren't sure they can do it."

In a little noticed development, D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At-Large) introduced a bill in October that would allow same-sex couples who marry in D.C. but live in states that don’t recognize their marriage to return to the District to get a divorce.

Supporters say the bill, the Civil Marriage Dissolution Equality Amendment Act of 2011, is needed because states that don’t recognize same-sex marriage have no legal mechanism to issue a divorce to gay or lesbian couples who wish to dissolve their D.C. marriage through a divorce.

Under the city’s existing marriage law, which allows same-sex couples to marry, one or both parties to a same-sex marriage performed in D.C. would have to become a city resident for six months before the city would grant the couple a divorce.

Interviews about marriage with couples who were living together found that two-thirds were worried about the “legal, emotional and economic consequences” of splitting up later.

Many expressed concerns about the “hassle” of divorce lawyers or arranging child support payments, while others had painful memories of their parents divorcing.

However most respondents insisted they did still want to get married one day, but only once they had met “the one” and were emotionally and financially ready for such a commitment.

Experts say the findings, published in the journal Family Relations, disprove the common belief that the marriage rate is declining because young people do not respect the institution of matrimony.

The paper, by Sharon Sassler and Dela Kusi-Appouh at Cornell University and Amanda Miller and the University of Central Oklahoma, states: “More than two-third of those in our sample expressed views about divorce that were in some way connected to their sentiments regarding marriage. -- UK Telegraph

... LOPEZ: “We need to restore cultural respect for the marriage ideal,” you write. “In the meantime, the marriage aspiration is alive and well.” So what can a single 39-year-old do about it?

MARSHALL: Don’t toss out the marriage ideal just because it’s not working out personally at the moment. Don’t let the fog of cultural stereotypes cloud perceptions of men; see them individually for who they are, just as each of us women wants to be seen as a unique person. Keep articulating the challenges on the path to marriage in the wake of the feminist movement and sexual revolution; pastors, leaders, mentors, and parents have wisdom to share but need openness on our part so they can better understand today’s circumstances.

And all of us, no matter what our marital status, should seek solid ground for a sense of meaning and purpose that transcends all life’s seasons.

I’m divorced. My ex-husband and I were married in 2008. Gay relationships, just like straight ones, often end in separation, and yet it’s surprisingly difficult to admit that after nearly 10 years together and two years married, we parted. Years working in gay media and advocating for LGBT rights (including marching in Prop. 8 protests that started the very day we moved back to Los Angeles) have made me reluctant to make any kind of declaration that my relationship ended. I’m not proud of my divorce, but c’est l’amour. I’m relieved that California made the legal process the same for us as it would have for anyone else.

Equality isn’t always pretty, and that’s a sobering realization...

Men in South Korea who wish to marry a foreign woman are now required to enroll in courses designed to teach them how to be a good husband to a non-Korean bride, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The mandatory lessons come on the heels of a surge in failed marriages among middle-aged men and their younger spouses who hail from Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Mongolia.

Korean women are increasingly moving out of their hometowns and into cities to start a career, shifting the demographics and leaving many older men with no option but to seek brides from outside of the country. More than 100,000 female immigrants, many of whom are looking to escape the poverty of their home countries, are now wedded to Korean men. Contributing to the rash of broken marriages, say experts, is the lack of government oversight of agencies that find brides for Korean men.

In an email to The Christian Post, NOM Board Chairwoman Maggie Gallagher responded, "I'm reluctant to criticize any given individual who divorces because moral judgments are hard without more information that it is my business to know – and celebrity divorces are too common to warrant special notice. Hollywood in general and Kim Kardashian in particular support gay marriage. Perhaps that makes sense, if the speed of her divorce reflects a reduced commitment to the marriage.”

She further pointed out that the biggest supporters of gay marriage, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “are apparently not that interested in marrying the women they love.”

A new proposal for reducing unnecessary divorce gets to the heart of the problem: the current system seeks to meet a divorcing couple’s every need—except for time and education on reconciliation.

Former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Sears (on the short list for Obama appointments to the Supreme Court) and family relations scholar Professor William Doherty have teamed up to produce with what they call, without irony, a modest proposal to reduce “unnecessary divorce”: the Second Chances Act.

The Second Chances Act is a brilliant piece of work by two of the nation’s leading pro-marriage liberals. (Full disclosure: The authors kindly give me far more credit than I am due by including me in a list of people to be thanked for “contributions,” which in my case consisted of attending one meeting in which an early draft of the report and the legislation was presented.)

The Second Chances Act proposes new model legislation that includes a one-year waiting period for divorce, along with a requirement that parents of minor children considering divorce take a short online divorced parenting education course, which would include information on reconciliation. Spouses could trigger the one-year waiting period without actually filing for divorce by sending their mates a formal letter of notice. These requirements would be waived in cases of domestic violence.

For as long as I have debated topics of grave social concern, a particular sort of argument has been insouciantly tossed about by those who just want the conversation to end. It frequently takes the following form: "How will legalizing X harm me? I'm not being forced to do X. I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing. Therefore I support the legalization of X."

... such a claim is self-serving. It only considers the harm done to me, while discounting as irrelevant the harm done to millions of other human lives--and the evidence of the harm caused to so many people by these two legalized atrocities is incontrovertible.

... such a claim conveniently accounts for only that kind of harm that the arguer is thinking about at the moment, such as serious and obvious physical or psychological harm, while passing over less serious but no less real harms, and discounting the reality of moral and social harm.

... We have been personally harmed by the regimes of abortion and easy divorce. We might not realize it. We might have survived it. We might choose to ignore it. We might even have recovered. But we have all been harmed.

If the wealth of a nation is tied to both the quality and the quantity of its people, then modern trends toward cohabiting instead of marrying, easy divorce and fewer children born to couples will have sweeping economic consequences, a new report says.

The “long-term fortunes of the modern economy rise and fall with the family,” the Social Trends Institute says in its new report, “The Sustainable Demographic Dividend: What Do Marriage and Fertility Have to Do With the Economy?”

This is because economic growth, viability of welfare programs, size and quality of a workforce, and profitability of large sectors of an economy - health care and food, for instance - are intertwined with the family decisions of the populace, says the report, which is co-sponsored by six international institutions and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

... Marriage also matters, the report says. Children raised in married, mother-father homes are the most likely to acquire the skills and behaviors conducive to becoming a “well-adjusted, productive” workforce. Also, “men who get and stay married work harder, work smarter, and earn more money than their unmarried peers.”-- Washington Times

Mexico City lawmakers want to help newlyweds avoid the hassle of divorce by giving them an easy exit strategy: temporary marriage licenses.

Leftists in the city's assembly -- who have already riled conservatives by legalizing gay marriage -- proposed a reform to the civil code this week that would allow couples to decide on the length of their commitment, opting out of a lifetime.

The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple splits. --Reuters

The BBC adds:

"...the bill has attracted criticism from families campaigner Consuelo Mendoza. She attacked the initiative as contributing to a "throwaway culture" in respect of society's institutions and said it would put children through the anguish of wondering whether their parents would stay together."

"...we were like an increasing number of middle-class couples who co-habit, have children and see no reason to formalise their shared commitment to a lifelong future with a wedding ceremony.

And yet, it seems it wasn’t enough. Because despite all those years together, and all those children, David and I are now in the process of splitting up. We are divorcing without ever having married.

..herein lies an uncomfortable thought. While it pains me to say so, I can’t help thinking that our situation might have been different if we’d got married.

For years, I told myself — and others — that marriage for me was just a word, a formality, and that David and I were as close as any married couple. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe, if we had made a proper commitment in front of our friends and loved ones, if we had said those binding, meaningful words, we might not be in this situation.

Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was a guest on "Piers Morgan Tonight" this evening, and discussed the 2012 GOP candidates, the economy and what he's been up to since leaving office. But he also discussed the scandal when he was in office – an extramarital affair with Maria Belen Chapur. While Sanford is still with [Argentinian] Belen Chapur, he told Piers Morgan, "You don't want to disappoint anybody. You know that you've let a lot of people down."

Does he have any regrets? "There's got to be regret," he said. "There's something sacred about a family unit...anything that brings harm to your boys you have genuine regret about." --CNN

I don't see the slightest sign of any genuine regret here. He chose his lover over his boys and broke up his family and we're supposed to feel sorry for him because he's afraid to do interviews?

Marriage matters, but why?

For more than 20 years, social scientists have consistently found that children do better raised by their mothers and fathers united by marriage.

For most of that time policymakers have focused on the problem of "father absence," and it is a real problem. Very few boys and girls have involved, loving, supportive fathers if the man that made them is not married to their mama.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers.

Continue reading at Human Events.

The government could save literally billions simply by taking modest steps to fight rampant divorce, according to prominent divorce-reform advocates.

Divorce “places real burdens on children, adults, and the state,” points out W. Bradford Wilcox, the University of Virginia National Marriage Project director.

“On the latter point, libertarians and conservatives need to realize that when marriage breaks down, court costs go up, children are more likely to fail in school and later in the marketplace, more police are needed to handle delinquent boys and young men, etc. So the breakdown of marriage causes the size and scope of state authority to expand.”

The costs of divorce, and efforts to reform divorce law, were the subject of a recent Washington Times article, where it was reported that on average a divorce costs a couple $2,500, up front. But that doesn’t take into account the costs of government support for single-parent families, which the Times reports can cost anywhere from $20-30,000/year. Multiply that figure by the number of divorced and single-parent families, and you’re looking at figures well into the many billions of dollars.

The cost of family failure continues to be a huge charge on the public purse. The Relationships Foundation’s annual index of the cost of family failure shows that the overall cost remains very high – at £41.74 billion (=$60 billion dollars). This means failed relationships cost each current UK taxpayer £1,364 ($1,964) a year.

For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Center for Health Statistics has released a detailed, state-by-state look at marriage rates nationwide.

... The statistics reflected regional differences. For instance, divorce rates are higher than the national average in the Southeast (10.2 per 1,000 men and 11.1 per 1,000 women) because marriage rates are higher there, and lower in the Northeast (7.2 for men and 7.5 for women) because people there tend to marry at older ages and less often.

The kids are not doing just fine.

The Institute for American Values’ new updated report, “Why Marriage Matters: 30 Conclusions From the Social Sciences,” is signed by an impressive list of family scholars ranging from professor John Gottman to professor Brad Wilcox. It concludes:

“The intact, biological, married family remains the gold standard for family life in the United States, insofar as children are most likely to thrive—economically, socially and psychologically —in this family form.”

The good news is that divorce involving children is down. The bad news is that children today are less likely to live with both parents. Thirty years ago, 66 percent of 16-years-olds lived with their mom and dad. By 2004, only 55 percent did so.

Divorce is down; family instability is up. How can that be?

More and more young men and women are choosing to have children in cohabiting rather than marital unions.

And cohabitation turns out to be a poor substitute for marriage. Sixty-five percent of children born to a cohabiting mother will experience a family breakup, compared to 24 percent of children born to a married mother.

Continue reading at The Manila Times.

...the fatal flaw is that the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] leaves out the most important sector of society that makes the private and public sectors able to function: the social sector.

... Further skewing the books, every time an intact family breaks up­—which represents a huge loss to parents and especially to children—the GDP calculators, deeming that significant, suddenly turn on and count all the derivative activities of divorce as positive indicators of economic growth.

Believe it or not, every divorce, because it generates activity in the private and public sectors, boosts the GDP. That activity includes greater workloads for divorce lawyers as well as the divorce-court and child-support systems, heightened demand for second households, therapy for the children, as well as new or increased employment commitments for the mother outside the home. In fact, as a divorcing mother is often forced into the full-time labor force, she may spend relatively more money on clothes, commuting, daycare, and dining out. Even when eating at home, she may opt more for costlier prepared foods than cooking at home.

At the same time, the divorced father will increase both energy and water consumption in setting up a second household. He may eat even less at home and frequent bars more often.

The GDP rises in response to all these inputs, but the net effect is reduced happiness, the handicapping of the next generation, and a less promising economy down the road. So in the GDP universe, the destruction of a little civilization through divorce—which splits a strong joint home economy into two weaker ones—is considered good for the larger economy. But in this same distorted GDP universe, the success of married couples in maintaining a lasting union harms the economy at large.

A controversial adultery website is now providing a money-back guarantee if its customers do not have an affair, the Herald Sun reported Tuesday.

Founder Noel Biderman -- in Australia to renew his own wedding vows -- said he would personally reimburse cheats who could not find a fling by following the website's guidelines.

... The dating site's Australian arm has more than 400,000 members. It claims to protect love rats from leaving a trail of "digital lipstick" by deleting personal communication between users and keeping identities secret.

The website has drawn international condemnation since its launch in 2001, with family groups accusing Biderman of making money from others' grief. In Australia, Family Council of Victoria president Peter Stokes said the website's success was a sad reflection on society. --Herald Sun

While New York's gay couples are lining up to get hitched, straight ones are increasingly untying the knot.

Divorce filings are up 12 percent since the state last October adopted no-fault separations, which allows couples to split without having to prove why.

"It's still going to the dentist," said lawyer Raoul Felder. "But now you go to a painless dentist. There's a certain percentage of people who do it now that wouldn't have before."

There were 37,015 divorce filings statewide from October 2010 through this May, compared to 33,160 in the year-ago period, according to court data.

Strengthening Michigan’s families, while transcending partisan politics.

That’s the emphasis of five marriage- and family-related bills introduced in the Michigan Senate last month.

The five bills “provide incentives for premarital education, require divorce effects programs for divorcing couples with minor children, create parenting plans and eliminate legal barriers to clergy engaging in marriage and family counseling.”

Brad Snavely, executive director of the Michigan Family Forum (MFF), said, “The decline of the family has played a significant role in virtually every major social problem facing our state.”

While there are many issues worthy of the Legislature’s time and attention next session, he said addressing the fragmentation of the family must be a priority if legislators are serious about securing a bright future for Michiganders. --CitizenLink

... stay-at-home parents are vulnerable to substantial financial risk during divorce. Time Magazine recently reported that unemployed men faced a greater danger of being left by their wives, particularly working wives. And though a wife's employment status had no bearing on risk, neither does the law provide stay-at-home moms sufficient protections either, especially under our unilateral divorce laws.

... New York recently recognized the inherent unfairness of this financial disparity when it came to the ability to defend oneself in a lawsuit for divorce. It amended its domestic relations laws to establish a rebuttable presumption that the monied spouse be required to pay for the non-monied spouse's attorney and experts during the pendency of litigation. Regrettably I had no such statutory protection during my own divorce. In other states, stay-at-home spouses without independent means are generally subject to the proper exercise of discretion by the judicial system to award them sufficient funds both to defend themselves and for support.

...  I believe the push for alimony reform has gone too far. That our divorce laws also fail to take into account current economic and unemployment realities as well as the need to protect stay-at-home parents. And shouldn't unemployment benefits kick in, too, when alimony ends for stay-at-home parents who are unable to secure employment?

In one of the first appearances by a 2012 Republican presidential candidate at a church service, Minnesota U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann opened up about her personal life Sunday and shared how her parents’ divorce, losing a child through miscarriage and finding God impacted her life.

Speaking to more than 500 people at the Des Moines First Assembly of God church, Bachmann shared how she grew up as a Lutheran and lived in Waterloo until the sixth grade, when she was 12. But a year after the family moved, her parents divorced. Her mother sold everything including the family home and all of the wedding gifts, and got a job in an attempt to support her daughter and three sons.

... Richard Jess, 61, of Des Moines, said he’s a political independent but there’s a good chance he’ll participate in the Feb. 6 Republican caucuses. He called Bachmann’s speech “very uplifting” and said he is impressed when someone has faith to trust in God and turn our country around.

“Of course being in a church setting, there was nothing political about it. She was simply speaking from the heart and how she felt,” Jess said. “I think she speaks the truth. In the time that I will take to evaluate all of the candidates, she will be a very serious candidate for me.”

Listen to Bachmann's speech here (MP3 file). -- IowaPolitics.com

On the day official figures showed that nearly half of all babies are now born to unmarried mothers, Sir Paul blamed family break-up on social changes including the shift in attitudes towards cohabitation and increasing numbers of children born outside marriage.

He said that 50 years ago 'on the whole cohabitation was regarded as something you didn't do, to have a child outside marriage, so that created a framework that stopped very much breakdown.

'We've had a cultural revolution in sexual morality and sexual behaviour,' the judge said. 'We need to have a reasonable debate about it and decide what needs to be done – and I don't mean Government,' he said. 'They didn't cause the problem.

... It was statistically proven parents were far more likely to stay together until their children's 16th birthday if they were married, he said.

Official figures suggest that an average marriage lasts around 11 years, but a cohabitation is likely to break up in three if the partners do not marry.

.. what is the problem with a little “nonmonogamy” in marriage, so long as everyone is open and honest about it? There are at least five problems with open marriage.

1. Even today, sex often results in pregnancy.
2. Monogamous, married sex is more likely to deliver long-lasting satisfaction than the quick thrill offered by infidelity.
3. People often do not realize what they are really consenting to when it comes to open marriage.
4. Swinging increases your risk of acquiring a sexually-transmitted disease (STD).
5. Open Marriages put children at risk.

Professor Wilcox expands on each of these points citing evidence and studies, and goes on to say:

When it comes to marriage, one of the few bright spots to emerge over the last forty years is increasing public support for sexual fidelity—in both theory and practice. Indeed, social science tells us that married couples who remain faithful to one another enjoy higher-quality marriages, lower rates of divorce, and, yes, higher levels of emotional satisfaction with their sex life. Sexual fidelity also increases the odds that children are born into and reared in a stable, two-parent home.

For all these reasons, and even though Savage is right to point out that fidelity can be a difficult virtue to live, turning the clock back to the swinging seventies is a stupid idea. Better for the sake of adults, children, and marriage as an institution to keep the book closed on open marriage

Anthony Weiner is just the latest in a long line of famous men who have strayed: Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards, Tiger Woods and Eliot Spitzer also have been publicly excoriated for their disgraceful behavior.

But the women with whom they cheated, who all knew they were getting involved with married men (all but one of whom were fathers), have not drawn similar criticism. In fact, the opposite is true: They have been celebrated.

We are, as a society, a long way from making such women wear a scarlet “A.” But it was not so long ago that the community of mothers was organized and vocal and got fighting mad at women who were a danger to their families [...] Our society needs similar values today.

Back then, women who preyed on other women’s husbands were shunned, shamed and excluded, not made into media darlings. They were publicly pointed out as “those kinds of women” to young girls as examples of what not to become, and to young boys as the type of women not worthy of their attention.

... Mothers knew that these women were as much predator as they were prey. That’s why they were called ‘‘home wreckers” in polite company and worse when the kids were not in earshot. These angry mothers, while rightly holding their husbands and the fathers of their children to the pledge of fidelity, realized what would happen not just to their families but also to society if this type of behavior were celebrated rather than confronted. --Washington Post

Savage is strongly pro-marriage, but he thinks the institution is weighed down by unrealistic cultural expectations about monogamy.

... Forty years ago, Savage’s perspective temporarily took upper-middle-class America by storm. In the mid-1970s, only 51 percent of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery was always wrong. But far from being strengthened by this outbreak of realism, their marriages went on to dissolve in record numbers. This trend eventually reversed itself. Heterosexual marriage has had a tough few decades, but its one success story is the declining divorce rate among the upper middle class. This decline, tellingly, has gone hand in hand with steadily rising disapproval of adultery.

There’s a lesson here. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.

Critics of gay marriage see this as one of the great dangers in severing the link between marriage and the two realities — gender difference and procreation — that it originally evolved to address. A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are to approach it casually, if they enter it at all.

One of the leading couples in the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in California is divorcing.

Molly McKay and Davina Kotulski have separated after 15 years together, seven as a married couple.

... John Lewis and Gaffney were plaintiffs in the 2008 California Supreme Court case that ended with 18,000 couples, including Molly and Davina, being allowed to marry.

... McKay said she will continue to campaign for same-sex marriage and will be at the marriage pavilion during San Francisco Pride festivities. -- CBS 5 San Francisco

Children struggle with maths and making friends when their parents divorce, a study has found.

They often fall behind classmates whose parents stay married, suffering from anxiety, loneliness and feeling sad – and may never catch up academically.

Contrary to some previous research, children through primary school did not show any negative effects before the parents decided to split, the U.S. study found.

But as soon as the divorce process started, the children suffered a range of problems that persisted, a report in the American Sociological Review said.

The five-year study compared emotional and academic development of children of divorce with those whose parents stayed together, by following 3,585 children from around the age of four.

... I’ve been following the ongoing marriage debate in the New York state legislature. Governor Andrew Cuomo has declared the legalization of same-sex marriage his number one priority. Supporters are waging a clever, celebrity-driven and well-funded campaign, suggesting that all they want is “marriage equality.” In fact, what they want to do is redefine this multi-millennial institution.

... In each example of social reengineering I’ve noted [no-fault divorce, cohabitation, etc], progressives promised good things. Sadly, the exact opposite has happened. However well-meaning the motivation, reengineering what God has designed is not only unwise, but radical and dangerous, too.

Without evidence of success to which to point, supporters of these ill-fated ventures are left with but one choice: If you can’t change unfavorable outcomes, you change the minds of people as to what is considered favorable and good.

Here lies the last great frontier and the last gasp for those determined to re-engineer marriage. Those committed to this form of radicalism have systematically broken down the cultural barrier to same sex marriage by desensitizing people on the issue, stigmatizing those who oppose the movement and potentially criminalizing anyone who stands in opposition to them. The irony in our cultural discussion currently, is if you support traditional marriage, you are the one perceived by the cultural elite to be the radical.

"The marital misbehavior of Schwarzenegger, a Roman Catholic, not to mention evangelical Protestants such as John Ensign and Mark Sanford, however, should not be mistaken for the norm among married men in America today, and especially for married men who are regular churchgoers. . . .

According to research by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Americans have become less tolerant of marital infidelity over the last forty years, and somewhat less likely to stray over the last 20 years. For instance, in the 1970s, 63 percent of men and 73 percent of women said marital infidelity is “always wrong.” In the 2000s, 78 percent of men and 84 percent of women said that marital infidelity is “always wrong.”

Likewise, in the 1990s, 17 percent of married men and 11 percent of married women reported that they had been unfaithful to their spouses. In the 2000s, infidelity reports fell to 16 percent and 10 percent, respectively, among men and women.

Infidelity is even less common among men and women who attend religious services regularly. Married men and women who attend church weekly are about half as likely to report sexual infidelity, compared to their peers who never attend church, according to research by sociologist Amy Burdette at Florida State University and her colleagues."

Greenwood's argument is re-treading territory already explored (in more detail) by NOM Chairman Maggie Gallagher. Here's the relevant part:

The tiny number of liberal northeastern states that have embraced gay marriage tend to have high per capita incomes, because they are much older, supporting fewer children, and much whiter, and better educated than average. They are older in part because with so little job growth, young adults with families move elsewhere, most likely to a southern state with a marriage amendment that enjoys more robust economic growth.

One of the things we are learning about marriage is that is increasingly becoming a "luxury" of the middle and upper-middle class -- and that's never a good thing. Underprivileged persons, after all, suffer the most when a marriage culture decays - the increasing numbers of children growing up without their father because their parents never married bear this out.

As for Greenwood's point that the marriage debate is forcing people to reexamine the importance of marriage in society, we absolutely agree. But why should the aging north and the minority of states that have legalized SSM have more of a say about what makes for a vibrant marriage culture that the vast majority of states from coast to coast that have recently reaffirmed traditional marriage as the true way forward?

Finally, the majority of divorces happen in the first 8 years of marriage--meaning they happen to younger people. You want to lower your divorce rate? Make your state unlivable for young families.

Outdated family laws have fueled an “alarming” rise in marital breakdown, causing “profound” damage to millions of children, a High Court judge has warned

Sir Paul Coleridge called for an independent commission to reform divorce law, arguing that family relationships are now “unrecognisable” from the 1950s, when the last review was conducted.

He condemned successive governments for “ducking” politically contentious reforms with the result that pre-nuptial agreements and cohabiting relationships were being legitimised by “stealth”.

... Sir Paul estimated that 320,000 children enter the family law system each year, suggesting that more than 3 million children are now caught up in the legal process

“The scale of the problem is genuinely alarming,” he said. “The incidence of family breakdown is so terribly high now that the way in which family law is shaped and managed has, I believe, a direct and profound impact on the private lives of huge numbers of the population.

Data from the National Survey of Children (NSC) indicate that approximately 80% of divorce cases in this country are forced divorces.  In other words, the vast majority of divorces are situations in which one person puts an end to the marriage through legal coercion, even while the other is fighting to save it.  In a time when “self above all others” serves as the motto for our system of family law and our culture, one would be hard pressed to find a more relevant and pressing issue for the Catholic Church, which upholds the sanctity of lifelong marriage and does not acknowledge divorce. And yet to date, we seem content with viewing spousal abandonment as a mental health issue for the person left behind, rather than the danger to the institution of marriage it is.  We refer the abandoned to a “divorce coping group” and encourage them to carry their cross. This is not enough.

In previous studies by our group, we found that female offspring of parental divorce and parental remarriage are more susceptible to suicide attempt than male offspring.

In this study, we examine whether these findings remain even after controlling for offspring depression. The sample consists of respondents from the 2001–2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Multivariable regressions controlled for offspring depression, parental depression, age, race/ethnicity, income, and marital status.

Our previous findings that female offspring of parental divorce and parental remarriage are more likely to report a lifetime suicide attempt than male offspring remained even after controlling for offspring depression.

Findings suggest that focusing on engaging female offspring who demonstrate symptoms of depression is not sufficient to reduce suicide attempt risk in this group as many at risk individuals will remain unrecognized.

My father, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, has been in politics as long as I can remember.

And as long as I can remember, media coverage about him has contained misstatements of facts. The vast majority are simple mistakes that are easily corrected, understood and rewoven into an ongoing storyline.

But one of them seems to have taken on a life of its own, and simple corrections have not sufficed to set the record straight. Why does this happen? I can't be sure, but I suspect that the narrative created by these untruths proves to be so much more compelling and more dramatic than what actually happened that it proves irresistible.

I'm talking about the story of my father's visit to my mother while she was in the hospital in 1980.

For years, I have thought about trying to correct the untrue accounts of this hospital visit. [Continue reading]

Utah taxpayers spend about $276 million on the effects of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth. But while there are effective tools to strengthen marriage and families, those who statistically need help most are the least likely to seek it out, experts say.

"Those who are younger, less educated and less religious feel that such education is not important. But they are more apt to divorce, as well," said Melanie Reese, coordinator for the Utah Healthy Marriage Initiative, which is housed in the Utah Department of Workforce Services.

... The group said children are particularly impacted by marriage failure, with "potential risks" that include poverty, mental illness, physical illness, infant mortality, lower educational attainment, juvenile delinquency, behavior problems, criminal activity as adults and early unwed parenthood. Reese notes that research shows children who live with both biological parents do better socially than peers in other family structures.

Here's a graphic that accompanies the story:

While often hostile to the Calvinist Christianity in which he was reared, David Hume’s essay “Of Polygamy and Divorces” offers a vigorous and well-argued defense of marriage arrangements as they existed in England and many other parts of Europe from the early Middle Ages through most of the 18^th century. His arguments have great relevance for us today as we struggle to cope with unprecedented rates of divorce and unprecedented ease of both entering into and exiting marriages and other intimate procreative relationships. His arguments against polygamy are also important as that practice seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence in parts of the southwest, with renewed interest in the popular culture.

Maggie Gallagher comments on David Hume's claim that both polygamy and liberal divorce laws make marriages less happy over at NRO's The Corner:

Interesting stuff, but I became somewhat more transfixed by the argument for polygamy to which Hume is in part responding:

Having multiple wives, says the polygamy defender, is “the only effectual remedy for the disorder of love and the only expedient for freeing men from that slavery to the females which the natural violence of our passion has imposed upon us.” It is by multiple partners alone — partners who can be used at will and played off one against the other — that “[we men] regain our right of sovereignty, and sating our appetite, reestablish the authority of reason in our minds, and, of consequence, our own authority in our families.”

Essentially, The tyranny of lust disorders men’s reason and gives women too much power over men: that’s polygamy as misogyny.

But who today seeks to limit the power of lust to disorder reason? That 3,000-year-old tradition of thought — from the Roman stoics to the Christian fathers to the polygamy defenders in Hume’s day — appears to have been replaced by a desire to experience the sweet disorder of lust as often as possible. Strange.

A year ago, Cynthia Shackelford, a 62-year-old North Carolina wife won an "alienation of affection" case against her husband's mistress. The case is ironic on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start. The facts: Shackelford charged that the other woman, Anne Lundquist, 49, broke up her marriage of 33 years by setting out to deliberately seduce her husband in 2004.

... The suffering of grown children is ignored [after divorce]. Young adult children like Shackelford's may be traumatized to the extent of suffering severe depression, or being unable to form committed relationships of their own. At the least they lose one of their parents when they take sides.

... Most states once had "at-fault" divorce laws, where you couldn't get a divorce without proving the other side had committed adultery. These laws were thrown out in the 1970s and replaced by no-fault divorce, which means basically a spouse can say, "I divorce thee," and be out of there. The irony is that feminists once supported the switch to no-fault divorce, although it's turned out that women and children are the ones who suffer. Unless the couple is wealthy, there's never enough cash to support both the ex wife and new mistress in the style to which both have been accustomed. The mistress usually wins and the cast off old wife and her children get shafted.

"Divorce rates. As in prior decades (Mahoney et al., 2001), three recent longitudinal studies tied higher religious attendance, particularly by wives or by couples who attend the same denomination together, to decreased rates of future divorce (Brown, Orbuch, & Bauermeister, 2008; Vaaler, Ellison, & Powers, in press; Woods & Emery, 2002). Null findings emerged for personal importance of religion, affiliation, or spousal similarity in affiliation using two nationally representative samples (Vaaler et al., in press; Woods & Emery, 2002)." [source]

The Ruth Institute posted an October 2010 FRC study by Dr. Patrick Fagan and Dr. Sullins that analyzed nationally representative data from the National Survey of Family Growth to find out how religion and family structure affects the likelihood of unwanted pregnancies.

Here's the variation: Only 1 out of 3 women who grew up with both married parents and go to church weekly have an unintended pregnancy compared to almost 8 out of 10 women who grew up in other family structures and do not go to church at all.

Here's what strikes me the most though: even in the so-called "best case scenario" sex frequently leads to babies, whether or not the participants plan on it.

In trying to encourage young women who have sex to use contraception, we have considerably oversold the extent to which we have now changed the nature of sex between men and women. In the real world, I mean.

For the rest of us it raises the question: what happens when the law gives romantic partners legal rights over our children?

Lambda Legal: "Today the Ohio Supreme Court heard arguments in Lambda Legal's case defending Michele Hobbs, a lesbian mother who was denied access to her child when she and her former partner, the biological mother, ended their relationship."

Children often have it rough when their parents divorce, but grown up "kids" may have it even rougher.

Adult offspring whose parents split up later in life face the usual and expected psychological issues: "They may feel like 'everything I thought was real, isn't,'" says Diana Mercer, an attorney-mediator and author of several books on divorce.

“Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?"

As Kevin Staley-Joyce writes in First Things' On The Square, here is the quote in context:

Something of an exposition of the attitude that love makes a marriage took shape in a New York Times “Weddings/Celebrations” column the week before Christmas. Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla, both married, Upper West Side professionals, met each other through their children’s kindergarten and, struggling with increasing mutual attraction, exercised their emotional rights as trumps indeed, and so crassly as to make clandestine affairs look prudent.

As Riddell and Partilla explained, their choice was fixed: They could either give in to their feelings for each other, or suppress them and live dishonestly. Further moral confusion seemed evident, with Riddell feigning a crisis of conscience: “Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?” The two soon abandoned their spouses and children and married each other, hoping, apparently, for the best.

To be sure, the couple’s alleged decision between adultery and dishonesty was a false one, and their reasoning solipsistic. But what if their story is not just an anomaly? What if our culture’s emphasis on personal satisfaction in marriage helped tip their mental scales in favor of adultery and against the needs of their children for stability and parents with imitable marital commitment? [Continue reading]